Changes

It is a place of change. It has a flow of existence, a simple yet complex existence that goes comfortably hand in hand with time. Its appearance is always shifting from one season to another, with its inhabitants easily following along. Its trees’ leaves float to the ground carried by the wind when it’s autumn, leaving a crunchy trail along its path. The branches stand high and bare during the winter, and new leaves bud when spring comes around. On these leaves and on the trails are the animals that live in this place that go through their own ways of adjusting to the changes taking place all around them. People go there to change their attitudes, or to try and look at something in a different way. Although this place is constantly going through various different changes, it never has lost the unique feeling it always has possessed.

Helen Putnam Park has a vast sky that is at no time the same; it constantly is shifting through tones of deep blue, fine purple, subtle orange, diaphanous pink, and slight crimson with the transition from day to night. The clouds can change from soft, delicate wisps of the summer to the powerful, dark clouds of the winter as the wind carries and alters them through time. The land’s appearance and inhabitants change with the season. In the summer and spring, the trees are full and their leaves are lush; in the fall, their leaves are crisp and warm in color; in the winter, the tree’s branches shoot upwards in shapes that are like lightning. The land carries a cool, calm, in-control type of feeling. The animals that live on that land are in a constant cycle of change, perfectly tune with the seasons. The caterpillars morph into moths and the lizards shed their skin and the deer change the colors of their coat; even the visitors go through their own types of change.

Emotions, outlooks, or attitudes - those are the things that people go there to change. They go there to be happy, and to become even more so by celebrating something such as a birthday or another special occasion. Some go there to be angry, and to calm themselves down and to let out some of the anger they have been carrying around with them. Others go there to be sad, and to try and cheer themselves up. Some others also go there to be sad with different intentions, as to lighten their shoulders of a memory by mourning for or honoring a lost one. Those are some of the reasons why I go there. I go there with my family just to enjoy what it has to offer. I go there to run, to blow off steam when I’m going through a hard time. Every year on the day of October 20th, we go there, now accompanied by our two-year-old dog Luna. We set off balloons in honor of our dog Sequoia, that passed away eight years ago. We chose Helen Putnam because it was her favorite place, just as we believe that it is Luna’s now.

I have many memories of Helen Putnam, and this one in particular is one I learned an important lesson from. I once went to the park when I was seven, and there wasn’t a single tree that I looked at that wasn’t bristling with caterpillars. They were so crowded with them that they were falling on the bandana wrapped around my head, and they seemed to be confused as I picked them up off my head as they fell one by one. We went there again a few months later, and couldn’t find anymore caterpillars on the oak trees that were once vibrating with life because of them. They were instead surrounded by moths that reminded me of large flitting clouds of snowflakes, capable of defying the laws of gravity that hovered around the oak trees. If we listened hard, it seemed that we could almost hear the fluttering of their wings echo all throughout the trees. I was around the time Sequoia had passed away. Seeing the caterpillars change and become moths reminded me that life did go on even through the toughests of times, and that helped me get through the blow of losing her - every time I go back there with Luna, I am reminded of that.

It is a place of change: the sky is always changing, the land changes with the seasons, and people go there to change themselves. Helen Putnam Park shows change as it resembles perseverance for me. It teaches me to keep going through change wether it be good or bad - just as the skies and their clouds, lands and its plants and animals, humans and their dogs - and to persevere no matter what life chooses to throw through the path of my family and I.

- Megan W.