My earliest childhood memories are the scent of pinewood and a sense of tightness with the earth hard above and below me. Even now, when I walk through certain forests, I feel nostalgic to return to my birthplace: the ground. “Ground” is such a harsh word, I think, for where I came from. “Earth,” or even “grass,” would be better. My mother was nature, and she sprouted me like a dandelion from her healing, though rigid, arms. I still remember the lights that shone from above as she birthed me. They hurt my eyes. I’ve never met anyone else who shared the similarities of my birth story. “In a hospital, weren’t you?” They say, eyeing me up and down when I ask where they were born. Then I usually never hear from them again. I suppose I am a bit odd. No parents to pick me up from school, no siblings, just the sense of family whenever I’m in nature. I try not to pluck flowers, feeling like they, too, are my siblings, although my birth, I’ve heard, was a little different than theirs. A man in a fancy uniform sat me down a few years ago and asked me what I remembered of my mother. “She’s the ground,” I answered. I was only six years old. “You think you were born from the ground?” He asked, fumbling with a pen. I nodded. “I know I was. My mommy is the earth. I remember coming out of her grassy, forest floor.” Even now, I remember how his eyelid twitched, his eyebrows scowled, and then his features softened as if something began to make sense. “I understand,” was all he said, scribbling something down on paper. He must have thought my eyesight was bad, or that I was too young to care about what he wrote. He was wrong. I read what he wrote then, and even though he was mistaken, it sticks with me to this day: _Boy thinks that the earth is his mother. Must be a manifestation of the hole whererin they found him and his dead mother buried. _