The Circle of Trees

A sort of memoir fiction non-fiction story.

Every spring she relearned the smell of warm wet earth and moss. Her feet remembered to avoid snails on the forest paths, and her heart rejoiced to see how the green surged out from the earth, gradually rising upward into the trees like a verdant leafy thermometer as the temperatures rose. If she managed to catch a few free hours in a morning or a weekend, she would pull on her hiking boots, sit in her car with the keys tapping against her thighs ready to turn the ignition, and close her eyes, seeking which of her favorite local forest paths wanted to be explored on that particular day. Each trip to the forest had its own story, and so too did every path. It might have seemed a little silly to wait for a message from the woods to reach her while sitting in a container of steel and glass, but nonetheless, a clear picture almost always formed in her mind eventually as she listened.

Today was a little different.

As her eyes fluttered and she leaned her head back against the headrest, she could picture the car driving down a familiar long winding country road, pulling into a gravel parking lot, and waiting for her to walk the forest path at the small public park hidden away and almost forgotten by everyone. She groaned at the image: the park used to be one of her favorites, but it abutted a high-demand, high-income college town, and eventually the cloned-layout mansions had stacked right up to the edges of the property. One whole section of the trail wandered ten feet behind the back yards of the behemoth buildings with their clipped lawns and concrete pools, with only a few straggling trees between. The forest might still have been forest, and the trees were still trees, but they were caged animals surrounded by walls of pristine human pavement. It was sad. It made her feel heartsore to go there.

Nonetheless, the message was definitely clear: go to the park on Jones Road. So she did. She walked past the barn with the hole in the wooden plank walls in the shape of a pointed gnome hat. She walked down the sloping hill to the trees nestled below, the calls of crows coming from deeper in the woods. She loved walking on chilly wet and grey mornings after spring rains made the ground soft and the moss even softer. Fewer people entered the forest when the sun wasn't shining cheerfully in the sky, and she was better able to have a dialogue with the woods without distraction.

In fact, it was in this forest that she first fell in love with conversing with the trees and the magic that flowed between them. These woods had emanated so much energy when she first started walking in them two and a half decades earlier. That was why it was so hard to see them depleted and trapped. The forest itself must have felt the same way: as she moved deeper into the densest part of the woods, the bracken and fallen logs to either side of the path gradually thickened with walls of thorns and briars that had never been there when she first used to walk this way. Eventually she felt as hemmed in as when she had traveled to Dartmoor and driven the hedgerow lanes. The difference was, these hedges consisted entirely of roses. It was still early spring, so the sharp dagger-like thorns were only disguised by small unfurling fronds of leaves, but her gardener's heart would know roses anywhere. Her heart ached to see the woods trying to protect what remained with such a clear sign to all intruders.

Then she saw the archway. When she first started coming to the woods, she was a twenty-year-old girl, naive and with a sponge-like desire to soak up all the proof and signs of magic and wonder the universe might hold. She wanted to believe in faeries. She needed to. And so she discovered how this forest trail told a story, first going downward and inward, then showing gentleness and trees with warm large spaces between them for the light to break through, and then, right after you passed under a tree with a branch arching naturally overhead into a gateway, you would come to the Sidhe trees. It was only years later that she would realize these dark and mysterious contorted trees were hawthorns: tree of the fey in folklore. All she knew at the time was that the trees radiated strangeness, a gateway, the Other. When she sat in the center of their circle, she felt like she was safe in her own strangeness, her own otherness.

Something about those trees had made her know bone-deep that magic was real. They gave her a shiver of excitement and perhaps a little danger (their bare black branches did have foreboding thorns). But as she passed through the archway of branches decades later, she could only see the upper branches of one hawthorn left standing behind the impenetrable barrier of rose vines.

She never stopped believing in magic. In fact, the years between the girl she had been then and the woman she was now had served to deepen and broaden her beliefs in the animate, wondrous and ever-present enchantment of nature. But sometimes she missed that effervescent excitement when it was all new and unfolding before her for the first time. She wished she could stand in the center of that circle of shadowy trees and raise her hands to the sky, dancing as if the path wasn't ten feet away and hikers able to meander by at any moment. Closing her eyes, she invited all of her senses to recall the feeling of that younger moment: the smells, the sounds, the energy, the fluttering of her heart. And she started to dance. She could see the world-of-then in front of her closed eyelids, as clear as if it was happening in the present. She stepped close to the remaining tree from the present, and wrapped her hand around the trunk, pressing her forehead to the bark and whispering secret words of gratitude into its hollow nooks.

"I miss you," she whispered. "I'm sad that you've changed, that the magic of then has shifted. But there are still those of us who believe in you, who believe in magic. Who believe in Faerie. And I will still seek you out, wherever I go."

As she said those words, she realized that they were true: she still could feel the threads of the presence she felt back then in the remaining tree, and not only that, she also felt the threads of that magic in the willow tree bathed in golden hour light, draped over a holy well in northwest England. She had felt it in the old growth forests of coastal Oregon. And she had felt it in the joyful fronds of ivy dangling like long hair and blowing in the breeze at the waterfall in Dartmoor.

The circle of trees represented the moment when her life had expanded from the smallness of all she had known before. But she had continued expanding to contain so much more, to experience so much more. She was allowed to miss her trees, but nature...and Faerie...changing and adapting was what allowed it to survive and thrive through the ages. She understood that now. And a sense of peace came over her, even as the sound of a lawnmower from the nearby houses interrupted the reverie in which she was caught.

Eyes still closed, she pressed a hand to the tree one last time, and stepped backward onto the path. However, she opened her eyes just a little too soon, and the briars marked her arm, blood raising along three lines, one for each tree that no longer stood. Faerie can be beloved and dangerous at the same time.