tiny fairies in the trees

She was digging for roots out in the forest under the redwoods where the light never shines. She knelt near fiddlehead ferns, earthworms falling through her careful fingers. She squinted and held up a veiny stone, brushing moss and ants to the soft forest floor. Her hair was thickly black in the deep shadow, and I could see her kneeling there. I watched her, quiet, afraid to startle her from her revery. I whistled lightly and moved forward, touching the bark of the trees around me.

She looked up at me with wide witchgreen eyes.
"Wesley," she said, standing up and greeting me with her warm hands in mine. She showed me the quartz she found and placing it carefully in her satchel of roots and snippets of plants. We walked together through the trees, listening to a woodpecker and wind rustling through the branches. She pointed out the sticky orange blossoms of the monkeyflower and the wispy parasols of ladyfern leaves. We stepped carefully through the verdant redwood sorrell, like a blanket of soft green clover on the earth. I helped her gather horsetail branches, their long rough spindles in bundles, she uses them to scour her pots and pans at home just like the pioneers did. She is clever that way, she knows the land.

I watched her and listened and walked. The woods were close around us and spreading through the hills, the day was close and scented with sweet azalea. clouds had descended into the woods to our west like cloaks around kings. The late summer afternoon was making way for cool coastal night and we turned toward her cabin.

"Look at this," she gestured toward a magnificent redwood not two hundred feet from her backdoor. It's bark pushed out in a giant burl, like a tumor, but thick and strong and proud. I found it grotesque and yet strangely calming. "touch it," she suggested, smiling slightly, and putting her hands on it.

I touched it, and I felt it breathing. I lingered my fingers for moments, feeling the life of it. When I took my hands away, I felt the separation of our skins. I sang a little song to come back into myself. The forest was too alive around me, I wasn't quite sure what to make of it. My little old self within it.

Back inside her house, I sat on her old blue couch and listened to the teapot squeal. She curled up in a patchwork quilt and asked me about my mother, my sister.

"Oh, Rose is okay, but Jessie left again." That's my sister's boyfriend. They have a pretty rocky relationship and I never really know what to make of it but Jade and Syvia are friends of hers and always concerned.

"Send her over to see me. I have something for her," Jade said, getting up from the couch and letting the blanket fall off her shoulders. She padded in her barefeet into the kitchen, her cats twisting around her calves as she walked. I looked at the ivy plants she had hanging from the arched doorway, long branches dangling down all raggedy. She had plants everywhere, the whole place breathed green and cool. Jade brought me a cup of green tea with honey and we sipped together, smiling softly and keeping quiet awhile. the last glimpse of sunlight spread through the stainglass panes of her front door, arching red and blue and green light through the living room. I felt like I was sitting inside a rainbow, I told her and she laughed.