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6 chapter three Pennies, nicKels, and dimes I’m going to tell you something, so listen. Long ago I learned to be happy. I was happy for all of my days. I had the birds, who told me the weather, and I had my rooms.When I first moved to the forest, I had denounced everything else. So I often sat at the window listening to the birds and the wind and the snow falling down from the sky. That is all I desired. Sometimes, a human person would pass by my hut and stare curiously at me through the fogged windows. I would wave him away—gently, of course. I waved “Go away” with no malice, no nerves. A sort of woodland GoAway trill, if you can imagine. I had long ago left my parents’house and all childhood trinkets behind—a giant trombone, glittering paints, all of my toe shoes and tutus. I was too blissed out to bring them along. I was that airy-fairy. I arranged to be awake and asleep according to nature —that beautiful beast, that loveliest monster—each given day. I rose with the sun, and when the sun was finished for evening, my own day was finished too. There was no need for news from the city. News is 7 not usually good, so why seek it? During my lifetime the news has always been bad. May it reasonably request to be called the “news?” I think not. (True news is worth listening for, and more radiant or awful. Anyone can hear it, if she only tries.) Instead, I spent my days walking the forest dressed appropriately for the weather, whatever it was. When it was summer, I wore little, and when it was winter, I bundled up. It is not that I cared for myself, nor whether I lived or died. I loved life—yes—but not my own personal possession of it in my humble container. Besides,any reasonable person who has the means will dress for the weather. It would only be spiteful to do anything else. In spring I looked for nests, particularly those of the robins. Robins sometimes nest twice in a season. Isn’t that a wonderful fact? Certain facts provide such simple pleasure. I allowed myself the happiness of observing the robins’ double-nesting season. Oh the robins—their little red bellies, those dignified coats. I kept myself occupied thus. I had no need for money. I had all the wood that one would require for fire, and when the robins’ nests sometimes would fail, and fall to the ground, and the robins depart for elsewhere, I had fine little blue eggs for supper. If they’d fallen down freshly, there was no need even to cook them—thus no need to waste any wood on a fire, if I wasn’t cold. (Mind you,if the robins did linger,I would do what I could to place the nest back in a tree. Yet I found that more often the failed nests were abandoned, after a few long moments of robin-grieving. And how I grieved 8 with them.) Dearest robins, my precious friends! Did you ever love something so much you just wanted to eat it? I was so poor that I slept on a bed made of hay. I had gathered the hay from the barn. When I first was sent to the forest, I came upon the cottage as in a dream, and I went out to the barn and saw what there was to see: a ladder , a bucket, an old dying mare. I went to the well and filled up the bucket,but the mare did not want the water. What could I do? I gave her my blessing and left her there in a halo of flowers. Gathering hay in my arms, I went into the cottage and made a small mattress. I had nothing to call my own except for the clothes I wore on my back and a few small objects (matchbook, storybook, lantern) and now the thatched cottage and the barn and apparently an old dying mare and some hay and some water. Lovingly, I cared for the mare every day. There was little for us to do in the woods but keep company there. Sometimes I worked on the clearing, making space for foxgloves and fiddlehead ferns. It is strange, but the fields did not speak to me nor did the flowers! Not even...

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