Jun 21, 2012

Derek

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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