She Always Took her Time About Things

She took her time about things: like reading, finishing her tea (she liked the last sip cold), like thinking carefully between her sentences when she spoke. 

She took her time about things: like trees, and talking to them, and watching out for birds, and long walks in the snow.  

 

They said she was strange and old, older even than the trees. The children regarded her as wonder. Some saw her as a timeworn crone. 

She tried to smile at them whenever she noticed them noticing her, but sometimes her thoughts got the better of her and she didn't notice them at all. 

She knew these things still, because she was a well practiced listener, even when she never talked once.

Indeed, some said she never talked at all. They said that she had lost her voice to excessive smoking (she didn't smoke), or traded it away in exchange for a husband that she had lost. 

If she had given her voice to anything it was the forest behind her house. 

It was then that she took time about her more than ever, like the blue coat she wore, wrapped close around her timeworn body. She remembered when there was forest around every side of the street on which she lived. Now the small patch in the north was all that was left, and even those trees were slowly dying. 

 

She walked there often. In fact, she walked there most days. And not just now that she was old and slow. She had walked here as a young girl once. 

She sometimes thought she recognized some of the trees from her youth, though she knew that in reality those had been lost long ago. 

But sometimes she liked to think the trees she once knew had wandered here late one night so that they could grow old near her. 

Now she could see them perfectly from her kitchen window. She could see them when they beckoned at her in the dark. She knows their shapes as she knows the veins in her wrists and the wrinkles around her eyes. She cannot remember any particular time in which she climbed them, but she feels it in her bones that she once did. Sometimes she almost convinces herself she still could.

Some well meaning folk worry about her long exertions. She knew that too. She was a very good watcher. She'd come back after hours of meandering through her small patch of forest, and she'd see the neighbor glancing anxiously from behind the curtains.

Secretly, she thought dying in that forest wouldn't be such a bad way to go. She'd lie down in the snow, and it would cover her like a blanket, and then she'd fall asleep, like a spell come to take her.

 

She had been a summer child once. Then, as a young woman, she had loved the spring. 

But now, in old age, winter was her lover. She cared little that it made her bones ache and froze her ancient joints. She knew the trees suffered the same way. She could hear it when the wind made them groan.

But she liked to think she had aged like the winter; she liked to think she had walked through this white world so long and so often that it had taken her once blonde hair and turned it the color of the snow; turned her skin to a white so fine and crystalline that you could see her veins course blue beneath, glowing like a winter evening. 

 

 

They said she was old and strange.

But that wasn't true. 

 

She was merely under an enchantment. She was convinced of it because, sometimes, in the space between wakefulness and sleeping, she was sure she was still young. She could feel it in her toes and the tips of her fingers as she wiggled them to wakefulness.

As for the strange part, she knew well that all silent things are regarded strange, and so, she tried not to blame them.

 

They also said she was lonely. She never heard them say it, but she knew that they did. She could see it in their eyes when they looked at her. 

But, that wasn't true either; not so long as the trees were older and wiser than she; not so long as she could still share the silence with them; not while there were birds to feed, and deer that knew her; so long as there were rabbits and owls that no one knew still lived there in that little patch of forest.

 

She was slow though. That much she admitted. 

But that, that was her choice. 

 

 

What We Found in the Woods

2019: We went for a walk in the woods, you, me, and your family. The sun was out, and the snow was glistening. The trees were bare, though I could feel that in the warm winter air they were beginning to awaken. As we whisked through the forest, waltzing amongst trees that stood like sculpted pillars around us, something mystical occurred. 

Maybe it was the way the sun was shining, like a romantic sort of photograph in which the sun ignites the world with a flare, with sun-specks or sun-spirals or sunny-streaks that shimmer in your hair. Maybe it was the way the forest floor was frosted over with snow, like a ballroom floor glimmers below crystal chandeliers. Something about the way the trees whispered of spring and the way the earth smelled of change gave me a breath of something that felt like certainty. 

We came to a river, frozen at the foot of a gorge. Your mom told me about your childhood, about picnics and the way the trees had since changed. You told me that a lot of your stories took place here. Maybe that is what made the place feel so nostalgic; even though I’d never been here before, there was memory here. There were little versions of you running through the trees. 

I too grew up in the woods, running through trees with dirty feet and feathers in my hair, searching for adventure like Peter Pan’s Lost Boys; storing secrets in tree-trunks and looking for the entrance to Narnia or other lost realms.   

Forests have a weird way of appearing timeless even as they change. We both grew up in forests of our own, forests that we mapped and memorized, forests filled with the trees we climbed and memories of us as bare footed summer children, our noses sprinkled with freckles and our heads crowned by the sun, fancying ourselves the kings and queens of our forest kingdom.

It wasn’t then, but at some point in time my forest and your forest aligned. It occurred to me then, that, as I prepare to leave my forest behind, I wouldn’t so much mind moving into yours.

 2021: We went for a walk through a different wood this rather warm winter day and I was reminded of this piece I wrote almost two years ago. Me and my husband were only just dating, and I went to visit him over the break. It was the first time I met his family, the first time we started talking about what our future would look like. 

I decided almost on a whim that I would move to his province that summer. Sometimes I wonder if we would still be married now if I hadn't.

