The Fern Tender Read Online Free PDF

calculations we learned and then meditated as if I were Josie like we practiced. In my mindfulness, I focused on the three places that I know Josie would seek out when frightened. Immediately I eliminated outside as an obviously bad place to search, I then sensed she would be under the kitchen sink, under the couch, or inside my mother’s closet in her dirty clothes pile.”
          "And where was she?” asked Lillian again gritting her teeth slightly at the mention David’s third wife’s dirty clothes pile.
          “She was covered up like a cocoon inside one of Mother’s skirts,” Edie answered.
          “Great. Thank you for that thought, I mean answer Edie," Lillian quipped. “But on what try did you confirm your magic?" asked Lillian.
          Edie proudly exclaimed, "On the first try!”
         “Very good Edie,” concluded Lillian.
         Drawing the lesson to a close, Lillian remarked, "OK, girls that’s it for today. Remember it’s not magic if you try more than once, it has to be one time. Next week we’ll talk more about improving your chances at first tries.”
         Lillian took Alena by the hand, and they walked through the village circle waving and smiling at the rest of the villagers. At this point in the day on this day, most of the mothers were also striking the same hand-holding-stiff-upper-lip-pose, as they walked their children to grandparent’s homes to spend the night. All were in expectation of visits from their husbands. It was a bitter sweet ritual for the women in the Colony.
          The moon this month was a dark orange color that hovered just above the horizon. There were some months of quarter moons that the village never even saw. The enormous peaks to the North were known to hide the full glory of the moon. Tonight they were graced with one that rose above the jungle basin to the South. After stopping and taking in the moon’s beauty mother and daughter entered the house of Lillian’s childhood.
         Lillian visited politely with her own Mother and in a distracted cursory way chopped a few onions for her mother’s stew. Standing under the low ceiling and admiring the strength of the beams that for over 900 years presided over her childhood’s kitchen, she thought of her own father and how she missed his smile. She wondered whether her half brother and sisters from his other wives ever missed him too even though they hadn’t been raised in the same house with him. He was typical of the rest of the men in the village, not able to grasp the concepts of intelligence and magic the women knew but still a good presence and companion in their home. He died from a jaguar wound while checking his fish traps below the lake, long ago when Lillian was still taking her own Jaguar circle lessons.
         His death only increased her desire to learn as much about the world and all of its natural probabilities. If her father had known how to use the laws of math and nature even in an elementary way as Lillian had been able to do from childhood, he might still be alive. Understanding the frequency of Jaguars at the dam below the lake during the trout spawn may have provoked him to make a different decision rather than run the entirety of his trap line on that day. He might still be shuffling around the hearth in her Mother's kitchen tonight.
         Lillian kissed her daughter and her mother and strolled back to her own home, desperately trying to empty her mind of the loss of her father, the intelligence of Edie, and her husband's inevitable visits later to his other wives. It was so much harder here than outside of the Colony to prepare her body for a man. David was everything she desired physically with broad shoulders and thick biceps He was a towering beautiful man. And of course he was well-endowed to the point of pain sometimes if she wasn’t positioned right.
        These feelings of contrast were her real life. Here, unlike at the Capitol, her