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.

This Holiday's For You

No lectures, please, about going overboard during the holidays. I won't listen. I'm not overdoing the year-end celebrations. But there are times to live large. And this is one of them.

Growing up, the moods brightened at my house perceptibly around Thanksgiving. My father, initials JC, took off work at least a month at the end of the year to spend time with family and to go quail hunting. Except for Sundays, he would be gone by the time we got up.

I remember hovering near the back door, watching for a glimpse of his green-clad figure as the shadows grew from gray to black in the woods behind the house. Then profound relief, as warm as the sun, would claim me when I heard his pointers rustling and barking. JC had whistled and waved them home. And in a few minutes he was there too, game bags full of Christmas quail.

JC was happiest out in the wilds. He was born on a large farm in a remote section of Tennessee, part of a big extended family living along a river bend that still bears our last name.

The parents lived in the "big house," the grown children and their families in smaller homes scattered nearby. They were prosperous farmers who celebrated holidays together, gathered for a main meal around a large table. On these days, the matriarch, Miss Becky they called her, brought out a bottle of whiskey and poured shots for her sons to enjoy, a reward for their hard work. This horrified my grandmother, a hard-line Methodist not used to these ways.

Then, tragedy struck. A horse threw my grandfather, a handsome man with thick, coal black hair and big, luminous blue eyes. He started being plagued by seizures. One day, at home alone with his little blue-eyed middle child, my father, he began to seize. It was over quickly. My grandfather, W., was dead. He left three little boys and a wife, who quickly packed up and whisked her boys away from the river to live with her own family.

These were kind people, stalwarts, profoundly religious. They were also poor and fiercely proud. The large, festive holiday celebrations were over. Holidays, in fact, were very simple. The boys were loved and taken care of, JC had nothing but good things to say about this side of his family. But I know now his days faded from bright to gray after his father died.

Yet, life goes on. He grew up and went to war in Europe, where he survived terrible things. He married and became a father. His wife was a teetotaller, too, so the holiday toasts he had revived for a short time as a grownup ended again. But still, with JC, holidays were times of celebrations.

On the Saturday before Easter, for example, he would disappear for hours. Then he would return, proud of himself, producing a box from the car with a flourish. Inside were exquisite corsages. I remember perfectly formed, quivering orchids for Mother. For my sister and me, tiny red roses clustered in dainty, artistic nests of greenery, secured by long pearled hat pins.

We tried to imagine the florist who made such inspired treasures in the middle of the Alabama sticks where we lived. These were not ordinary corsages. JC was mysterious. "Oh, a friend of mine makes these," he would say, mentioning a community by the river near my hometown. Mother's Day yielded similar surprises.

JC cared little for furnishings, accessories, trappings, embellishments. He wanted to be gardening if he couldn't be out hunting, trudging through woods and fields with those sleek bird dogs he raised and trained with chickens bartered from farmers with promises of quail.

But as Christmas approached, he rummaged through boxes in storage and pulled out lights, stringing them over bushes in front of our house back when they were costly and easily broken, before decorating in this way was popular.

Then, on Christmas Eve, he would vanish again. Through dinner and the opening of presents, JC was the happiest person at the table, especially when the grandchildren started arriving. Then, with the evening over, JC would finish the boiled custard he asked Mother to make every year, his mother's recipe. And this normally tight-fisted man would fish out a bank envelope and distribute $100 bills. To everyone, little children included. Even Mother got one.

One Christmas Eve something even more amazing happened. I was quite small. I heard sleigh bells ringing outside my bedroom window. I got up and looked, but couldn't see anything. I wasn't asleep, I had just gone to bed. No one heard the bells but me, or claimed them, which was unusual. Mother didn't believe in "telling lies" to children, Santa and the tooth fairy included. So anything along the lines had to originate with JC.

I can see him now. Hidden behind the bushes, dressed in hunting camouflage after a long day in the wilds with the dogs, crouched low, knees brushing the browning grass, shaking a rack of sleigh bells borrowed from a farmer over by the river.

Ringing sleigh bells, steaming dishes of Christmas quail, colored lights gleaming on a dark night. Trembling orchids and roses that left us speechless. Golden custard from an old recipe and $100 bills, all of it, held in hands that bequeathed not just material goods but layers of wonder, mystery, peals of laughter.

Because in the giving JC opened an airway for life's breath, which flowed into cold, dark shadows that had been still and silent around a large table for nearly half a century.

So don't pity me the tangled lights, the cinnamon roll baking, the wrapping and mailings, the long drive I insist we make through Virginia and Tennessee into Alabama, which is still home to me after 30 years of living elsewhere. The endless details that exhaust me to the point that sometimes I have to take a nap halfway through the Christmas Eve celebration.

And when I rouse myself long enough to hand over a $100 bill to my son, after all the gifts have been opened and put away, I see more than just his luminous blue eyes.

Because the holidays give us permission to celebrate life with all the surprise and wonder it deserves. We should throw everything we have at it, energy-wise anyway. Because I am not just doing this for myself, for presents, or for my immediate family. I am recovering what was lost, long ago. Filling those blue eyes with light again. I am living for the many, around that big table, JC right in the middle of them.

This one's for you, especially, all month long. Merry Christmas, Daddy.