This is what Charlotte writes.

10.11.07

When you stand barefoot underneath the trees all you can see is green and brown and sometimes a little yellow, in places, peeking through, dancing with the sunshine as the dead leaves poke under your feet, dry and sharp, needles, really, but not the Sleeping Beauty kind, not the kind that will put you into a magical sleep while roses grow up and over your castle, because there isn’t a castle, just redwoods going up forever, as far as your eye can see, tall trunks covered with fibery reddish brown bark that crumbles in your hand as you pull it off in chunks, knowing that you’re hurting the tree but fascinated all the same, peeling off this ancient tree’s skin and then jumping up from the forest floor to snatch at the branches hanging down, snagging the tips watching them spring back into place as the joints of the branches snap and you’re left with a spiny green twig in your palm, like the ones beneath your soles but still bright and neon and smelling like life, still smelling so fresh as you tuck it behind your ear and climb back up the hill, tripping over branches and logs and rocks and holes, slipping, sliding, revealing the damp layer of slightly rotting tree junk that is just below the dry needles, clambering up the hill until the trees start to thin out and you can see, up ahead, the house, tall, imposing in a comfy sort of way, the gray of weathered wood blending in to the other colours surrounding it, and when you step up on to the redwood deck, the same gray as the house, the planks sag slightly and you know it’s because they’re rotting, the same thing happened a few years ago and you had to replace a whole section because it rains so much here, and even when it stops it takes forever for the house to dry down here, under the shadow and protection of the trees, which block the late afternoon sun as it fights to be seen, slanting sneakily through spaces left between the branches, somehow managing to hit you straight in the eyes and when you squeeze your eyes shut before the pain sets in you don’t need to open them again to make your way to the door and inside the house, onto the cool tile and then the carpet, which you know without peeking that it is gray with a few green speckles mixed in in a futile attempt to liven it up and you wriggle your toes and know that you are home.