Movement Ten — A Plant and a Druid

Let me describe her to you properly, I said, as best as I'm able, because I don't think you can understand any of this without seeing her the way I first learned to see her.

Sorrel wore her hair long and unbound, a deep, living green that shifted, depending on the light, toward something closer to moss in shadow and something closer to new spring growth wherever the meadow's gold managed to reach it — the specific color, I've always thought, of something that has spent its whole existence being nourished rather than merely grown. Her eyes were a pale, startling amber, ringed faintly darker at the edges, the particular color of sunlight caught and held inside old amber sap, warm even when the rest of her face had settled into something sterner. Her skin carried a faint dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose and the tops of her cheeks, scattered the way seeds scatter when a wind decides, on its own schedule, to carry them somewhere new. There was a small, pale scar along one eyebrow, from some old life I've still never gotten the whole story of, and a way of tilting her head, faintly, whenever she was listening closely to something, that always reminded me, absurdly, of a plant turning slowly toward whatever light happened to be strongest in the room.

She was tall — taller than most of the women I've come to know in this long existence, with a build that spoke less of delicacy and more of endurance, the specific strength of something that has weathered a great many seasons and intends to weather a great many more. Her shoulders carried a certain squared, settled confidence, the posture of a woman who has stopped apologizing, in any form, for taking up the space she takes up. Her hands, when I first came to know them properly, were never quite still — always finding some small living thing to touch, a blade of grass, a fallen petal, the rough bark of whatever tree happened to be nearest, the particular restless tenderness of someone who has never once, in her entire existence, been able to walk past something growing without wanting to know it a little better. I've watched her, more times than I could count, kneel without warning in the middle of a conversation simply to right some small bent stem no one else in the room had even noticed was leaning wrong.

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She dressed, always, in simple draped layers the color of turned earth and new leaf, unadorned in the specific way that had nothing to do with poverty and everything to do with preference — she had never once, in all the time I've known her, wanted to be dressed by anyone else's idea of what beauty was supposed to look like. There was an irony in that, I think, given everything I've just told you about how we met. A woman who had once starved herself nearly hollow chasing someone else's verdict on her own face, choosing, eventually, to dress herself in nothing but what the earth itself would have chosen for her.

I still haven't come to a full conclusion, I admitted to them both, about that particular obsession of hers, if obsession is even the right word for something that arrived in her already fully formed, carried whole out of whatever life she'd lived before this one. I don't think I ever will reach a conclusion, not entirely. I've simply learned, over the long years since, to love the whole shape of her exactly as she is — the woman who once needed a stranger's daily verdict to feel real, and the woman she grew into afterward, who needs no one's verdict at all, holding both of them at once, the way you hold two seasons in the memory of a single tree.

I fell quiet for a moment, then, letting the telling settle the way you let a stone settle after you've dropped it into still water, watching the last of the ripples finish crossing whatever surface they'd disturbed. The meadow had gone a shade deeper gold while I'd been talking, the particular slow deepening that happens as that permanent held-breath hour leans, almost imperceptibly, toward its own quiet end without ever quite arriving there. Somewhere near the hearth, I heard the small clink of that same abandoned cup someone had left earlier, disturbed by nothing more than a passing current of air. Vesper's weight against my side had shifted, at some point during the telling, into something looser than it had been at the start — not relaxed exactly, not yet, but no longer holding itself quite as far from me as it had when the afternoon began.