Wren and the Whispering Wood

Wren was the only person in three valleys who could speak to the Whispering Wood, and everyone envied her for it, and nobody should have.

The wood listened perfectly. That was the trouble. It heard every single word and it took each one exactly as it came, the way a very literal and very earnest giant might.

A catalogue of small disasters

When Wren, struggling with a fallen gate, said give me a hand, the wood grew her a hand: five knuckled branches on a trunk, opening and closing hopefully. It was very proud of it. It kept it for years.

When she said the rain was coming down in buckets, the wood, alarmed, spent a difficult night trying to work out where to put the buckets.

And when she stood at the edge of the trees at dusk, tired and cold and a long way from her own door, and said — not really to anyone — I just want to go home, the wood took her at her word and opened a path. It was the shortest path. It went straight through the bog.

I hear you, said the wood, I hear you plain,each word as round and whole as a stone.But which of all the things a word can meandid you mean, when you spoke to me alone?

What Wren changed

Wren sat on a root with wet boots and thought about it for a long time. And what she worked out was this: she had been giving the wood her words and keeping everything else to herself.

So she began to talk differently. Not more loudly — more around things.

“I am tired,” she told it, “and it is nearly dark, and my mother will be at the window by now, and I would rather arrive late and dry than early and drowned. When I say home, that is what is underneath it.”

The wood was quiet for a moment, the way a listener is quiet when something has genuinely landed. Then, slowly, it opened a longer path along the ridge, dry the whole way, with the last of the light on it.

It never did take down the hand. Wren rather liked it. She hangs her lantern on it, on the evenings she walks late.