Forest Song: Little Mother

Chapter One

Good morning, Inga. Did you have a good rest? Good. Yes, sleeping in the woods is easy. I honestly don’t know how people can sleep through the noise of a city or a town. I see you’ve made some notes, which tells me you have questions. And rest assured that I’ll answer them in time. Some will be resolved as I continue the story. Others will have to wait. Sit down now and have some zupa ze moreli. It’s is a special soup I made just for you. See how pretty, all golden with lemon and apricots and honey from the sacred bees. Wait! It still needs some whipped sour cream. There. Now it’s ready. Have some coffee too. Be careful, though. It’s still a bit too hot.

Now let me see, I believe we stopped at the rite to celebrate my becoming a woman. Did I tell you the story about building this house? No I didn’t think so. Well I guess that’s where I’ll start.

We waited for the day of the moon’s first silver grin, since that is the time when hope becomes beginning. Everybody came. Władysław, the alpha wolf and Bogumiła, his mate, brought their pack to dig the root cellar and the well. Dobiesław and Danuta pressed their beaver clans to work to cut wind-felled trees into logs, which Bronisława, the bear, and her two grown cubs, Czarownica and Rościsław carried to the site. Dobiesława, Czarownica’s playful cub, skittered under their feet. Stretching himself to his full impressive height and pointing to the left then to the right and sometimes in both directions at once, Tranoc, his sleeves rolled up to the elbows his shirt pulling out from the waistband of his pants, detonated commands as if the house were meant for him.

I would have laughed at his antics if I had not been confused about having a place of my own. I wanted the house. I had daydreamed about it from the day my childhood crush, Jochen, and I dug our way though Mama’s flowers to squirrel under the new fence and made our great escape for the woods. I had fantasized about it even before I’d met Tranoc and my teacher, Matka Lasu.

On the other hand, I resented it because I’d have to leave the home I loved with Tranoc and my teacher. And so I felt as I had when the neighbors had come to put the fence up around my parents’ house. Though the fence had been erected to cage me in, and I was sure that the cottage was meant to push me out, the sense of helpless outrage was the same.

“Why can’t I live where I want?” I groused while Matka Lasu, and I gathered stones for the foundation. I hefted a rock the size of a cat into Tranoc’s little cart.

“Who says you can’t?” She nudged some leaves with her toe and picked up a plum sized piece of schalenblende. Brown and beige striped and at home in Germany, it had no place in the Polish soil. She handed it to me. “This one would look pretty embedded with your chimney stones.” I huffed and stamped my foot. “Kochanie, there’s no law that says you have to move.” For the first time I noticed that her hair was all gray and that the lines of her smile did not smooth away when her face relaxed back to a neutral expression. “One day you’ll want a place where you can have some privacy.”

“I won’t!” I pouted and stamped my foot again. “I hate this house!” I lied kicking the cart’s wheel. “I want to keep on living with Tranoc and you!”

“Then you shall.” She brushed a silver hair wisp from her face and plunked another rock into the cart. “But why don’t we build the place anyway in case somebody else wants to live there?” I hadn’t considered that somebody else would want to live in the house I had designed. Suddenly possessive of the home I had toured in a trance before my Woman Ritual, I gnawed my thumbnail and scraped the ground with my foot and wrestled with the longing to stay with them while having the new cottage for myself.

“Maybe I could mostly live with you and visit the new place from time to time?” A peach colored thomsonite caught my eye. Roughly trapezoid shaped and the size of a wren, it glinted on the shadow-striped forest floor. It belonged in Russia or in Germany and shouldn’t have been just beneath the leaves. I suspected that Tranoc had planted it there and had covered it lightly so I’d find it.
“Exactly so,” my teacher beamed, her brown eyes going to blue, the crinkles at her eyes and mouth creeping toward each other. “You’d come and go as you chose. That’s precisely what I mean!” I showed her the stone. “It looks like Tranoc’s been here.”

Having settled the problem of where I would live, I searched with more attention for any special stones that Tranoc might have hidden for me, though I still wasn’t sure if he or Matka Lasu had been the one to scatter them about. I found a piece of amber as big as my head and a zincite the size of my fist. While deposits of both were commonly found deep within the Polish soil, they should not have lain among the leaves and the green shoots probing their way into spring. Nor should they have been perfect orbs. On our way back we discovered a chunk of carnelian leaning against a boulder and a few paces later a piece of cobalite, both stones from Africa. Only Tranoc had traveled around the world. Only he would have had access to those stones. If my teacher had left them I knew she’d have done it by pilfering them from his collection. And she wouldn’t have taken anything of his unless he had given permission.

“Did you find any stones that caught your eye?” he winked when we arrived back at the site. “No! Those logs go over there!” He swept his arm to the right then, glancing at the bears, he flashed a gap-tooth grin at me.

“Nothing special,” I teased. “Just ordinary rocks.” His jaw dropped. He frowned. I had his absolute attention. Shoving his rumpled ever-present cap to the back of his head, he grated his scalp, his glance flitting from me, to the cart, and back to me. I shrugged again and ordered the giggles bubbling behind my teeth to settle in my throat or, better, in the pit of my belly. They would not be contained. Tickling my tongue, they sputtered from my lips. Head tilted, he laughed, clapped his hands then chafed his palms.

“You got me, Funny Bunny!” In two long steps he had draped himself over the cart. He plucked the apple of zincite and handed it to me. The humor evaporated from his face and a father’s affection glimmered from his eyes.

“Do you know what this is?” The stone stung my hands with the scintillation of a star. Reflexively I dropped it back in the cart and checked my palms for blisters or chars. I nodded. My hands were both whole and pink. “And you know about its magic?” Matka Lasu had taught me everything I knew about women’s mysteries and the plants and the beasts, but Tranoc was our resident expert on stones. All the wisdom I possessed about rocks and stones I had gleaned from his patient instruction. Again I nodded, preparing myself for a quiz.

Instead he gathered my hands in his and went on. “You’ll need this to synthesize your physical power, your psychic energy, and your creativity. You’ll draw on it to organize like-minded people so your work can be successfully done.” Looking back at the cart, he petted the stone. It sizzled to his touch. “Embed it in your chimney low enough that you can touch it. This stone will serve you well. All of them will.” He mounded the planted gems at my feet. “They all should be part of your hearth.” He barked another order then returned to me. “And Judy? No rock is ordinary.”

Working through the grumbling of our overburdened muscles, Matka Lasu and I went out for seven days searching for stones that would be part of my house, welcoming those that agreed to come along and leaving those that didn’t want to move. Each day we came back from a farther place to pile my treasures at the site. Along with the gray and tan rocks of the woods we found a fire orange hopeite from Africa and a green diabanite from Germany. Satisfied that we’d found all of Tranoc’s secret gifts and longing to rest our quivering arms, we rested on the eighth day to take stock of what we had.

The pile of rocks was pathetically small. Astonished at how much timber and stone was needed to construct a simple house, I consulted Tranoc’s plan again and again, willing the cottage to need less. ...