Twelve Octobers before last, I was a burned-out forest grove. I had dug my roots in by the water, where I could wait.

The fire had taken over as winter gave in to spring. One scalding little spark took to the hollow, then spread with devouring speed. There are places in the forest that will never come back.

On my first night home from the hospital, I watched “Fantasia 2000.” It was the whales in “Pines of Rome” that I remembered best, the calmness and light that my heart desired.

Somehow I hadn’t thought about the Firebird. How once it has done what fire does, the spirit of all green things is nothing but ashes. How all that can revive her is the breath of the only living creature who’s there to see her. How she huddles in grey, too weak to rise, until her old friend lifts her up. When she remembers how to fly–when she turns the land green again–I cried like I had never cried. But that is what brings things back to life: tears, and breath, and time.

I wrote a song sometime that spring–”See How I Grow.” It is sung by a dryad, or something near, as she passes the seasons alone. She dwells in deep winter, remembering. Waiting. Her beloved, the wind, has been struck dumb. “Somewhere, I know,” she says, “the woods are ringing.”

She held the hope safe when I couldn’t.

Ten Octobers before last, I caught a zephyr to the Ohio Valley Filk Festival. Music and kindness had called me, a lifetime too late and not a moment too soon. There I found tears again, and I could breathe. Little could I know what time was sheltering for me.

Six Octobers before last, I opened my eyes and shook off the earth piled above.

A twenty-year fire was out.

All the pain was gone. The sapping sickness.

Gone.

Gone. Love drove it out.

All that was ever asked of me was a song.

Five Octobers before last, I saw an ent’s face in a redwood tree. I was sitting alone at sunrise when I saw him: noble profile unmistakeable, solemn-faced with the kiss of the morning breeze.

I finished writing “The Entwife” in January of 2020. It is sung by an entwife who passes the seasons alone. She dwells in deep winter, remembering. Waiting. Her beloved, the ent, is separated from her.

“All clothed in light, as fair and bright as when we first were made.”

She’d found the hope the trees held safe so long.

I sang my song on the last night I would sing in a room with my friends for near to the next two years.

Four Octobers before last, the fire that devastated the mountain communities and massacred the redwoods had finally been put out. It was wildfire twilight from morning to night right up to the end of summer. One day the daylight didn’t come at all.

It took a long time for the smoke to clear, and longer before I knew for certain that the old ent’s tree was gone. But acres upon acres of the trees have stood and survived, and will regrow.

Two Octobers before last, my seedling had come through the seasons. The time underground, for all of its darkness, had given me room to become. A year had become another, and another, and since singing was what I could do, I sang like I could sing the springtime back. I’d offer breath as well as tears, but time did the trick on its own. At the end of October, I sang with my friends. We had kept the music playing when we couldn’t be together. They had heard the entwife’s song from far away, and it made me glad.

A journey was beginning.

The Pegasus Award for best performer that year went to Jen Midkiff, she of the harpstring waterfalls and the river-mother’s voice. That was how I knew her then, for she dwells by different, distant trees. But in my mind, when the entwife sang, I heard a harp beside her.

One October before the last, my whole world had burst into life. I can’t explain it. Only that I have lived to live the Firebird’s finale. The music swells with magic I could never have devised. The bonds we have made in its making are not like anything I’ve known of.

Jen is my album twin: our trees grew up together, but I tracked in the spring and she tracked in the summer. While she was there, she took the time to sing and play for my songs too. The first time we actually performed “The Entwife” together, it was for the album release at OVFF.

I’m always in awe of Jen Midkiff. It took us a while to meet each other for true, but as soon as we had the chance, the light took to the branches all at once.

The Entwife’s time signature is “entish.” When I sing it live, sometimes, my self-consciousness will fight the flow of the song that I know to be right. It whispers that people will get impatient, and I’m throwing the other musicians off, and…

“I can feel it,” the harper tells me, and the words are a smooth calm river. And the harp is the gold in the crown of the trees. And wherever I go, it goes also.

Just before October this year, I learned that the circles of coast redwood trees that grow up together after a fire are called fairy rings. They emerge from the same root system to rebuild their home as one.

See how we grow.

Every good thing in my life has been touched with someone else’s goodness.

This October, once again, I went to be healed in the arms of light that always fill the grove. No matter what comes next, that light remains.

My favorite word is “bewilderment.” It comes from the wilds. It means confusion, but it also means awe. The dizzy wonder of the fairy ring. The silent woodland guardian you may glimpse in early light. The sun itself, warm on the seedling emerging from shadow.

The trees assembling in the grove, and the groves that become the forest, and the forests that foster the mountain, and the mountains that make the world.

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Please remember Swannanoa, and Asheville, and every person in every part of the southeastern United States fighting for survival and the start of a path to recovery in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. Please do whatever you can to help.

Thank you.

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