Emerging from the Woods

In a few hours after posting this I leave Kannapolis for High Point and my first Equity-level professional production. At the same time it'll be my first extended separation from Laurie since we moved in together, and I'm going to miss her something sick, no matter how many friends I might make in High Point.

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I can't articulate my roiling emotional mix with any finer-grained articulation than that, so I'm gonna natter about the woods behind our house now.

I'm rereading Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock; it's a fantasy novel about a couple of brothers who realize that the woods behind their house are vaster and stranger than they could have imagined. The first time I read it I hated it for reasons which now elude me, and I wrote a cranky Amazon review that I now feel duty bound to rewrite. I quite like the book this time, and I sort of relate to the situation the brothers face. We have a small wood behind our house, and while there's nothing of the uncanny about it, it does make me tingle a bit to hear... things... rustling through the thicket. The cat noses around the fenced fringe of the wood with an evident mix of eagerness and trepidation.

One day the cat and I were sunning in the back yard when a pack of large dogs appeared in the woods on the other side of the fence. They happily romped by, disappeared, reappeared, passed along. Something about it unnerved me as much as it did the cat, and I'm not generally unnerved by dogs. Dogs roaming down the street might make me watchful if they seemed dangerous, but dogs appearing from the brush like actors sneaking through stage curtains gave me pause. What caveman intuition is awakened by creatures emerging from the woods?