The “wivah”

This week my two youngest grandsons, Brennan,4, and Jesse, 2, were visiting me.  They are very active little boys with immense curiousity and great imaginations.  The “big adventure” in coming to Grammy’s house is to go and see the river.  I live in town, on the Fish Hook River.  It runs through the back of my yard in a very deep ravine that is very steep.  The boys know they cannot go back there by themselves and always need to hold hands when standing by the edge.  So, on this day they were visiting, Brennan suddenly said, “Grammy, can we go see the river?”  He says “the river” in a sort of whisper as though it is magical.  Jesse, who imitates his bigger brother,  starts clapping his hands and also whispers, “the wivah, the wivah!” (he can’t say his r’s).  So I bundle them up and we walk back to the “the wivah”.  As we get toward the edge of the ravine, the boys slow down and this sense of awe comes over them.  They listen with their whole body, their senses heightened.  With the leaves now gone from the trees they can see the river easily.  They hear the ducks quacking and try to position themselves so they can see the ducks and not scare them away.  They listen and wait in a silence that is filled with excitement.  Suddenly the ducks fly up out of the river and the boys jump back, excited at their flight.

Their attention then changed from the river to the trees along the ridge.  I told Brennan to wrap his arms around the tree to see if he could “feel” the energy of the tree.  He put his head against the tree too, and he got excited and said he could hear it too.  He then asked me, ” Grammy, where are the eyes of the tree?”  I told him to look up through the branches on the trunk of the tree and see if he could see them.  He looked intently but said he couldn’t see them.  I told him he could talk to the tree, and ask the tree where its eyes are.  He closed his eyes, got very quiet, and then suddenly this deep booming voice came out of him stating, “My eyes are in the very top of the tree so that I can see everything.”  Brennan seemed as surprised as me!

We then looked at the birdhouse in the tree and imagined what birdies might live there.  I have wind chimes hanging in the trees and the boys loved the sounds of the chimes, excited that the wind could make them sing.  We went up to the big pine in the middle of my backyard and I told the boys to hold my hands and we encircled the tree, just making it around the trunk of the tree, our bodies up against the tree.  Again, that magical silence occurred.  The boys listened and felt the energy of the tree.  And then we laughed and did “ring around the rosie” around the tree.

When the boys had to leave they said good-bye to the “wivah” and to the trees.  They brought a bit of magic back into my backyard and the “wivah”.  The trees and river and me were smiling.

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