River Ma

A fertility story, a water dance, a fairy tale

This fire-and-water bioregional fairytale emerged in a writing + dance workshop called Mother Animal with author

Sylvia V. Linsteadt

and dancer Nao Sims.

If you’d prefer to listen to this story, tune in to Episode 11 of Kinward Podcast [here]. Or subscribe to Kinward on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

There once was a traveling woman, a woman who carried her things on her back or in the back of a sputtering truck, who knew she didn’t need a child and whose life was not right for a child and who had not got a lover to be a father to a child and yet who longed for a child. 

One day this woman had come to rest for a while in a mountain meadow. Having disembarked from her overheated Ford Ranger, the latest in a string of old rigs, she said hello to the big ponderosas of the meadow and hello to the bright false hellbore and hello to the stain of sedges that marked a spring. Hello, she said, hello, and she took off her shoes. 

Barefoot and alone she traveled in the golden glow of evening light down into the springtime springfed meadow. It was wet. Her bare feet squished in the warm mud and cold water welled up between her toes. Hello, she said to a herd of seven horses who were grazing along the edges of the meadow. There were two foals among them who watched her curiously. Her heart sprang toward them. Why, these horses have babies, she thought, why not me? 

As she traveled down the draw the wetness coalesced into a little stream. She followed it. Golden pollen swirled in the pools, the golden pollen of pines. She dipped her foot in the water and pollen painted her toes. Why, the trees are calling into the wind and water that they are ready to make their children, she said to herself. Make me ready, too. And she felt the wind moving her hair. 

She came to a confluence place where her little stream met the little stream that began in the next draw. Here she paused and wiggled her toes in the mud. Trickles murmured in her ears. She watched orb weaver spiders setting their evening traps for the mosquitos and moths. A low ray of light met the edge of the stream and there, nestled in the deep hoofprint of a horse, swirled in a wealth of golden pollen, she saw a clutch of frogs’ eggs. 

She squatted to look at them more closely. Tiny translucent tadpoles wiggled inside the clear eggs. They looked so cozy and friendly there together, this jelly swirl of siblings. Hello, the woman said, how sweet you are. Why, I would be glad even to be your mother. 

The old witch who lived in the forest—whose horses were the horses, and who had been watching the traveling woman from under the shell of her usual evening shape, the shape of a painted turtle—heard this wish. She thought to herself, in her slow turtle mood, Yes, this is a reverent one, who has painted herself with longing. She longs for a child, but she has never felt herself Mothered. She could learn this.

And so she turned the the traveling woman into a tree, a cottonwood tree.