On Neff Road: Walking down the dingle

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The trees reached from one side to the other, creating a beautiful archway dense with foliage. I was transported to another time and place. I had never been to England, only in the books I read. Now I was stepping into those visions I’d only dreamed of.

A friend wrote that she was walking down a path in England. Ah, I was a little envious. It has been about eight years ago that I traveled with a friend to Nottingham, England, to help settle his mother’s estate. We moved into the town for two weeks, becoming natives instead of visitors. The perspective was different. No tourist tours for us. I met locals and was shown all the sights. The most memorable were the antiquity of the buildings, the awesome pubs and, most of all, the dingle.

dingle [ding-guh l]

noun: a deep, narrow cleft between hills; shady dell.syn: basin, lowland, bottom, dell, glen, swale, vale, coulee, trough, notch, channel, basin, gorge

I grew up with a bottom. Now don’t giggle. I grew up with two bottoms. One was a creek bottom. A place where cows grazed. A place where I rode my horse. It was a place of adventure and memories. We fished there and walked the back lane almost every day during the summer. I knew what a bottom was. However, I did not know that the bottom was also a dingle. This does not apply to the other bottom.

A fence ran along the shaded path. Though the day was sunny, the archway mottled the light, creating a dramatic effect. We followed the old rock wall to a gate. I began to laugh. At last I had found the faerie glen straight out of Tolkien novels. The sign on the gate said that it was the entrance to the dingle. We walked down the forest path into a small bottom where I am sure a mystical world lived. We clambered over fallen trees and hopped across rocks in the stream. The little girl in me laughed and wanted to dance with the faeries and talk to the forest creatures. When traveling to another culture, you absorb. You do not compare, because there is no comparison. The people are different. The language is different, even though you supposedly speak the same. The history is much older. And differences enhance our lives and help us grow.

Yes, I walked down a dingle. I walked in as a country girl from Neff Road and walked out with new understanding. Was it a dream? Sometimes I think so. For a girl who always had a wild imagination, imagination came to life. I walked down a dingle.

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By Pamela Loxley Drake

On Neff Road

Pamela Loxley Drake is a former resident of Darke County and is the author of Neff Road and A Grandparent Voice blog. She can be reached at [email protected]. Viewpoints expressed in the article are the work of the author. The Daily Advocate does not endorse these viewpoints or the independent activities of the author.

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