Once I was a Goddess and made my home in the roots of the snowball bush: shoots for walls, violets for my carpet, apricot blossoms for my chandelier, and wallpapered it all with tall grasses and the stems of the forsythia. My fingers sunk into the green and the soft of the earth and I slept and swung and sang; invisible dryads for dolls. I kicked my heels toward the leaves. I perched in the apple tree. I counted the flowers and what they meant: Magnolia for an uplifted heart; Lilacs for womanly grace; Pear for softness and Apple for refuge; Lavender meant sunlight and Grape Hyacinths were for imagination; Dollar Plants for stories; Sage and Dill for calm and humor. Johnny Jump Ups meant indomitable good cheer. And Buttercups were the souls of fairies.
I hung upside down from the clothesline poles, I jumped from stone to stone, and stripped the raspberry brambles of their fragile fruit. I made the sky my cathedral and the water in the pond my marble floor. I wove the branches of the pine to make my pavilion; the arms of the sycamores my thicket; and I was a doe, a fox, a hare, a red wing blackbird.
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