The Autumnhouse

A field vole (c) Barrie H. Kelly

Vole, who lives at the root of an old fallen pine, knows the way in.

Her doorway is humble and easy to miss, but if you leave marigolds, or the last gold leaves of the buckeye, or the first acorn, at the root of a snag, she will most likely appear, plump with the last of summer's seeds, black-eyed, and kind. She will show you that the doorway is just here, through the hole in the rootplace of the tree which she uses regularly but which is also suddenly a smooth-carved, rounded door made of pine, with a bronze knob made of the bronze of ancient women who long ago tempered it among the embers of your blood, and now Vole is a plump, kind-eyed woman in a great tawny-furred shawl, opening that door for you, holding out a hand of welcome, gesturing you through. 

Inside, you are in a root, hollowed and smoothed and snug, a house that smells of ancient resins and fresh humus, nuts roasting, woodsmoke. There are windows, odd and random, glimpses of the afternoon's long gold light, the slantwise shade of rich sky blue, a buckeye heavy with shining nuts. The fire is new in the round-bellied hearth. Hazelnuts roast on top, and an earthenware bowl within, bubbling scents of corn and bean and sage and a hundred savory roots, a thousand. Only a Vole-woman knows how many. In the center of the round root room is a cushion woven thick of green and brown and yellow wool, and beside it a table made of a polished branch where all manner of wooden birds are perched. The woman settles back onto that cushion, taking a thin, sharp knife and a bit of wood from her belt. She begins to whittle and carve, singing high whistled vole songs that are almost too strange for your ears to follow. 

Varied thrush are coming, coming, coming through the night. Varied thrush are winging, winging, winging with the light. She chants as she carves. Pleiades are rising, varied thrush are flying, Scorpion has gone, Scorpion has gone. As she carves and sings, the root is no longer a snug house but a deep rush of sky and star and feathers. It is the inside of a thrush-breast, speckled as night, pulsing with a compass magnet and a map so old the stars sing to it like the singing vole. There the earth calls south, south. The stars have changed to gloaming. There is a place the thrush knows and flies toward, right into the window of the autumn house, guided by a thousand thousand ancestors. For the briefest moment the thrush flies right into your hands—a big songbird, orange and bluegray in painted swathes, with a song of two tones in one note that opens you up sidelong and brings the acorns swelling everywhere in the trees, and every ghost in your blood released to feast at last among them, welcomed home. 

The  Enclosed Garden, by Meinrad Craighead

Vole-woman stops singing. The house is only a root again, warm and safe. The hazelnuts have roasted. She places the wooden thrush she's carved in a window that peeks out onto a different forest where the stags are wild-antlered, big-chested, weaving after the long-necked and prancing does. Then she hands you a nut, hot and crisp and oily, the papery husk of it flaking into your hands. As you eat it, there is a sound around you like the rustle of falling leaves—buckeye, bigleaf maple, curls of madrone bark, old pine needles. It's a skin, vaguely shaped like you but also like a snake. Vole-woman scoops it up in a deft hand and throws it into the fire as you eat more nuts and listen to the thrushes as they arrive, singing autumn in to roost. 

The Winterhouse

 Written for my dear friend Nao Sims of Honey Grove, inspired by a conversation about her dance class series of the same name

A star will guide you to the Winterhouse. Between the courtship calls of the great horned owls in December there is a door. It is made of smoke, it is made of bronze, it is made of bone. Take the hand of that star and he will show you how to knock and how to bow and how to cross the threshold in the old way. It is a low lintel. Only animals do not need to bow their heads. In the darkness you could not see much of that house, for its walls in the night are made of shadows and of certain winter stars, though for stability they are stuffed with straw, they are coated with clay. Starmade but mud and sturdy, this Winterhouse as round as time.  

In winter, in the year’s darkness, there is no time. The Winterhouse swallows time. You will leave time like a coat at the door when you cross the threshold, clasping a star by the hand. He too will vanish once you have stepped fully in—a glimmer of snowlight, a longing, and he is gone far up in the wheel of rafters with the smoke.

Owls and their ancestors perch on those rafters, the kind with very black eyes. The floor is covered with furs—bear and deer, sheep and goat, gray fox, red fox, bobcat, snowshoe hare. Everyone has given their coat to winter.

The Old One sits in the center by the fire that heats the whole house, a fire whose light and shadows move everywhere in the shapes of animals, of stars. The light of the Winterhouse is made of embers. It is soft. It dances. It is generous to shadow. It courts the unseen. You can never see everything at once, in the Winterhouse. Only many points of light amidst a great and indigo darkness. Still you can see the Old One very well, she who sits nearest the fire, cooking on the hot coals. Her coat is sewn of a hundred skins, of every creature that dwells in the winter forest. Her coat covers the whole of the floor; it is all the furs beneath your feet. When she moves, they rustle. She is old and broad and dark, and she is cooking little buns on the coals.

The air smells of yeast, of nutty flour, of sweet bread. She offers a bun to you. Her hand is gnarled, ancient and twisted as roots, and yet you see that it is jeweled. On her sooty fingers are rings of immaculate delicacy. They shine with a crystalline sharpness, with the glitter of snow, of sun on cold water. At her neck, over the many braided rabbit furs of her vest, hangs a piece of silversmithing that dazzles you. It is a woven net of silver, fine as spidersilk, jeweled with clear gems as perfect and bright as rain. Her looks are not a queen’s, but plain and strong and lined, her furs the furs of ancient memory, simply tanned and many colored, ragged here and there. And yet at her hands gleam the work of the smiths who live deep in the ground, the forgotten ones who tend the earth’s own light. You would like to ask her what it is she has seen, and how she goes there in those underworlds of silver, gold and stone. If by foot, by cat, by star, or none at all, and only soul. 

But her kind, fierce eyes quiet you, and you accept the steaming bun.