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.
