Gerontology of Flight

There weren't always dragons in the valley. In fact, there didn’t use to be many things there. No one even visited there, thanks to the multitudes of mosquitos that bred in the shade of the trees where no sun reached inside. There weren’t even a lot of animals that called it home. I only knew of it as a hiding spot, away from my step-father that criticized my entire existence and neglected everything outside of his arms’ reach of his recliner. Then, one day, while I was walking snuggled inside my hooded sweatshirt cocoon and pretending to be invisible, the dragons appeared.

I had made myself a shelter years ago, against the most giant tree that I could find. When I think “valley” I imagine the Shenandoah in Virginia, along the highway we took to go to visit family in New York. It was a large dip between two ridges, swallowing entire cities between. My valley looked like it was cleared a long time ago to make way for new development, an overpriced urban sprawl, and then forgotten for a hundred years. It was dark, with small openings that let in light, but only where the large trees shortened the lives of the smaller ones. It wasn’t far from my home. Only two streets down from my house you hopped over a guard rail at the end of a cul de sac and walked across a fallen tree to get to it. Once passed the tanks filled with deceptive clear blue water from the water treatment plant on the left, you take a right at the weird shack where teenagers from another school drank beers and then broke the bottles against the sides. Finally, there wasn't any kind of trail or anything to mark the way, but you’re there after a couple hundred more yards through the woods. It had a creek that flowed down the middle, deep enough at places where you could swim.

I know my chosen building site wasn’t the most welcoming, but I wasn’t the most joyful child at the time that I found the location. The bugs were both the worst part and the natural security system. My shelter was rough at first, so they easily got through the cracks between the sticks of the walls. It was made by an eleven-year-old, so the expectation was fairly low. I became better at weaving smaller sticks and vines throughout the initial structure over the years, thickening the spaces by overlapping, until it was sealed up tightly. The door was a fitted sheet that was being thrown away by my neighbor in the real world. It had a flower pattern, one that I thought could blend in well with the nature around me. I made an uneven floor inside with bricks I found from different housing developments around my neighborhood and I decorated it slowly with things found after the swollen rain-filled creek would go back to normal. I even had a slightly damaged rug. Rainy days were my favorite, with treasures and a lack of bites.

One day, after I traversed my route with my backpack filled with the floor for an upcoming home renovation, which dug deeply into my shoulders, I noticed something a bit odd. I had my eyes open. While not a huge observance on my part, it was still startling. Usually, by the time I passed the treatment plant, I would squint and look through my eyelashes so the flying insects wouldn’t dart for the only part of my body uncovered by clothing. I stopped and looked around. There weren't even any beetles under the leaves kicked up from my boots. I pushed up the sleeves of my sweatshirt and nothing landed between my goosebumps to suck my blood. The only thing I could hear was the gurgling of the creek and the groaning of the tree branches in the wind. It was as if winter had come early and killed everything off with a frost, but it was October in North Carolina. It was sixty degrees on the best days during fall.

It was so uncommonly quiet that I could hear the definite chirping of birds flying above my head. Leaves were falling periodically and colors were zipping quickly past my face, like large hummingbirds, the passing giving little gust of winds against my face. I couldn’t quite make out what kind of birds they were until one stopped and perched on the woven roof of my cottage. It was then that I noticed that it was lacking feathers, a beak, or anything resembling a bird at all except for wings. It definitely had wings. I figured that this was the day that I finally lost it, whatever “it” was supposed to be, because no one would ever believe it if I told them that there were tiny dragons living in a secret valley where I built a house; but at that moment I didn’t care, because regardless of my sanity, nature finally found a way to get rid of the mosquitos. The answer was magic. Of course.