A Symphony In Green

Symphony in Green

The Maestro strode through the woods in the gloaming, leaves flowing behind him like a majestic cape as he called the night creatures in: with his right hand he heralded the bats to cease flitting, with his left he called the owl to alight and close his big round eyes, and with a glance and a whisper he bade the moths and the spiders to go to sleep. The sky took on shades of periwinkle, and then light gray, as Dawn fought to break. 

He waited for the precise moment and cued birdsong, as the robin chirped, the chickadee whistled; the peacock wailed, inconsolable. 

He snapped his fingers as he passed the fox-den, and twirled his wrist to set him dancing near the thistle. The sky grew ever lighter as he tapped the bee hive in the old pine tree to awaken the inhabitants, and still, he swirled on through the forest. 

As the sun touched the edges of the carefully-laid tiger lilies, in the ditch beside the cattails, he called to the butterflies, and then the blue-bottles, and finally the dragon-fly.

Cardinals joined in with the other birds, and the wild turkeys raced across the hill and then into the valley as the rising sun turned the sky from pinkish-gray to a brilliant blue.

 The squirrel came out, and caught the acorn the Maestro tossed to him, and began twirling it in his claws. The blue jay twirped in greeting to him as he came near the birch tree, and he nodded a good-day, hardly giving pause as he swirled on, like the West wind. He was the spirit of the woods, the Maestro, and this particular corner of the world was his symphony hall.

 It promised to be near-perfect, as the sun glistened through the dew, he had so carefully draped only hours before, clinging to the edges of the fiddle ferns. Near-perfect, but with one fatal flaw: the Maestro had no audience save the citizens of the forest.    

 At the curve in the path, where the big black oak stood silently, he could see the house at the edge of his domain, a cottage made of stone and dreams, once filled with laughter, but now long still, the windows dark, the fire pit empty, no flowers blooming in the boxes on the sill.

 He recalled the squeals of delight as he set the birds aloft, or called the hummingbird in to hover above the red Canna lily, and giggles as he drummed the rain on the green steel roof in an ancient rhythm, and punctuated their bedtime stories with a flash of lightening or a peal of thunder. And although they could not see him, or might only catch a glimpse of shadow as he passed, it was always children who loved him, and approached his domain with eyes of wonder.

He found as the inhabitants of the cottage got taller, they forget the wonders of nature, and could no longer hear the Maestro’s symphonies quite so clearly. He never had one remember him again, try as he might, with the song of the Blue bird, or the howl of the wind in the trees on a stormy night. No, they got to a certain age, their heads closer, though still far off from the tops of the trees, and regardless of how many money plants he placed on the hill, in vibrant lavender and then later silky white, or how many diamonds he scattered in the snow on a clear and starry January night, or how carefully he orchestrated the ice clinging to the branches of the pine trees, how precisely he covered the full moon with shadows and then ever-so delicately blew them away, or caused the tree frog to light upon the window in silent, verdant invitation to come outdoors and play, they were oblivious.

 Of all of those children now long grown, there was one whose memory was most fond to the Maestro; a child with hair like moonbeams, wandering in the woods behind the stone cottage, and as he orchestrated the Blue-bottles buzzing about the thistle and bracken near the pond, and made the trees sway in syncopation, and the gray squirrel perch upon the branch of the black oak, rolling an acorn, and the Cardinal swoop in front of the old pine, and the hummingbird flit between the red flowers, and the butterfly traipse along without a care in the world, for hours, and hours; and the ants march in their militaristic formations, she noticed, and clapped her hands in glee.

 One night in a June now long past, as she sat on her porch, he called her to dance with the fireflies under a silver lighted moon that reminded him of her hair. And as she danced in rhythm to the sound of the cicadas, she did an amazing thing: she raised her hands toward the moon and began to dance and sing. 

As she twirled around, the fireflies lighting her face, she sang in the old language, reminiscent of water gently trickling over rocks or of the cricket rubbing its hands together in the empty space of silence between the croaks of the bullfrogs.

 He found himself spending the infinite hours thinking of ways to amuse her with new and amazing symphonies; the red fox dancing in a patch of Brown eyed Susan, the owl calling whoo-whoo in the tree outside her window, the brown rabbit bounding out from the brush at her feet, and then zigging and zagging as only rabbits do.

And in the early, nearly, almost-Spring, when she eagerly pushed aside the snow to find the pale purple blooms of the crocus he had hidden there just for her, her squeals of delight warmed him. She was the Maestro’s greatest fan. But she forgot him as they all do.

