Out of the Garden

My childhood was idyllic, joyful and fanciful. I grew up on a farm. My grandfather had a large farm that he farmed with tractors and mules. As a boy , I got to farm with both. He had a sawmill and a cotton gin and I got to work and play at both. My brother and I had horses to ride. We had cows and pigs to take care of, barns to climb in, roofs to climb on,wagons to ride in, big piles of cotton to dive into. My grandfather built us gym toys and other large outdoor toys to play on. The centerpiece of these toys was a slide built out of wood and tin. It didn't slide very well ,but it was really high, and at the top of the slide was a large platform, beside a tree. The platform was ideal for a young boy to lie on and read comic books: Superman, Batman, Green Arrow, Aquaman. If you got tired of lying on the platform you could just climb over in the tree. Oh, there were chinks in the garden wall, intimations that the garden wouldn't last forever, such as pretend girlfriends, sneaked cigarettes, fights at school, and such, but nothing truly portentious.
But one night when I was fourteen years old, I sat in the school band hall at band practice. From the left side of the room, I looked at Judy Bedford with her french horn in the center of the room, and she looked at me, smiled, and blushed. I had an awareness of her, and of myself, that I had never had before. We "made eyes" at each other for the rest of band practice that night. I had no way of knowing then that I was being cast out of the Garden forever that night, as surely and irrevocably as Adam. And I have since come to realize that every one of us is just as inevitably cast out of the garden, to live with joy and sorrow, ecstasy and pain, and the inevitability of change and the sure knowledge of death, but just as with that fourteen year old, we would, and could, have it no other way.