Wishingwell

This is a story about Cynthia Brinich-Langlois, a little red head from Alaska.

When she was a child, Cynthia liked to play. Her parents thought that it was best to let her figure things out for herself, and generally, they let her do what she wanted. For example, she was always allowed to pick out her own clothes, and from an early age, she expressed a unique sense of style.

During her formative years, Cynthia learned important skills for a young lady in Alaska, such as cutting fish (although she was a vegan, she learned how to use an ulu to cut fish steaks for cooking and fish strips for drying and smoking). She also joined her family in boating, skiing, swimming (very cold), berry picking, and other arctic activities.

She liked to imagine things, and in school she spent many a study hall contemplating fantastical places far away, but she also saw a bit of magic in her surroundings. Cynthia always had a certain fondness for things that grow, for animals, for rocks, and for rivers.  She went on tadpole gathering expeditions, canoed through mosquito infested sloughs, and picked tundra cotton in the rather exquisite northern sunsets.

Then Cynthia left Alaska. She went to school in Ohio, a place with trees, hills, and cornfields. Very sleek and healthy rats lived with her in her apartment. They liked to nibble on her soap and play in her bowls of sparkly glass beads. Then they would scamper back to their home behind the refrigerator. Cynthia missed Alaska, but the rats reminded her of the various hamsters (Tinkertoy, Rascal, Bubbles) who had escaped and made little nests in the closet under the stairs back home.

After a rather miserable experience in freshman english, Cynthia focused her studies on biology and studio art. She watched diatoms swim under a microscope and drew detailed clusters of them in her prints. She talked about divergent evolution, about the origin of terrestrial life, about how these creatures carried the water of the oceans with them onto land inside their own bodies.

Cynthia returned to Alaska. She worked as a gardener, planting, watering, transplanting, cultivating, measuring, counting, collecting data about what sorts of things can grow in silty soil next to a river that floods the tundra every spring. Few plants grew on the tundra to begin with: tundra tea, tundra cotton, willows, lichens, mosses, fireweed, low bush cranberries, blue berries, black berries, and salmon berries.  There was little or no soil, just living plants on top of dead plants on top of compressed dead plant matter that a few inches further down became permafrost. Houses were built on stilts sunk into sand pads dumped over the tundra. It is impossible to build a foundation in the permafrost, so the stilts provided a solution to both the problem of foundations and the problem of flooding. The problem of growing tomatoes remained unsolved.

The tundra was a watery world, with small patches of marshy ground surrounded by rivers, sloughs, and tundra ponds. It seemed to extend forever, a flat expanse of aromatic shrubs and shimmering water. The water reflected the sky like a mirror, so that when seen from above, it created the illusion of a second sky on the other side of the land, an opposite world with the water as windows. Cynthia thought about water -- too much, too little -- the fine balance required to maintain an equilibrium.

She went back to school in New Mexico. The desert was familiar, like tundra without the water. An emptiness punctuated by scrubby bushes and gorgeous desert sunsets. And when the rain came, it fell all at once and then disappeared, leaving behind a trail of flowers and green that quickly faded away. When things died in the desert, they didn't rot. They dried out and crumbled into dust. Cynthia's prints showed landscapes both wet and dry. She thought about when all the water went away, how things dried out and drifted away in the wind, like a flock of sailboats, sails unfurled in full migration. Their lakes and rivers gone, they flew away to waterier places.

But the wind can't carry away everything. The especially large and heavy rocks, the bare mountains and boulder fields remained, waiting for the rains to return, for water flooding the land. And when the rain came, pouring out of impressibly threatening thunderheads, the water ran over the dry land, rushing downhill, through the arroyos, collecting in depressions, and only then very slowly seeping into the ground. Then tiny plants grew, covering everything with a budding green carpet. They sucked up water from the newly wet land, swelling up, flowering, and then going back to sleep.

Sometimes the rains rained too much. The trees drank up all the water their roots could swallow, but they still choked and died standing up to their knees in a new and endless lake. Even the birds flew away to drier places, leaving behind empty houses hanging from the branches.

