Pine-scented walks, an early memory: a writing exercise

To encourage my brain to continue to play with words and to encourage me to keep handwriting things, I attend writer's workshops whenever possible. Today I want to share a special exercise I wrote from the workshop I went to today. The prompt was: Where and when would you go back in your past to visit a memory and why? 
(*Note: This is dedicated to all mothers, and especially my mother. She is also a writer and lives in the same city I do, so we attended the session together. Of course, I read it to her.)
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Perhaps I would go back to an early memory of walking to preschool at St. Pat’s Catholic Church, three blocks from our house, hand-in-hand with my mother. My, my, I must have been young. Four years old, I think? It’s a very simple memory, almost like a dream…

At the dead-end of the street at the edge of our neighborhood in Wisconsin, a stand of carefully planted pine trees stood tall, already old, forming a wall of protection between that quaint, safe neighborhood and the business part of town. Just on the other side was the Catholic church, joining that protective force, standing on its own, apart from the cluster of churches on the opposite side of town. Just the church and the pine trees. We weren’t Catholic, but it was a happy place to attend preschool, which I remember fairly well.

But the walks… Mornings of pine-scented quiet, so close to home we just walked each day, but me still too young to go by myself… and we didn’t have to hold hands, but we did. (Is it one memory or a composite of several ones?) I liked that there wasn’t a sidewalk at the dead-end. We just stepped over the curb and onto the dirt deer path the last twenty feet to the parking lot. The empty lot led to the back door of the church where my classroom was.

I’ve always liked trees… and maybe those trees started it all. They probably seemed even taller to my young eyes. They were majestic and special, like Heidi’s, the Swiss girl of literature, the swishing of the needle-laden branches in the breeze a very nostalgic sound. Those who grew up near the coast may fondly remember the pleasant white noise of the ocean, but I, a Midwest girl through-and-through, remember the pines.

Maybe I would go back to this memory just to squeeze my mother’s hand again, look up and say, “Thank you for this walk. Thank you for your part in my love of trees, morning walks and quiet neighborhoods.” Perhaps I’m choosing this moment in my life because it was an end of an era of me living at home, leaving my special last-kid-at-home relationship with Mom. It was just before my entrance into a much longer era of fulltime school attendance. But, perhaps surprisingly, given the era’s classic sentimentality, my memory is not ever of her crying, not of holding me back tightly from more hours away from home and from growing up, but rather of quietly holding my hand… taking me there.

Selah.