"If I shut my eyes it returns: the evocation of a whole wood, a whole world of wood-darkness and flowers and birds and later summer silence, of a million leaves turning mellowly to death. It becomes more than the mere memory of a wood, the first and best wood I have ever known. It is the distillation of another and more lovely world." ~ H.E. Bates Through the Woods
A large portion of Fat Hummingbird Farm is a woods that climbs up the side of North Mountain. It forms a dense and impenetrable border of trees and brush and knotweed that, during this first summer of our experience of this wood, is crammed with vegetation and wildlife. We have seen porcupines munching greedily high up in a tree and snakes slithering off to the brush in the glissade manner peculiar to snakes. Signs of deer and their trail-making - ripples in the tall grass, and scat of the coy-wolves we hear carolling at night. The wood carries a particular sound as the winds from off the Bay of Fundy come up and over the mountain and sheer down through the trees. It is a water-less waterfall sound - a rushing, a whorl-ing sound of wind heaving and tugging leaves in its wash.
I have not known woods like this since my childhood in England. I have become habituated to the woods of the Northwest, on the west coast. There, the woods are evergreen, shaded, with a dripping dampness that feels cave-like. And quiet, too, like a cave. The scent is of earth, and mushrooms, and moss. The deciduous trees in our wood are soft-leaved and carry an inevitable death within themselves. Even in the heat of summer they hear the murmurs and sighs of autumn. Their branches and their roots know - a deep knowledge of things that a tree that is ever green and never relinquishes life can never know. The scent of these woods is acrid and a bit bitter, and you can taste pollen and dust on your tongue.
As we have been clearing brush and making (very slow) headway into the woods, we have found wild apple trees, peach trees, trees that carry a berry that even the birds won't touch, and voluminous drifts of Kicking Colt (jewelweed), Goldenrod, Tatarian Asters, and numerous wild roses.
"Everyone knew you shouldn't go biting into fruit offered by magical creatures in the woods, even if you'd thought until just five minutes ago that such stories were, you know, only stories." ~ Molly Ringle
In those parts of the woods we have not yet been able to access, at least not until winter, there can be seen dark portals, tenebrous shadows between the papery silver of the birches, to places unseen. They put me in mind of the woods of my childhood; and the portals and thin places and things unseen. My Nana, on mornings that followed a summer night-time rain, would take me to the kitchen window that looked onto the woods that bordered the lower garden. There she would point out the rings of toadstools that had sprung up under the oak trees overnight.
"Fairy rings", she would say, "Look closely, look closely, can you see the fairies teasing
that hedgehog?"
And perhaps as a result of her holding my arm tightly, meanly, until I replied; or as a result of her insistent, whispering, tobacco-scented voice; or as the result of my staring and staring until there were tears in my eyes and the image of the toadstools swam in and out of focus - I saw the fairies. Pointy-faced, sharp of nose and long of fingers. Their wings were honed, bony, and web-veined like shattered glass. They were not the fairies of children's books.
My Nana put out a nightly bowl of bread scraps softened with warm milk to appease these creatures of the woods. I feel the creatures of my woods may be gentler, more tender, kinder to me than was my Nana. I wouldn't be remiss, though, to start putting out those nightly milk sops. It would be wise . . . I think.
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