Chapter 1: The Woods
A silent house that knows impulsive rage is unsettling. Anger hangs on the walls like flickering sconces, agitated and onerous.
A songbird signaled dawn’s approach. Stella was out the door and into the woods — ducking under jutting branches and sliding over roots with the grace of a forest nymph. She pushed on through the pitch, zipping her Patagonia over her nose and mouth, head down, fingers jammed into linty pockets. Was she running from something or being pulled toward something? Either way, she welcomed the unspooling.
Inky depths faded into shadows. The trees were her protectors, and with each snapped twig beneath her feet, she was part of something greater. The spirit of the woods took possession of her despair and helped her to breathe again.
She walked for the better part of an hour, a new day in pursuit. By the time the massive Sycamore rose up on the opposite creek bank, the morning light had pierced through the overstory in a kind of fractured awakening.
The spare winter brush always threatened to reveal too much. Stella glanced from side to side, then behind her. Though the thicket served to obscure, the absent cloak of spiraling vines left them exposed. She reached for the wooden door, panels splintered like a neglected picket fence, and tugged on the latch. With that, Stella disappeared into her fallen house in the woods.
*****
Stella pushed the door closed. She never quite knew what would greet her on the inside; what critters might have taken up residence.
Once something had moved as she neared the side window. Through lacing ivy appeared a raccoon eyeing her, black nose pressed against cracked glass. He had thrust his fist out a small breach along the fading shingles in a fumble for balance. Two others nudged in – three whiskered masks bobbing in fear and curiosity at their uninvited guest.
These woods, this place, belonged to them.
Today her fractured house was gloriously still — still in the way that banishes brutality at the doorstep and suggests possibility. She inhaled the loam -- a blend of dirt, creek, dead leaves and moist walls stained grey and brown with the graffiti of deterioration. The decadence of decay.
Two sides of the room held sturdy within drywall and exposed brick, while a third bore a gaping hole just beneath the eaves, through which sunlight and the outside crept in. Along the fourth wall was a doorway to a forgotten room and a rotting spiral staircase ending in the boughs of a hickory tree. A carpet of black nuts covered the forest floor beneath. That tree was a life force in her house, with limbs outstretched.
Her back pressed against the door, she slid down to the floor, still intact but for ferns and witch hazel invading the cracks. Exhale. This space was enchanting. She couldn’t quite explain it – after all, the structure was barely there — but to enter this house lifted any anguish. Her despair drifted out the gaping hole like smoke through a forgotten chimney.
Nature’s invasion stoked that power. Here amongst the tangled vines and creeping shrubs was reclamation. It pulled Stella ever-closer to the woods and the mysterious wild, blurring the space between reality and ambiguity.
Someday the vines might encircle her in an embrace and pull her into the understory. She would be ready.
Last spring’s robin’s nest sat wedged atop the broken wall, a strand of purple yarn woven through the twigs. Stella had arrived just in time to see the female settling onto three sky-blue eggs — and later the expected flurry of shrieking beaks and twisting worms.
It was a moment of clarity. This planet thrived on ingenuity. Creative energy provided sustenance, from intricate nests of leaves and shiny bits, to vast ecosystems teeming with biodiversity.
Stones from Sycamore Creek rose up in small monuments around her house — one balanced at the base of the staircase. Another, 13 rocks high, followed a meandering crack in the plaster. Pinecone wreaths woven through old vines and edged with crusty Bergamot globes and milkweed pods hung on the inside door and walls.
Stella scooted over to a small pile of foraged animal bones and deer antlers and began to fit them together, sliding beams through curves, locking tines inside branches. She had soon shaped a small vessel, into which she dropped a Great Horned Owl feather and some dried wild rose, scattered gifts from her wanderings.
This unearthing would be the centerpiece of an altar honoring her sacred space in the woods, to give thanks for all that was and forever could be — in the presence of abandonment and hope.
An Excerpt by Diana Lasseter Drake