BEEN THINKIN’ ABOUT… STORYBOOK DIRT. The smell of the leaves is strong in the November dusk, strong and acidic and tannic and luminous, the smell of the forest’s death and rebirth, of the garden and autumn all at once. The sun slipped beyond the west seemingly only moments ago and now all is but dark. The clock is ticking, once again, and another day is gone.
The forest at dusk has always seemed magical to me, as though just around the next bend would be an opening into another world. Perhaps on some level, I expected to grow out of this sort of thinking. Storybook lands are for the realm of children, little children, and I’m decidedly not a little child anymore. “Put away childish things,” says the Good Book, but I think that advice has more to do with adults behaving childishly, rather than embracing childlike wonderment.
The late autumn wind lifts the brown cottonwood leaves at my feet. The cedar boughs lean. Above, clouds clear and a dark blue sky is filled with twinkling stars. Wish I may, wish I might, have the …. Another childhood rhyme, another bit of old magic. The mundane world seems far away indeed. Magic itself is considered childish at best, dangerous fiction at worst, but here encompassed by the luminous dark, magic is, at least to me, simply real. And that’s what storybook tales are all about.
Rigid boxes of adulthood may be important to navigate but at the end of the day most of those boxes are just that — boxes. It is surprising the number of constructed things we take for granted, believing them to simply be. Perhaps government, perhaps church, perhaps education, perhaps civilization, perhaps words on a page, none of these things simply exist. These are things created, chosen, imagined, ultimately fought for, designed, birthed into the real world, some for good, some for ill.
“Write drunk and edit sober,” Hemingway is rumored to have said. No matter, the advice is good. We need objective minds, solid, structural, focused, based, to parse the practical from the nonsense. But we also need the flights of fancy, the fairy rings and moon’s glow and the hubris to imagine a world changed. If we cannot imagine the world we wish to leave to our children or grandchildren, then how on earth can we get there? The things that do not yet exist are not found in today’s textbooks.
So, with that, then leave me my own storybook worlds — worlds in which the oaks all look like those of a certain stuffed bear and his animal friends in the “Hundred Aker Wood.” Worlds in which I still look for the fairy lights at the base of the boxelder trees, and wish my mom was looking with me yet. Worlds in which the “magic” of the Ozark Mountains are yet and still real — blue elixir of life flowing freely from beneath pristine mountains, and deep hollows blooming in dogwood pink, guarded over by white deer living high in treetop nests (the Ozark Howler might get all the internet press right now, but my heart belongs to the gentle Snawfus).
And sometimes magic more close to home — the doe which stood outside the window of a loved one dying and simply stared, the sounds of our family dog which echoed from the kitchen cupboards at my grandpa and grandma’s house… months after that preternatural animal had already passed away, or the simple look of impossible love in my own puppies’ eyes as they stare into mine and I know in some strange way that we have all done this dance many times immemorial. Perhaps impossibly, I imagine a world that is just a touch more kind, all while knowing if such is to be, it must start in my own heart and that I cannot police the heart of another. No, imagination is not for the childish and must sometimes be wielded with utmost maturity.
The wind picks up again and the starlight is shrouded by clouds. The streetlamp in the distance seem brighter now. Civilization, responsibility, again closes in. All the same, I can’t help but believe that now, especially now, at the turn of the year, we could all use a little more compassion, a little more heart, and a lot more storybook dirt in our lives.
— Joshua Heston, editor-in-chief, StateoftheOzarks
© StateoftheOzarks 2025
