Song to the Hemlock
Freya grew up in a small town at the edge of the prairie, with long, empty miles rolling westward and no people out there to speak of – – well, no settlers, anyway. Her town had grown up here, on the trail of the buffalo hunters who had slaughtered their prey right out of existence and then they, and their children, and their children, had to find different ways to make a life. Slowly but surely, the edges of civilization became smudged and rubbed away until there were no more edges and the small town on the prairie evolved into a big city, complete with skyscrapers and bureaucrats, traffic jams and prostitutes.
Freya died before all that happened, though. Her life ended before the railroad connected the east coast to the west; before all the indigenous people who’d been there first were relegated to tiny bits of land with nothing to support their traditions, their language or their culture; before Great Wars turned whole countries into munitions factories.
While she was alive, Freya made the most of her tiny window into the world, filling it with her boundless imagination and her innate desire to leave a mark, her own mark, a mark that no one else would think of. Maybe even a mark that no one would recognize for a very, very long time. Or maybe … ever.
In between doing her chores, going to school, and reciting the daily round of prayers as dictated by her parents and grandparents, Freya sang. At home or anyplace where other people could hear her, she sang so quietly as to attract no notice at all. But in those rare times when she could get beyond hearing of her family, Freya didn’t hold back. Sometimes she had to go no further than the barn, where the bleating of the sheep and the stomping of horses’ feet easily drowned out her descant, at least until her singing got so much of the animals’ attention that all other noise would cease, at which point, ironically, Freya felt she had to stop singing.
During her teen years Freya took particular interest in a seedling she found growing on the far side of the easternmost corn field that was jointly owned and worked by her father and his two brothers. At that time in our country’s history Eastern hemlocks were still plentiful throughout the Appalachians, Pennsylvania and north into maritime Canada. This far west, though, it was unusual to see them, and this was long before their easterly populations were decimated by the invasive Hemlock woolly adelgid which has now brought the Eastern hemlock to the verge of extinction.
Freya couldn’t explain her attraction to the seedling on the far side of the corn field. She discovered it totally by accident, one day when she’d gone in the wake of the tilling machine to help smooth out the rows, and she sat down at the end of a row to catch her breath and look – just for a minute or two – for shapes in the clouds overhead. But the sky was empty of shaping clouds so Freya looked down into the grass instead, and there found the tiny sprig of a newly-erupting conifer, with leaves, such as they were, of a shape and color she’d never seen before. From that day onward, for the rest of her life – the life that ended much too soon, along with that of the only child she birthed – Freya sang to the seedling. She sang to it her hopes and dreams, she sang to it her wondering about life beyond the prairie, she sang to it her thanks for all who had come before her and all who would come after.
Cholla-ley, che-ley, tuyayo
Cholla-ley, che-ley, tuyayo
Wa-hapia – wa-hapia -latta, tuyayo
Freya had, once, when she was still small enough to ride on her father’s shoulders, heard the song of the brown people who lived to the north. Their songs wound their way through her blood and nested in her bones. She sang to the hemlock tree a song to remember the brown people, to honor their lives, and to help their memory stay alive in a way that they, as a people, had not and would not.
Cholla-ley, che-ley, tuyayo
Cholla-ley, che-ley, tuyayo
Wa-hapia – wa-hapia -latta, tuyayo
Cover photo by Daiga Elleby on Unsplash
