EmilyCobbStudio

I can sum up my entire childhood with that one day after the rainstorm. We were making a movie about bandits, so we all had ripped-off pieces of our t-shirts tied in masks around our faces, and there was a backpack of rope, an enormous blond wig, and two bottles of ketchup-blood.

We all took off our shoes, waded up to the dam—it’s an old concrete slab embedded in the hill, crumbling and covered in vines, and it has been there so long the creek found its way around the dam—more like a castle and moat, really.

This was the day we found the doll with one glass periwinkle eye, but I remember it because of the moss. The ferns smelled like skunks and there were tiny red bugs, and in every direction was this toxic green glow, like a rich Peter Pan green on top of iridescent lime, like the moss had slurped up all that rain water and was breathing it out in an ethereal mist.

It’s visceral moments like these that continue to drive me from one adventure to the next, each fueling an internal demand to create. And as my stomping ground grows bigger and more limitless, I’m grounded by the internalized cycle of the New England seasons. Their pull is inescapable, and it guides me as if it were a pendulum between outward and inner discovery.