Tomorrow I start the final leg of my term as an instructor at Oglala Lakota College. Today I spent many hours reading (and correcting) my student’s historical fiction stories. I asked them to place their stories within the context of a “war”. I was stunned by their output. One story was nearly 17 pages long-and these are developmental English students. I loved reading these stories, many of them connected to family stories and Wounded Knee, both the massacre and the occupation of. I do love this teaching thing, but am ready to be done and find the next leg of my life.
I wandered old files tonight trying to find something interesting. I abandoned the darker stories for this one. This is the opening of a small collection of stories that I wrote when I wanted to play with my own version of Siddhartha and Candide combined. I thought it was a nice spring story although we are buried in snow here in South Dakota.
Happy Easter
Jamie
Evida
Or How a Forest Girl Discovers the World
Evida Takes a Walk and Finds Herself Separate
There could be no better place on earth than this the young girl thought as she stepped her toes into the muddy edge of the pool of water to catch a closer look at the water spiders skimming the clouded surface. She was in a small clearing carved out by road workers who had taken the red soil for their road-like purposes and left behind the moon. The clearing was dotted with rough craters that filled with water. Each pool birthed a new universe and was teaming with tadpoles, water spiders, bugs, birds feeding. Scruffy grasses poked up between the reddish mounds.
She was eight years old the summer she awoke from childhood to find herself encased in a wrapper of skin that separated her from this beloved world. Up until that moment, it had not occurred to her that she was separate.
Evida lived along the northern edge of the nation in what she simply called Blueberry Country in honor of the low bush berries that filled her forest. No one else ever came to this small, scarred piece of earth but her, and she came daily that spring to watch the transformation between winter and spring. It was, in truth, a muddy mess, but she loved it. She ran along the plowed ridges that separated one small pool from another so often that her bare feet padded and packed the sand as if it were an ancient road carrying tribal inhabitants across the Bering Strait.
Life was good.
Down the road her parents had built a house that sheltered her and her five brothers and two sisters in a cocoon of warmth and safety. That her dad had tried to defy Mother Nature and built his house in a swamp seemed not to matter to them. When the ditches filled with murky water, Evida and the other kids leaned over the edge to see the wigglers that bred there by the millions and would soon turn into mosquitoes. It was a small price to pay for paradise-a few hundred red, itchy welts and the little screamers buzzing them to sleep each night.
Evida couldn’t figure out what was different this spring, different from all the others she had endured in her full eight years. Something had changed. The color of a single green leaf bud opening on a twig belonging to the larger tree pierced her eyes almost painfully. The dry grasses of last year, as they gave way to the newer shoots poking up from some mysterious earth ethos, seemed to say reassuringly, “Never mind. We go gratefully. We’ve had our season.”
Wind, sun, birds, the tiniest flowers-all spoke to her in a language once incomprehensible but now understood clearly as if by magic. Going to sleep each night was almost a burden, that she must close her eyes to such beauty for the dimmer world of sleep and dreams.
She took to speaking aloud, only when alone of course, to the many offerings of nature. I love you, little bird. I love you tiny clover. I love you big mamma tree. I love you creepy little spider on my hand.
What had caused such an awakening? She didn’t know, couldn’t understand. She simply drank the realization in, letting it fill her soul and spirit with such rich nectar that by noon she was drunk, intoxicated and asleep on the grass.
When she opened her eyes again there was a blue-silk sky wrapping her like a sari. It was exotic, foreign, scented with the spice of Mother Nature’s unique perfume. When she stood again and stretched her arms to touch the blue silk, she glanced down and saw the imprint of her own small body in the grass. She felt just the slightest shiver of what could be fear or foreboding, a wisp of warning of things to come, but she tossed her blonde hair and walked off.
Thirty years later, she would return to this same spot, now an overgrown piece of the forest once again, desperate to find the slightest indentation she had left on Mother Earth.