Maybe it started with Noah’s rainbow. The story was spelled out for us on the Sunday School felt board and told each of us little sinners that the rainbow was God speaking to us. Even as a kid, it seemed like a pretty lame message from Heaven, “Hey, listen up. If you all do as I say, I promise never to drown every single person in the world except for one selected family and a bunch of random animals.”

Perhaps that’s when the idea was planted; the suggestion that messages could come to me from almost anywhere.

I remember running up the trail to our back pond.

Sandy would be panting at my heels, his short little Corgi legs doing double-time as he tried to keep up.  My slingshot would be shoved in my right back pocket, my leather-sheathed knife on my belt and my magnifying glass that swivelled out of its very own leather case would be stuffed in the other pocket of my jeans.

It occurs to me now that perhaps I was an odd child. At the very least, I could be called curious, but whatever it was, I would inevitably slow on the trail whenever I saw two branches crossed over each other.

‘X’, I knew, always marked THE spot. The question was, what was the message? Who was in trouble?  Should I start digging?

Distressingly, these mysteries were everywhere. I kept my eyes constantly on the lookout for letters of the alphabet, always hopeful that I would be able to decipher a message that others surely had missed.

Later, I remember writing my own messages on the sidewalk as I walked. I’d drag my toe on the concrete to make an invisible letter as I spelled out my words. I would have to run back to cross the ‘t’ or dot the ‘i’, having to guess where it might have been so many spaces back.

Then there was the excitement of creating my own treasure hunts for my neighbourhood friends. I would rub the paper with Mom’s cooking oil, burning carefully around the edges like a wonderful pirate map, my ‘X’ marked prominently to match the location of the rock I’d carefully painted with its  own ‘X’ and placed over the old shoebox full of jewels and other delights.

I took message sending to dizzying new heights when I discovered the QWERTY keyboard in grade eight. Now I’d tap my foot onto the sidewalk, reaching down to the left to hit the invisible ‘C’ and then pointing my toe up and to the right to hit the ‘O’. Fortunately, that fascination faded and I resumed walking down sidewalks like a quasi-normal person.

Sending messages sent by sticks and funny shaped trees has mostly faded, though the memories still make me grin. I don’t remember when the messaging phase started or ended, it was just always part of how I operated in the world.

Like my messaging era, my fascination with metaphor feels like it has always been part of me.

Looking for metaphors and, quite honestly, finding them in absolutely everything is an endless occupation.

See a fence? Is it broken? Have you walked through the break or let the remaining wires hold you to its pattern? Is it a metaphor for religion or societal constraints? Do you feel fenced in with your life? Should you bust through? Or is it a reminder of all that you have already walked away from? How you busted down fences and said, nope, I will not be held back.

Or I go for a bike ride and every hill signifies a push through some part of life, each revolution of the pedals, a way of moving forward through feelings. I slip into a shaded part of the path, and another Biblical admonition falls out of some sparking synaptic connection and I remember that even though one crosses through the valley of the shadow of death…well, perhaps you’re getting the picture.

Or I look at the fog this morning and realize that some of my own personal pandemic gloom has lifted. I’m feeling slightly more energized, more focused. But the always changing weather reminds me that my own internal weather shifts and moves, seemingly independent of what I want or desire. I know that a moment of joy can slice through the clouds at any moment, illuminating my heart the same way the sun is making a flower glow.

Seriously though. It can all be a little exhausting, this seeing metaphors in everything that crosses my path.

Maybe like my QWERTY sidewalk typewriting phase, this too shall pass, but I sincerely hope not.

Metaphor adds so many lovely layers to a life.