Toils and Snares by Alana Terry

Chapter One ...

Last night, I dreamed I went back to the cabin.

The wind rushed against my face as I rode my father’s four-wheeler down the familiar wooded path. The summer sun shone through the trees. I breathed in the fresh air, trying to remember the last time I felt so at peace. So alive.

And then the cabin came into view, not the trash heap that exists today, but the charming cottage of my memory. Mom would cluck her tongue and tell me it was only for a few weeks, remind me that if I wanted to come home I could drive the four-wheeler to the lodge and call her to pick me up early.

And I would laugh and tell her that as soon as summer was over I’d be back with her in Anchorage, with its traffic lights and its noise pollution and its depressing concrete sidewalks. I’d voluntarily return with her to that world where litter floated around empty parking lots, where Mom and I stressed together over the money that wasn’t in the bank, where landlords could force you to move with only a month’s notice, where Mom and I fantasized together of a better life without care or worry.

For three seasons of the year, I was her anxiety-ridden shoulder to cry on, a younger version of her care-worn self. But not in summer. In summer, I wasn’t the shy girl who alarmed her schoolteachers because I was skinny and malnourished. I was Snow White, spending my enchanted days outside with woodland creatures, cheerfully keeping house for not seven, but one mysterious forest dweller I adored more than life itself.

There I spent the happiest days of my childhood, my fingers stained nearly black from the juice of the wild blueberries, my skin bronzed and freckled from the 24-hour sunlight that streamed in as I trudged behind my father, who hiked and fished and tracked black bears.

There I learned the distinct sounds of the Alaskan wilderness, recognizing every bird call, knowing the time of day or night by the angle of the sun, breathing in fresh mountain air so pure that when I returned home ready to start another agonizingly tedious school year in Anchorage, I felt like the city air might suffocate me.

The cabin of my childhood no longer exists. I know that if I were to find my way down that overgrown path today, what waited for me at the end of the trail wouldn’t be a tangible representation of all the happy magic of my younger self.

Instead of my summer home, there would be only rubble and ash. A pile of debris, a makeshift memorial, and memories I’m not strong enough to confront. I’m no longer a girl, running carefree through the mountains.

Now I’m a woman, my soul burdened with the crushing weight of all the truths I know … truths I can never go back in time and change, no matter how hard I wish.

No matter how hard I pray.