He could not recall how long it had been since he had seen a ribbon of smoke wending its way through the trees, or a glimmer of light in windows at night at the cottage built of stone and dreams.    And then one evening, as he made his midnight rounds, he saw a glimmer in the distance, faint as fireflies. He sped on the night wind and found as he approached the cottage, smoke once again curling up from the fire pit, and sparks taking the night air.  And there she was, older, her hair now in shades of dead grass, but in her he recognized the child she had been.   As she gazed into the fire he could see, or sense perhaps, a sadness as melancholy as the howl of coyotes in the fall night wind. The trees swayed, whispering their secrets to each other, as they were wont to do. She listened to the trees whisper a name, his name, and she repeated it, in the language of water over rocks, Maestro. He laughed with the sound of cicadas chirping as she murmured it aloud, for that is what she had always called him, in the language of the Old Ones. As her fire burned to dusty white embers, she entered the stone cottage. He recalled the owl was one of her favorites, so he sent it sent it to call whoo-whoo by her window, but could see she was only frightened by it. He watched from the trees outside her window as she slept fretfully, and he gently caressed the boughs to hum a gentle song to her, as he had when she was a small child.

She walked in the woods the next morning, and he had been up all night, which was but a moment to him, thinking of ways to remind her of the wonders they had shared without frightening her. It was Autumn, and he had spent the night and early dawn blowing chilly breath on leaves and stems, drying them to the dead-grass color of her hair, and to darker shades of rust. He recalled these were things she liked to clip and take inside with her, to remind her of Autumn in the deepest cold of Winter. He touched the boughs of certain trees, changing the color of their leaves to the shades of orange and yellow that would remind her of how she loved him and his work.

As she walked, he rejoiced to see her stop to pick a few sprigs for her winter vases, and he caused the autumn birds to sing in harmony, and the trees to murmur soothingly. Impatient for the full recognition he felt was his due, he caused the geese to fly overhead, making their way southward, and as they honked, she looked up at the sky, a bright early Autumn blue, and he came as close as he dared. He touched the tree with all of his force, cascading a crescendo of the full season of autumn in a moment’s glance. Like fireworks in the morning sky, the leaves changed from green to orange, and then brown, and then began to shower down on her in the gentle wind of his breath. She sighed, and then dropped her sprigs, and reached her arms toward the tops of the trees, and danced in a circle with her eyes closed as she had when she was a child. He increased the frenzy of the wind, and saw in her dance she remembered the wild symphony again: the squirrel, the fox, the birds, the ants, everything in the woods.

In the time that was for her, Ever-After, but seemed to him a few moments, he moved the clouds for her, put diamonds in the snow, caused the snow, and sometimes ice, to cling to branches to refract the sunlight, sent the fox, the owl, the bats, the tree-frog, the butterflies and moths and ants and Blue-bottles to amuse her.

 He had not noticed that her hair had taken on the gray-white tinge of the January sky, or that she walked less deeply into the woods, and then not at all. And then came the day when she no longer got out of bed, and then was no longer at the house at the edge of his woods.  

If he had eyes, he would have cried tears. Instead, he howled, and the trees whipped back and forth with his grief, and his fears of a return to endless solitude.

 Except the big black oak, now dead, this stood like a sentinel, a mute, dead statue to his sadness. He blew his wrath toward it and it tumbled down with a fierce crash. And suddenly the forest was silent and the wind was still and he remembered her for a moment, raising her arms in the wind, or sitting quietly, head cocked to one side, trying to hear the secret murmurings of the trees. How long would he wait for another to sense him? How long would it be?

The Maestro looked at the rising sun and realized that, despite his grief, there was work to be done.  He cued the robins in their cheerful song, and made the fox dance next to the thistle and the bracken, and woke the butterflies from their sleep, and instructed the Blue bottles to hover, and bees to buzz in and out of their hive in the old pine. The red squirrel scurried pell-mell for acorns, and, the ants marched in their formation, putting up supplies for the winter, and suddenly, he heard a sound, the clapping of very small hands.

He turned and she was there, again, in all her quiddity—like the child she has always been, and perhaps always would be. She smiled at him, and he saw that she saw him, and there was no need for words, which was good because he did not speak in the language of words, only with the sound of wind in trees and water on rocks.  He smiled at her, with what was almost a face, and then with the twist of one wrist, he sent the fox dancing again, beside the thistle, just for her, all for her.