She was like the forest. She changed with the seasons.
In the spring her skin was soft and pink, like the new flowers on the mountainside. Her eyes were as pale green as the young sprouts on the forest floor. Her hair was yellow like the sun. Her voice was sweet and melodic.
In the summer her voice was strong and joyous. Her skin was tanned with warmth. Her eyes were hazy blue. Her hair was like dry grass.
In the autumn her hair was red. Her voice was crisp and clear. Her skin was dry and pale. Her eyes were clear blue.
In the winter her eyes were dark as the sunless sky. Her skin was gray and cold. Her voice was icy and tired. Her hair was long and white.
Each midwinter she wrapped herself in her hair and slept. In the spring she awoke and began her life of seasons all over.
As did the forest.
She had lived for centuries. Perhaps longer. She didn’t know, for she didn’t keep up with such things. Much like the forest.
She wandered the hills and streams, moving with the wind, the sun, and the animals. For centuries, or longer.
One day in the spring, when her hair was golden and her skin was pink, she was among the mountain cascades, and she found a small house built atop a ravine over a waterfall. She had not seen this house before. How long had it been there? She didn’t know because she didn’t keep up with time. When she was here last, the house had not been.
She walked in the small garden around the house. The young flowers nodded to her. She touched the vines stretching up the stone and mud walls. She peered curiously at her reflection in a paned glass window. She saw, for the first time, how beautiful she was, with her sunshine hair and petal pink skin. She gazed at her own pale green spring eyes. She became aware of herself.
Suddenly a young man’s face peered back at her from within the house, she started and fled and hid among the trees where she could still see the house. For the first time in her unaged life, she felt fear, but also titillation. The man came out of the house. She saw he was beautiful. He called out, looked for her, called out again. She didn’t understand his words, but she understood his nature. So she slipped back through the trees to the house, to the man.
She stood before him and gazed in wonder at his black hair, his dark sparkling eyes, his muscled shoulders and chest in his shirt- a shirt! She became aware that she was naked. Reflexively she raised her arm to cover her rose bud breast. The man blushed and looked to the ground, and back to her face again. Then he undressed himself, so they could be bare, open, unclad, and exposed together.
They touched. They tingled. They stroked and embraced and tangled themselves up in each other. They lay in the garden. The flower petals opened. A tree grew through a crevice in the rock. The stream rushed through the ravine in a springtime frolic.
They didn’t talk, for their language was useless to the other. Yet they understood each other. They laughed, sang, and loved. That was their speech. It was all they needed.
In the forest, two different types of trees can grow alongside each other, their roots and limbs twisting together. But the trees are too dissimilar and can never truly join. Though they appear to be one, they cannot be. A single root of one tree may part two roots of another, but they remain two trees. Such as it was with her and the man. Never one, but always together, intertwined in ecstasy.
As was her nature, she changed with the summer. The man loved her and her summeriness. And she loved him.
In the autumn, he loved her fiery hair and pale skin. He gazed into her clear blue eyes and loved her.
As winter approached, and she became icy and tired, he didn’t understand her white hair. She couldn’t explain what was happening, any more than a birch can explain why it loses its leaves. It didn’t matter, the man loved her.
In midwinter, she went away to the trees above the ravine and found a place to sleep in a cradle of oak roots. The snow fluttered and blew around her. As she always did, she fell into a deep winter sleep.
The man didn’t understand her departure, and he longed for her, and became worried. So he went out into a snow squall to look for her. He found her under some snow in the oak’s roots, cold and lifeless. The man thought she had died in the cold.
He wept, and held her, and stayed with her while the snow piled over him. In the cold winter storm, he closed his eyes to sleep.
Then the man died.
In the spring, when the snow melted and the earth was warmer, she woke up as she always did. She found herself wrapped in the man’s cold arms. Life and death come to the forest just as the seasons. She was not new to seeing death. The coolness of the burrow had kept him handsome and intact, though clearly no life was in him.
For the first time she felt the pain of sorrow. She mourned and lamented, until the birds and squirrels came to her side to see what caused such anguish in the forest. Her tears soaked the ground and covered the oak’s roots.
After some time in sadness, she rose from that place to walk away. She turned to look once more at the man. The roots were growing around him, embracing him, wrapping him tightly in a cocoon. With one last tear on her pink cheek, she left that place.
For many years, she lived as the seasons live, but it was different now. She hurt. She never forgot the love, the laughter, the joy, the sorrow. She never forgot the man.
One summer, she found herself in front of the house. It was old and the forest had started to reclaim it. She went to the place where she’d left the man under the oak. The tree had grown, and the cocoon among the roots was grown in. No trace of the man was there. In some way that made her sad.
Her thoughts were interrupted by a caress on her tanned shoulder by soft oak leaves, which grew from the end of a bent tree branch that looked like a man’s limb. She turned her eyes upward to see oaken arms growing from shoulders, which in turn branched off from a human-like torso that formed from the trunk of the mighty tree. The branches embraced her gently and lifted her high, where she saw in the bark and wood, the sweet smile she had missed and longed for, the undeniable, perfect, beautiful visage of the man.