Magic in the Woods

My father planted the first home we owned in the middle of a north Alabama cotton field. He endured a long commute into the city so we could grow up rural, like he did. The woods in the back were my favorite part of this.

A swamp stretched in the middle of the back woods, perfect for hiding. The crumbling remains of fireplaces from long-gone homes were strewn about, delapidated wells, some still with frayed rope attached. The whole canvas slashed with other-worldly flowers I've not seen since.

We snacked on the run on blackberries plucked from thickets and plums from bushes. A few muscadines. A tree with a strange, gnarled middle hid bees and their honeycomb, ripe for the stealing with long thin bamboo sticks (wait until the bees get "sleepy," be really calm, and move slowly and deliberately, like Tai Chi).

I did my best to live in those woods for years. And at night I managed to stay close. The windows were open in our house many nights, because my father hated air conditioning. So my bedroom was perfect for cross breezes.

On most nights, the wind rushed with huge energy through the tall trees, funneled into the bathroom, then swept across the hall before swelling into my room, then out the window beside my bed. The sound wasn't a soft rustling, more like a river.

My dreams were always in technicolor.

Which is why my mother reacted the way she did to the following. I think.

One early morning, just before daybreak, I woke to a sound streaming with a distinctive lilt through the bathroom screen. My house was perfectly still. I stole into the bathroom and looked out the window, into the dark woods. The sound continued. It was like singing, but wasn't. A woman's voice? High pitched. From a distance. I thought it was coming from the direction of the old haunted house. But that was so far away. And this sound was so close.

I was just a child. The woods were full of magic and I was half asleep, so nothing about this struck me as peculiar. I stumbled back to bed.

This "singing" happened several more times, before the first rays of the sun burst forth. Sometimes I stayed in bed listening. But one day I got up again, curious. Who was it, what was it. I stood in the bathroom at the window, listening, straining to see.

And then my mother came into the bathroom.

She wanted to know what I was doing up so early. "Someone is singing in the woods." She was suddenly quite angry, which was not like her. She slammed down the window, told me I was dreaming, ordered me back to bed. I felt vaguely ashamed, like I had done something crazy, or wrong. That window was shut the next night and for a good long while.

I grew up. I forgot all about the episodes. The windows were thrown open again and I went to sleep to that rushing wind. But there was no more singing from the woods.

Decades later, I was living in D.C., going to yoga class. The teacher asked us to stay after for a meditation session. She had a special guest that night, a Cherokee teacher who would demonstrate ancient chants handed down by generations of Native American women.

I was curious, so I went. The teacher explained about chants that deal with opening the chakras, something I wasn't and still am not all that clear about, to be honest. I imitated the meditation pose, cross-legged and hands upside down on my knees, thumb and forefinger tips touching. And went over some lists in my head.

Then I heard her say something about the heart chakra. And she began to hum or chant or sing. And the hair stood up on the back of my neck. It was something I had not heard in decades. It was the sound I had heard from the woods on those pre-dawn mornings as a little girl. It was exactly that sound.

My mind scrambled. I was skeptical. How could that be? The first time I heard the sound, it came from the direction of the old haunted house that legend said was built on an old Indian burial mound. That was in books we read in school. Were they Cherokee? Members of that tribe had lived in that area. And my mother always said we had a few drops of Cherokee blood from her side, from her grandfather.

But no one in the very early '60s was out in that dark scary woods in the middle of the night chanting a heart chakra or whatever beside an old burial mound. Or were they?

People do funny things. My own straight-laced mother took us into the sage once and demonstrated how Native Americans used to smoke "rabbit tobacco." She actually gathered these dried leaves, rolled them in a paper torn from a brown paper sack like a fat cigarette, lit it and puffed a bit. She had us try it, causing us to cough raucously. That sounds strange today. Although I'm told this was not unusual among children with Appalachian roots.

So maybe someone was trying to break the curse on the old Gable House, with its legend of an owner who  murdered many husbands and buried them under the house. Maybe this was someone's idea of soothing the dead. It was a mystery then and it still is today.

By the time I left the meditation class, I was strangely happy, buoyant even. I did not understand what had happened exactly. But I knew one thing.

I had found an old friend, one I finally recognized. That there was nothing wrong with me back then. Quite the opposite, in fact. That I had a childhood filled with magic and mystery, remnants of which fill me with light to this very day.