Blackbirds
“ Even as a little girl picking cranberries out in the bog, she could see things. Her visions did not happen unbidden, but by her studying the world around her. She would touch things, things of nature, things of the bog, and those things would show her what was coming.
If she found the bones of a snake, she could handle them, let them roll around in her small fingers and watch how the bog water ran off them, and therein she might see what would happen to her father later that day when he... went to market, or how her sister might suffer a splinter under the nail of her toe.
She could smash the berries in her palms and read the red guts. They might tell her what weather was coming. By running her hands up the bark of a tree, she might learn what birds nested there, and by breaking the neck of a rabbit kit, she might learn where the rest of the rabbits had their warren.
Later, when I was a child and we had come to this country, my oma would sit out on the front stoop of our house, sharpening her knives across the sidewalk and steps.MoreLess
If she found the bones of a snake, she could handle them, let them roll around in her small fingers and watch how the bog water ran off them, and therein she might see what would happen to her father later that day when he... went to market, or how her sister might suffer a splinter under the nail of her toe.
She could smash the berries in her palms and read the red guts. They might tell her what weather was coming. By running her hands up the bark of a tree, she might learn what birds nested there, and by breaking the neck of a rabbit kit, she might learn where the rest of the rabbits had their warren.
Later, when I was a child and we had come to this country, my oma would sit out on the front stoop of our house, sharpening her knives across the sidewalk and steps.MoreLess
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