THE THICKET

I was a rather solitary child who lived in the imaginary worlds created by the books on my grandmother’s bookshelf.  I had never seen a thicket; the only thickets I knew were those which filled the old books.  In the cautionary tales that dominated those books, children were often lost in thickets; princesses fell into comas in castles hidden in thickets; crones and witches with their black cats lived in one-room cottages overgrown by the mosses and vines that marked their thickets.  Maidens were imprisoned by jealous stepmothers in decaying houses hidden deep within thickets with elves and fairies their only companions.

Somehow, despite the unpleasant reality of actually living in a decaying hovel somewhere in a remote thicket, the image always appealed to me. The birdsong, mystery, ruination and solitude of the thicket spoke to me through the tales, and made a soothing setting for what was - in reality - frequently a story of evil and cruelty.

It never occurred to me that there might have been life before the thicket.  In the tales of old, the thicket and the home it surrounded were frozen in time like one’s relatives in an old tin type.  The witch or crone was perennially old; the stepmother always wicked; the dwarves had always been working in the forest.  I didn’t think about a time when the cottage or the castle might have been bright and new, set in a pretty woodland, its occupants young and happy.

I try to imagine the folk tale characters before their thickets tucked them in.  Was the wicked stepmother once a young bride, smiling and pretty as she moved hopefully into her new home in the forest? Did the witch ever have a family of her own? How did they spend their younger days? Did they trim the vines and weed the paths? Were their cottages once neat and trim and new? Did they manage to keep the spiders at bay? Did they cook and mend and clean? How old were they when they surrendered to the thicket? Was it a conscious decision? Or, did they just sit back and watch from a window?

And then, yesterday, I noticed the moss on my roof.  Later, I saw that weeds had grown up between the rocks in the wall behind the house.  Grasses were beginning to edge into the path that led to the brook, and silken webs were hanging down from the eaves of the porch roof.

Once upon a time, I would have weeded the rock wall, edged the path, and taken a broom to the cobwebs.  I might even have scraped the moss from the roof.  But that was then - I was young and strong and agile.  Now I sit on the porch with pen in hand, and write while my ever-encroaching thicket gradually surrounds me.

For that is what thickets do in real life.  They creep, surround, and ever so gradually encroach.  Acorns fall from the oaks, then sprout and grow, sending their roots deep into the rocky soil to become first seedlings and then saplings and take their place in the ever-wilding thicket.  Wild flowers - black-eyed Susans, Queen Anne’s lace, cornflowers - cluster around their trunks.  Grass seeds and berries, accidentally dropped from the air by migrating birds, take root and turn into vines and weeds or thorny shrubs that criss-cross old paths and choke the carefully planted perennials.

Across the road, leaves in tones of gold and red and orange pile up and turn brown, warming the soil as they rot and become part of it.  A tiny spider rides on the warmth of the steam from my coffee, spinning a web from the base of my lamp to its shade.  A squirrel gnaws at the opening in a birdhouse chosen years ago because it resembled a cottage from one of the fairy tales. She may be hoping to find a few eggs left by a long gone robin.  Or, perhaps, she’s just seeking somewhere warm to spend the winter.  Either way, she adds one more level of ruin to what is rapidly becoming my own thicket.

As the weather cools, I’ll spend less time on the porch, preferring instead to sit at the window, warmed by a small fire in the fireplace, and watch as leaves flutter down, birds assemble for their flight to warmer parts of the world, and squirrels store their food against the coming winter.

As I withdraw into my own winter haven, the thicket beyond my walls will continue its relentless takeover.  Soon, I’ll become the crone within it.  Small children, seeing me in the window, will shiver and point at me as they turn and run.

Perhaps they already do.