When I was the original Feral Land Child

I remember what Spring used to mean for me, way back in those olden golden days of youth. Spring meant school was almost done, spring meant new shoes, and spring meant time spent out Lothlorien, before we ever moved out there. In March the work parties would start, where we kids were released into the wilds while our parents and small groups of volunteers prepared the festival field for the upcoming summer season. Sometimes we were given duties, mostly picking up sticks along the paths through Faerie (also known as the valley, for the unfamiliar) or helping mulch and weed the gardens. When we were a little bit older, it became pruning orchard trees, mowing, making sandwiches for everybody and sometimes helping with construction, which was the coolest thing ever for most of us. Mostly, however, it was stretching our legs and our muscles in the new sunlight, helping prepare a place we loved for the invetible swarm of faces old and new. That, really, was what Spring was a herald of: Festivals.

Allow me to put on nostalgia cap: man, I miss festivals. When you're 6, 7, 8, 9, what on earth could be cooler than the several times a year when hundreds of strangers would throw up a tent city for three days, and you got to be there? It was magic, and I really mean that. I remember playing hide and seek in the endless sea of colorful tents and tarps, walking down Merchant's row and staring wide-eyed at goods that were exotic to my tiny self then as an alien bazaar would be now. Chasing each other through the woods and down to the swimming hole to join other revelers escaping the summer heat. The smell of cooking, wood fires and leaves. A whole world moved into our Lothlorien for a weekend, and when I play games Final Fantasy and other RPGs, and I see those little towns they design, I smile, because that is what it felt like to me then. A village-- naked hippies, community kitchens, space-rock bands and all. I guess it's not normal for most kids to have poignant memories of watching people covorting around a bonfire to drums, or leading tours to Ancestor's Shrine, or sitting in on workshops on where Buddism and Photovoltaics meet, but I can think of few things that feel so much like home.

I miss the days before the drama-- or before I was aware of it, I guess. I might be outed as a dirty hippy for saying this, but I will always remember and crave the feeling of being lifted off the ground, hand in hand with two strangers, as 200 of us spiral danced and called the directions.