But that is the way adventures go, is it not? Occasionally a whim strikes us, almost like a childish desire to run away to live in the woods, but much more serious. 

All I knew then was that I was restless without him, and that home was where he was.

    

Turning it Around for Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is always brighter when reflected upon, or when seen in pictures afterwards. 

 

We entered this same forest last year, but the sun was not shining then like it did now. Last year the forest was a fairie one, full of moss, and little mushrooms and tiny timid snails. The dainty webs of spiders were bejeweled. Little streams stole through the leaves then, creeping through the crannies on the ground, barely heard. We hopped over them last year, trailed them, tapped our booted-toes in them. Last year this forest was undiscovered, unwoven by our trails, every bend a mystery.

 

Not this year. This year, the sun was shining, and the leaves were painted, like I'd always dreamed I could paint them with my messy oil pastels, bronzed and bitten, flushed and florid; as if the trees themselves exhaled a sigh, blissfully remembering how wondrous the summer has been.

 

 

This year the sun warmed the leaves like pie; this year the world seemed illustrated, like a picture book that stretches through the hundred acres. This year we were no strangers to the forest, we knew which trees to pass. There were no streams to hop, but there were roots to tip toe across. This year two kitties waited back home for dessert to begin (instead of just the one); this year, our family was a little bigger.

 

 

But there are some things these pictures cannot capture: Like how that same morning the skies were bleak and grey and I did not feel thankful at all; how we fought first, then thanked. 

But then we got dressed in fall colors, and we drove to my mom's house, and there it smelt like cinnamon, and apples, and cranberries, and warm turkey, and all the other fine delicious things you read about in books about holidays or critters that live in a red wall.

 

 

 

 

 

Fall gives such magic, and this year it gave me an even greater gift than timid snails and bashful streams over which to hop. This year fall gave me time; time to drive home in this golden kingdom after turkey; time to taste the tender goodies only a mother can bake; time to walk with my dad; to snap pictures of my brothers; time to fight with my husband, and fall asleep in his arms that same night.

 

 

Tolkien, Trees, and other Thoughts

I got distracted by the light dancing across my book as I was reading The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien this afternoon.

I love the tree outside my bedroom window, almost as much as I love reading in the afternoon. I love sleeping with the window open so I can listen to the hush of the leaves in the night. I greatly enjoy all the little critters that visit me outside my window, from the birds that come to sing in the morning, to the family of squirrels that sometimes come to gawk at my cat. It is also my favorite place to take a nap, there in the tree filtered afternoon-sun.

Tolkien was himself a great lover of trees. Thus, it is no small wonder that The Lord of the Rings pays such special attention to them. Indeed, the trees are the personality of most every landscape in Middle Earth, be they of the hostile or illustrious variety. They are the constant dwellers, watching over passersby and temporary inhabitants that come and go throughout the years, such a short while in the long life of a tree.

Tolkien himself had a tree outside his window once which he claimed helped inspire his story Leaf by Niggle, an odd and wonderful tale that feels altogether dreamlike. He wrote about this tree in the books original introductory note, saying

"One of (the tale's) sources was a great-limbed popular tree that I could see even lying in bed. It was suddenly lopped and mutilated by its owner. I do not know why. It is cut down now, a less barbarous punishment for any crimes it may have been accused of, such as being large or alive. I do not think that it had any friends, or any mourners, except myself and a pair of owls."

Altogether, leafing through these letters written by a mentor that I will never get to meet has been wonderful, even more so than I expected.

Reading through his rambles –regarding such themes as the struggles of procrastination in the face of productivity, his constant anguish at the regrettable busyness of his schedule, and the woe brought on by a book that doesn't want to get done, have all made me realize that maybe I know what I'm doing after all. Self-doubt is no stranger to even the greats.

I sometimes feel small in comparison, so un-heightened by time, so stuck in the scope of the present with a book that is only as old as the files containing it on my computer; a book that is still so unlived in. But knowing that someone I so admire has struggled with the same things as I am toiling with now brings me an unexpected sort of comfort. All this is mostly normal, after all; as normal as the life of anyone who takes up writing can ever be.

Tolkien barely dared dream that so many would share in his delight for his Middle Earth.

Books are wrought only with great pain and frustration, for the imagination rarely complies well with the limits of our vocabulary and the hampered frame of the page.

But once the wrestling is through, and the writer sits back and cries in wonder and fear at what they have created, the book becomes severed from them. As Tolkien wrote:

"(The) goal was reached at last. It is finished... (but) now I look at it, the magnitude of my disaster is apparent to me. My work has escaped my control, and I have produced a monster."

Sometimes the book fades away after that, collecting dust on a back shelf, thought about from time to time only by they that sired it, sometimes with fondness, sometimes with regret. But every so often, if chance allows, a book will fly away to other horizons, where it finds other shelves, from that of a publisher, to possibly that of a reader.

Who can ever know for certain how many shelves a book can make a home in, nestled in comfortably, as if it's already forgotten they that toiled for it before it could stand up on its own. But, the writer won't know: not where it goes, nor how shelves it comes home to; much less how many readers might find a semblance of home in reading it.

Indeed, no one can ever truly guess what might happen when you release a wild book onto the vast world.

For now though, it is much nicer to simply read under the shadow of a tree, and dream of the day when my own book will forget about me and find a home on the shelf of another.