Derek |
I really get a kick out of nine–year–old Derek, not just because he's always giving
me his treasures from the island, but because he always seems to be bouncing
up to me when I least expected it to show me a conch, a butterfly, a unique twisted limb from the woods, an interesting bug, a colorful flower, discarded snake skin that lays like torn tissue paper
in his hand, a tortoise shell,
bamboo… and he gives these items to me as gifts. I didn’t have the heart
to throw them away, but I didn’t know
what exactly to do with
them. I didn’t have space in my
small cabin, and I figure it
wouldn’t be good for a tortoise shell or snakeskin from a dead
reptile, bugs, or tiny insects inside
tree limbs to lay where I slept. So I keep a little “Derek Garden” outside just behind my cabin with all the
treasures he gave me. As I
lay Derek’s recently dead butterfly
against a teak tree, I thought of all
the gems inside the tree knot that
Boo Radley gave to Gem and Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird.
One night at our
campfire, Derek presented a live
banyan tree frog to me in his cupped hands. When he passed me the frog
and I tried to take it, the frog slipped out between our hands and jetted in the woods in one huge
desperate leap. Derek
looked terribly upset. I was touched and pulled him to sit in
my lap, which he respectfully refused, telling me he stopped sitting in
laps ages ago. “Well Jamie, I’m not too old for
laps,” Grady said from the fire pit, to which Darcy said, “You’re such a creep of huge magnitudes!”
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