Jillybean had always been my favorite in the neighborhood. She was part of the second wave of kids on our block: primarily girls about five years younger than the first wave and she stood out amongst them.
Mischief always seemed to accompany her. The flash of an unruly mop of red hair and a perpetually skinned knee announced her arrival. Anytime there were butterflies to chase or a new species of bug to inspect Jill could be found darting through my mom's rose bed, swinging her white net wildly, or crawling on her hands and knees coaxing some uncatalogued insect into a glass jar.
The summer I received Mexican jumping beans, from a visiting aunt, Jill got her nickname. The endless movement of the small brown nuggets reminded me of Jill and her tireless blur of motion. The first time I called her Jillybean she let a funny smile spread across her face, before she punched me in the thigh and sprinted through a hole in the fence just large enough for her slender body. That same summer she took to calling me Spike. I never could figure out how she turned Sean into Spike but if anyone else called me Spike I would hold them down and punch them in the shoulder until they howled "Mother Mary berry," the neighborhood equivalent of "uncle."
When the other girls began to comb their hair straight and 'dress for boys' Jill was more interested in climbing trees and riding her bike through the nearby woods.
Being the resident tomboy was sometimes difficult for the active redhead. When we boys--that made up the first wave of kids in our neighborhood--were sprinting through the woods clad only in loin-cloths salvaged from a rag barrel and shooting at squirrels with homemade bows and arrows, Jill was either ignored or she became the lost heroine tied to a tree by 'the renegades' only to be forgotten. She would cheerfully endure this treatment in order to be accepted as one of us. I was nice to her because she tried so hard to be accepted and, in fact, could run the woodland trails better than Matt, the husky kid from the next block over who had asthma.
When I started high school, ecology became my all-consuming interest. The forest behind my parent's house was a tangle of ivy, blackberries, laurel, and other assorted introduced species that had run amok in this new environment. I set about clearing the invasive greenery and replanting the native species. Every weekend and most afternoons after school, for almost four years, I could be found crashing around the dense woodlands nearby. At some point, Jill showed up and offered to assist me in my quest to rid the forest of all things foreign.
When friends my age came to help they usually saw the skinny little girl with pigtails as a pest, with her incessant questions and discoveries of 'ancient artifacts' that were mostly junk discarded decades earlier by the local farmers. One day she found a piece of plastic with a hole in it. I laced a piece of broken shoestring through it and told her it was precious ambergris as I placed it around her neck. She smiled broadly and pressed the new found treasure to her chest.
Rain or shine I could count on Jill to show up.
One afternoon she burst through the ferns at a dead run and tumbled down a slippery slope only to land in a pile at my feet. Rubbing her head gingerly she shrugged and told me she had 'planned that.' She was one tough kid. But, by the time high school ended, girls had replaced ecology as my all-consuming interest, and I saw little of Jillybean after that.
I attended a college halfway across the country in hopes of escaping my small-town USA roots.
Pushing myself hard I graduated with a Master's of Civil Engineering in five years and then decided home looked more inviting than I remembered. Back I went. Returning home I was disappointed to see heavy equipment nearby scratching at the earth, leaving angry red scars in the native clay.
My first Saturday home I trekked into my familiar woods to assess the recent damage. I pushed through the ferns and brush only to find, to my surprise, few of the foreign plants had made a resurgence. Thinking I had accomplished a major feat of removal, I bent over to pluck a stray piece of ivy.
"Hey! These are my woods. Don't you dare pick anything!"
I stood up. A female voice echoed from the thicket of Indian plum by the creek. I squinted but couldn't make out the form in the darkness of the woods.
"Shut up! I live here!" I barked back.
"That doesn't give you the right to come in here and..."
A figure burst out of the thicket and headed straight towards me quickly before tripping over a downed tree.
"Shit!"
Laughing hard I ambled towards the muddy prostrate body. I thrust my hand out to help the figure to her feet.
"Go on! I don't need your help!" She swatted at my outstretched hand.
She shook her head vigorously and her baseball cap plopped onto the muddy banks of the creek allowing a cascade of thick red hair to fall across her face. When I tugged at her arm the girl let loose with a string of profanities and punched me hard in the thigh. I lurched forward and grabbed my leg. The girl shook her hair away from her face and stood over me fuming with her fists clinched.
"I told you I didn't need your help, damn it!"
"Jillybean?" I asked as I squinted up at her.
She froze. Her creamy white face turned crimson. The little freckled-faced tomboy I remembered had transformed into a beautiful young woman.
It took her a moment before she cocked her head and gulped, "Spike? When did you get home?"
I bounded forward and tackled her. "That hurt, you little insect!"
She squealed as we tumbled down the bank and into the creek. We splashed around in the water for several moments before I picked her up and dropped her into the deepest pocket in the creek. She shrieked and grabbed my knee causing me to collapse backwards. When I came up she pounced on my head to hold me under.
"Say 'Mother Mary berry,'" she screamed. "Say it, or I'll drown you!"
"Mother..." I swallowed a mouthful water. "Mother Mary berry," I coughed out.
Suddenly, she was gone. I stood up sputtering. Then I spotted her running up the opposite bank towards the giant maple tree where she had so often been held captive. I ran after her, her giggles making it easy to follow her.
When I finally got to the top of bank I saw her standing beside the tree staring at the heavy equipment that waited patiently to continue its destructive path come Monday morning.
"Hey, you ragamuffin..." I started.
She turned to look me in the eye solemnly.
"I tried to get the city to save this little strip of woods as a park but they said it wasn't big enough to worry about."
"Yeah?" I puffed as I tried to shift gears to adult behavior again. "It's still in good shape, though."
"It ought to be. I came out here almost every day to work on it. I was an ecology major, too. And this was my 'Senior Project.'"
