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Picture this: it was cold, and I stood among trees. Many, many trees. I looked up, and there they were. A feather and a leaf, floating through the air, not quite up or down but sideways, lifted along by some gusts of coldish wind. Could they be friends, and traveling together? I ruminated on this while formulating interview questions to ask them about their roots and their journeys, specifically this one.

Before I continue, true confession: I know the language of forks and plates and furniture and random other things considered to be not-alive. These so-called inanimates communicate clearly, and I happen to hear them and usually endeavor to fulfill their simple requests, like placement in drawers and cupboards and being allowed a good slant of afternoon sun. It’s the least I can do, given all they do for us. There are many stories there, but they must wait for another time. Stories are good at that, have you noticed?

Anyway….

I was thinking, that day among the trees, that the language of feathers and flying leaves might be beyond my reach. Oh, I feel pretty sure that if I’d studied their languages when I was young, I’d be able to bridge any communication gap now. Like so many things, though, I put away my forest fancies and my birdy songs when I was oh, so young. The bigs told me other things were more. More important, more acceptable, more real. And so, like littles everywhere, I abandoned my whimsy and denied my fairy genes.

There I go again, with the digression thing. It happens all the time; words arise that just must be written and as I honor them I lose sight of—well, in this case, I lost sight of the feather and the leaf. They disappeared around a corner, between a few big trees. Which got me to wondering if I could ask the trees if they’d seen them. Which got me to wondering if I could learn the language of trees. Which brings me here, to this writing, and gets me wondering if the Grammar Police will ticket me for starting multiple sentences with Which.

So much of life is attitude, and so much of attitude is belief, and so, so much of belief is faith. And so I, mid-life and of the flesh, stood rooted in my sturdy shoes that day in the damp woods, feeling just a tickle of breeze tingling my scapula in just those places my wings tried to sprout so long ago. There are scars, I’m pretty sure, on the spots where I ground my little back against the walls of my room, rubbing out the tips of feathers that came once, thrice, six times before they gave up. My thoracic spine is a graveyard, I realized then, and a longing arose to unearth those feathery thwarted things, to sing them back to life and learn finally and just in time how to fly. And (sorry Grammar Police), I chose right then and there to follow this desire as it leads me down a path or up a hill. I decided to let myself rise and feel a gust of coldish wind carry me and my new old wings along to the place where feathers and leaves might be friends, where we would and will play in the wind and commune a bit, and talk of many, many things.

–Melinda Coppola

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