by Mitch Lee
My brother is a full five years younger than me and when we were kids he said a lot of crazy things that just made me laugh. When he was four he had a stuffed animal collection that he slept with.
Since I always tried to share any new information I learned with him, I attempted to explain his stuffed owl to him by saying that owls were nocturnal.
“Yes, owls are not turtles,” he said. After I stopped laughing I thought I would give up on trying to school him for a while.
But growing up on Limekiln Lake he always wanted to do the big kid stuff with me.
When I left the yard to go play with friends or go for a snoop-in hike he became very upset.
I tried to find things we could do together in the yard, like catch, something he always loved to play.
One day I made a terrible throw that sailed over his head.
“Sorry, that was a bad throw,” I said.
He stopped, gave me a kind look and before he went to get the ball said, “No, was butifuw throw.
When we say some-en nice, even when we no mean it that’s called being poo-lite, wight?”
Every once in a while I would try to spend quality woods time with him.
I would take him down the back hill into the woods where a creek trickled down the hillside.
One day we dipped our hands in the creek and flipped in small sticks to watch them float along.
When one got stuck, he shouted, “This waterfall is ruining my life.”
Then he shook his finger at the creek like it was being very bad.
Behind our house we explored the large rocks left by the glaciers that were all over the mountainside.
I tried to explain how the ice pushed them along until the ice started to melt and just left them there.
But he wanted me to tell the story of how giants might have carried them here and what each of the names of the rocks were…and were the giants still out there in the woods moving them around?
As we hiked along he often made up songs. My favorite went like this: “Woods and trees, woods and trees, this is way many wooooods aaaaaan trees!”
He always seemed to put a smile on my face when we explored together.
I think my mind still reflects back on these whenever I see a turtle and I hear, “Yes, owls are not turtles.”
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Mitch Lee, Adirondack native & storyteller, lives at Inlet. ltmitch3rdny@aol.com