“Courage is knowing what not to fear.” — Plato
Every time I pass the chinaberry tree that grows in a neighbor’s yard, it takes me back in time to when I was a young girl joyfully climbing the one that grew in my grandmother’s backyard. The tree was located in a fenced area behind the house where my grandmother raised chickens, rabbits and pigs that eventually found their way to the dinner table.
Beyond this area stood a wild blackberry field that stretched for several football fields down to train tracks. It was in this tree that I often watched the Texas Zypher fly past. The sight of that silver streak may have been the beginning of my lifelong wanderlust, as I always wondered where that train had been and wished I had been there.
And as the zypher passed, I always waved at the engineer, imagining that the whistle that blew in response was just for me. Adulthood eventually inflicted me and I realized that the whistle was blown because of the nearby railroad crossing and not for me. It’s not easy growing up.
Anyway, one day when I went out to climb that chinaberry tree – and to collect its hard green berries for a neighborhood kid’s fight – there was a huge rattlesnake sunning itself on the large rock I used to reach the first limb. I screamed and ran back into the house and never climbed that tree again.
But, without nary another thought about snakes, I continued collecting blackberries, my child’s mind not connecting the fact that field was where that big rattlesnake surely had come from, and had relatives as well.
Instead, I continued enjoying those blackberries with a little sugar and milk
in a bowl, and in the blackberry pies or cobbler my grandmother baked.
It’s kind of funny thinking about that now, which I did during the big monsoon storm that shook up Tucson this past week. There is nowhere Mother Nature, with her hurricanes, tornadoes, fires, avalanches, hail storms, floods, deadly winds or just a lightning bolt out of the blue, can’t get at you.
I eventually overcame my fear of snakes, although I still keep my distance, and I learned not to let fear of what might happen keep me from living a full life. Growing up is not all bad.
Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion, Scamp. She is an avid reader, an enthusiastic birder, the author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon (Free on Kindle Unlimited), is always searching for life’s silver lining, and these days aging her way – and that’s usually not gracefully.
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