Hmm.
When I was a child I spent some time living in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I lived in a very old area where many of the houses had been plantations, and fields of sugar cane would still stretch on behind them. During hot summers you could smell the sweetness of it in the air all over, sort of like a faint fragrance of caramel.
I spent a lot of time in the sugar cane fields. The stalks would grow tall enough that it felt like you were in a dense forest, with these narrow paths among the rows. They made a lot of shade and it was nice and cool, and there all sorts of critters that ran around. I used to catch bull frogs and lizards and snakes, just being a rough and dirty kid. I'd sit out there chewing on sugar cane and zoning out, pretending to be a wild explorer.
There was an old catalpa tree in the middle of the rows, which we few kids in the area called the 'keebler tree'. This big giant of a tree with gnarled roots and gaps between them, so you could hide all sorts of things in the grooves and pockets. This became my 'central base'. I began to hide little trinkets and odd things; bird feathers and beads and little toy cars, whatever.
After about a week or so I started to notice I wasn't the only one doing this. I'd return to the tree and find new items in place of the ones I had left. For example, I'd left a shoddy little plastic bracelet I had found, only to come back and discover a heart-shaped rock that was painted red. I found this very fascinating of course, and I began to leave small notes, trying to discover who this other person was, but I never received an answer. It was always little items, most of which were very old. One of the coolest things left was an old 'Archie and Jughead' comic book dated to the 1960s, which I was able to read while lounging on the big twisted branches of the tree.
I'd tried to wait it out, hunkered in the sugar cane field on many occasions to try and catch my mystery friend, but was never able to. It went on like this for months.
Then one day this woman comes by. She's maybe in her late 60s and as I'm walking up through the rows of cane I see her standing at this tree with a lily, which she sets down on the groove of a branch. I had this ridiculous notion she was my odd friend, which weirded me out, but... I had to know. So I approached her and asked if she was the one leaving things in trade. She turns around and gives me this awful, horrible look. As if I accused her of something terrible. And then she tells me she only comes by once a year.
On the anniversary of her son's death.
She tells me he had fallen from the tree, that back then there were these water pipes that stuck up from the ground to spray water for the field and he had landed on one. I'm this nine year old kid and she's telling me how her son was impaled on one of these pipes and how he was found sitting upright with his chin drooped as though he was just quietly pondering the day.
And she tells me how he used to play on this tree all the time, how he liked to hide his treasures here.
I couldn't go to the tree much after that, it freaked me out too much. I went back one time, about a week later, and that was it. Found a dead blackbird laid at the base with it's wings spread like some kind of artistic impression.
I'm not a spiritual person, and I'd like to think it was all just someone else messing with me, but it's something I won't ever forget.
