Since I was small, since we lived here and made ourselves the flower people to keep from getting our heads chopped off, Gramps has warned me not to wander into the trees that push up right against our place-out back, beyond the flowers and paths and bushes, over the low stone wall that rings around our garden. Well, and this time, could be there’s something to it.

He’ll not talk about it, maybe, but he worries, more and more the less he can do. Any sickness going around, any rumor of bandits-I see those eyebrows drawing in tight. There’s no one like my Gramps for fretting. As if I don’t already know he frets more than he’d ever let on. I see him look sideways at me where I’m leaning against the porch rail, as if I won’t notice that way. When they’ve gone, though, I see my Gramps sigh. They leave less worried about the creeping trees. They leave more peaceful than they were when they came. When he talks, it’s as if they forget the state of his legs and see only the calm on his face, hear only the slow, measured way he has with words. Gramps tells them it’s nothing to worry about, that the trees will take themselves back again, just as they always do. I see them shaking their heads, twisting their caps in their hands. When they come to bring our supplies or to buy some flowers, they mutter about it with my Gramps. It terrifies the villagers something fierce. This year, the trees do not go they only come, on and on, and rumors from all over our land say the same. The farmers have always complained of it, but they’ve never talked of it as they are talking now of this advance. It isn’t something to fret about, not in a fearful way. The woods come and they go, like the sun, like the wind, like the seasons.

But just as often, an old fence was uncovered by the woods as they retreated, or a long-lost watering hole suddenly appeared again, where it hadn’t been for near fifty years. In years gone past, this happened now and again: a goatherd would complain of his flock’s favorite hill being eaten by shadows and trunks, or a shed alongside the trees would rust overnight and be crawling with vines in the morning.

And all along beside it, the woods stretch on and on, where no woods were the night before. One evening a well will be standing untouched, a good twenty feet from the shade, and when the farmer’s daughter goes to draw water in the morning, there will be nothing left but a pile of stones and a new tree or three growing out of the rubble. ICLE (International Center for Leadership in Education)Ĭustomer Service & Technical Support PortalĪll summer long the villagers have been talking of the woods.Įven those living many hills away can see it: their crops are disappearing their land is shrinking by the day. Into Algebra 1, Geometry, Algebra 2, 8-12

Science & Engineering Leveled Readers, K-5

A creature of moonlight by rebecca hahn