For his Writer’s Workshop this week, John Holton gives us six writing prompts and we are tasked with choosing one of the prompts (or as many as we want) and writing a post that addresses that (or those) prompt(s). I chose to use this prompt: Tell us about a time you got lost while going somewhere.

We had moved to the area a month earlier, so we hadn’t lived there very long. I was in the first grade, maybe six or seven years old. One of the kids in my class that I became friendly with, Dennis, asked me if I wanted to go to his house after school to play.

Dennis lived just on the other side of the woods, not that far from my own home, really. Just in the opposite direction from the school. I knew how to get home from my usual starting point, the school, but now starting from Dennis’ home, I realized that I was hopelessly lost.

It was dusk when I left Dennis’ home, and the rapidly approaching darkness, intensified by the canopy of the trees surrounding the path through the woods, seemed to be enveloping me. It was getting cold, too, and I could feel a chill passing through my light jacket, reaching deep inside to my very core.

The branches, some still with the dying autumn leaves clinging to them, were reaching down toward me like the gray, bony arms of an army of skeletons. Grabbing, pulling.

I heard sounds, but I couldn’t be sure if they were the sounds of my own footfalls or if someone — or something — was lurking from within the trees, following me, waiting for just the right moment to pounce.

I had never been so scared in my young life. Why had I done this? I knew I was supposed to go right home after school. But I was new to this school and my best friend — my only friend, actually — had invited him to come over and play after school.

I didn’t know whether to continue in the direction I’d been walking, or to turn around and head back toward my friend’s house. But if I did turn around, would I even be able to find my way back there again?

I came across a large, downed tree branch along the side of the path. Unsure about whether I should move ahead or turn back, I sat down on the branch. It was dark and it was cold. Fear was starting to overwhelm me and I began to cry.

“Hey kid,” I heard a voice say. It startled me. “Are you okay?” he asked.

“I’m lost,” I said between sobs, looking up at the older boy, who must have been a sixth grader.

“Where do you live?”

I gave the older kid my address; my parents had made me memorize it. “But if you take me back to my school, I can find my way home from there.”

The older boy grabbed my hand and pulled me up. “I know where your house is,” he said. “I’ll take you home.”

I didn’t know whether to feel relieved or to be wary. “Don’t talk to strangers,” my parents had warned me countless times. But in this case, the stranger was, himself, just a kid. Maybe only four or five years older than I was.

The older boy took me straight home to my worried parents, who were so relieved and overjoyed to see me. I was surprised to find my father there, as he normally didn’t get home from work until much later.

They were both crying tears of relief and happiness — even my father. It was the first time I’d ever seen my father cry. My mother couldn’t stop hugging and kissing her little boy, repeating, “Oh thank God, oh thank God” over and over.

The next day, first thing in the morning, the principal’s voice was broadcast over the school’s P.A. system, to be heard in all of the classrooms throughout the building.

“Boys and girls,” she said. “When you leave the school in the afternoons, you must go directly home unless your parents have given you a signed permission slip authorizing you to go somewhere else after school.”

I knew why the principal had made that announcement on that particular morning. But no one in my classroom was looking at me, the new kid. The kid who should have known better.

And when I left school that afternoon, I walked confidently into the woods. The familiar, comforting woods that I knew would lead me straight home.

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Photo credit: Alex Smith at Pexels.com.