Commander Cream: Here Be Monsters

This is my final post, so I thought I would indulge in some nostalgia.  Thank you Marie for running the game: I have loved writing for it.  Thank you everyone for humoring me for this long. 
 
I've always had an (over)active imagination. My childhood interests fed this tendency. I read Where the Wild Things Are until I memorized it.  Later, my imagination continued to be colored by all the fantasy books I could get my hands on, much to my parents' dismay.  My love for monsters and my older siblings' efforts to frighten me as a child filled my childhood with the improbable. Fortunately for my sanity and that of my parents, usually my monsters were localized to one area:  Shelby, Michigan.
 
My mother was raised on a small farm outside a small town: she left as soon as she could, as did all her siblings.  My grandmother continued to work the farm with occasional help from her children and grandchildren.  She grew corn, cherries and a mixture of other crops.  Every July we drove for over twenty-two hours, reached Shelby, and started working.  For me, it was a new world: even my suburban/rural upbringing could not compare to the wonders of Michigan and Grandma's farm.  In Michigan, simple ideas became fantastic- there was the Under-toad of Lake Michigan my mother always warned me about.  To my six-year-old self, some giant amphibian lived under the waves, waiting to drag swimmers down and drown them.  Fireflies became graceful pixies from my books.  According to my brother, I was not allowed into the cornfields alone because of the dragons that roamed there.  In contrast, the cherry orchard was considered safe, for the dragons never ventured among the trees.  (Actually, I wasn’t allowed into the cornfields alone because my mother thought I would get lost, but it was impossible to get lost in the orchard.)
 
There's this funny thing about cherry trees.  Twenty years ago, all cherries were picked by hand.  Migrant workers would show up in their beat up pickups, help bring the crop in, and then continue westward to other farms.  Cherry trees would grow quite tall and live twenty-five years or more.  And then "shakers" were introduced.  Now a crew comes, wraps a belt around the tree, and a machine shakes the cherries loose. Nowadays cherry trees only live for ten years and are forever stunted.  My grandma employed shakers, but there was one tree that was never touched by anything save a human hand.  This tree became my fortress during the month of July- to me the tree was like the magical apple tree from the Chronicles of Narnia: the cherries were always bigger, sweeter and juicer than those from any other tree.  It was simply another facet of my magical world.
 
It's hard for me to recapture Michigan as a magical place for me.  The magic shattered when I was seven or so. 

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It was the first time I was allowed to go check the corn by myself.  My grandmother said I could go explore the acres of corn and see how the crop was coming along.  I had learned how to peel back the leaves and check the hard kernels as a toddler, but I was always with my mother or an older sibling.  Going out into the fields alone was somewhat of a rite of passage.  
 
Out in the fields, the corn towered over me, and the light was filtered through the huge leaves.  Even walking to the center exhausted my stubby little legs, but I was determined to really check the corn, like a true farmer. (To be honest, I have no idea why this required me to check the corn in the middle of the fields, but hey- it was a six-year-old’s logic.)  As I wandered in the corn, I began to hear a faint snuffling noise and felt the corn rustle around me.   The darkness of the corn field combined with my brother’s stories provided me with only one explanation for the noise.  A dog, a cat, a deer?  No, none of these would suit my active imagination.  It was…
 
A dragon! (Surely it had to be...)  A mixture of fear and elation filled me.  Fear won out, and I raced for safety.  The creature gave chase.  My sincere horror when watching Children of the Corn probably stems from this race through the corn fields.  With the corn leaves obscuring my vision, I never caught sight of my pursuer.  Breaking free of the corn, I found myself in the orchard.  I quickly climbed the old tree and armed myself with a handful of cherries.
 
Breathlessly, I perched in my fortress as I awaited the dragon.  When a badger peered out of the field, my elaborate fantasy crumbled to dust.  There was no Under-toad.  The old tree was not a magical fortress.  I could not slay monsters that stubbornly refused to exist.  I don’t think I ever really believed that dragons lived in the corn, or that pixies fluttered out of my reach during the nights, but to have an adventure so thoroughly shattered by the mundane destroyed Michigan’s magic for me.
 
My mother later came looking for me, convinced that I had lost myself in the corn fields.  When she found me in the orchard, still perched in my favorite tree, she was alarmed at my woebegone expression.  Only now can I articulate what I felt as a child:

 

“I don’t know that I want to live in a world without dragons...”