Cynthia bought two finches, Amelia and Valentina. They liked to sing together in the morning. She took them on walks around the neighborhood so they could see the sunlight and breathe the fresh air through the bars of their cage. Cynthia liked to photograph the birds going about their daily activities: fluttering around the cage, perching then sliding down the bars, nuzzling up to each other, and scattering seeds in a fine shower all over the carpet. They laid eggs on the bottom of the cage, so she built them all sorts of houses, shaped like people houses, but built out of things that birds might use to build a nest. One house was made of grass, one of leaves, one of long narrow seed pods.

The houses dangled inside the cage, and the cage dangled from the ceiling. Cynthia felt sorry for the birds, always inside their cage, never quite able to fly before landing again on the pretty white curlicue bars. She thought about what the birds dreamed about, places where there were other birds, mountains, trees, and open expanses of sky. It was impossible to know every place to which the birds wished they could fly away.

They never did fly away, though. Both birds died on the same day inside their cage, curled up together. By this time, Cynthia was camping in the desert, making small houses for herself out of things that birds make nests out of, and also out of things that people make houses out of. The houses were small, just big enough for one person to sit or squat inside. She knocked them down before leaving, speeding up what would have been their inevitable slumping and tumbling and toppling over onto the ground in her absence.

She thought about how spectacular each of the structures was going to be, like a sandcastle, towering above the sand dunes, glistening in the sun. She wanted something monumental, rising above everything, stretching into the distance. But Cynthia was not a big person, and she didn't have enough time to build something big out of small parts.

Even so, the sandcastle was an utter disappointment. Her own incompetence and general lack of house-building knowledge frustrated her, as did the rather uncooperative nature of the available materials. The sandcastle couldn't hold itself up against the winds and the shifting sands of the dunes. It slumped and slid back into her footprints. But in her mind, the image of the sandcastle remained, even though it proved impossible  to build.

Cynthia also built a tree house, but due to her rather extreme fear of heights, she built it on the ground instead of in a tree. The tree house was comprised of trees, or, at least, parts of them woven together into a small lean-to. She gathered fallen branches and braided them together to look like the top of a tree.

The dead branches came alive in her imagination, sprouting long green clusters of pine needles. The tree's branches grew down and pushed the house higher and higher through the forest. From the safety of the ground, Cynthia pretended that she was crouching inside a tree house atop the tallest ponderosa pine in the forest, looking out at the treetops and the sky.

With thoughts of houses falling down and rainstorms and sunlight and plants growing back over it all, Cynthia went to Elsewhere.
 The building was old and creaky, with crumbling brick walls and worn out pine floors. The roof had leaked water, and as it trickled down the walls and through the floors and ceilings, it collected. More and more water from thunderstorms, drizzles, and light spring showers dripped through the building. And as the water dripped through the building, it changed, and where it collected, it became something entirely new.
Cynthia found a place where the water had rotted out the floor. The windows were broken, the ceiling had fallen down. She swept up the ceiling and tore up the floor. Sandwiched between the floorboards of the second floor and the ceiling of the first, she uncovered a wishing well.

Maybe all the toys and stories and ghosts and artists always changing and rearranging the space made it a little more alive, or maybe all of the crazy art dreams floating through the hallways and empty rooms finally distilled into one corner on the second floor. Most likely, though, the wishing well was always sort of there, in all the objects and memorabilia scattered throughout the building, and the water simply brought it together. At any rate, something about the building transformed the water from all those rainstorms into something magical. Cynthia built a bridge over the sparkling colored water, but it isn't finished, so you can't see it yet. There are still some things left to do: the kudzu isn't planted and the buttons aren't in the gum ball machine. And everyone knows you can't make wishes without buttons.

Cynthia continued to work in the room, fixing it up and making it ready for that exciting day when it would be finished. Then, all sorts of people with impossible dreams and desires will come to toss in their buttons and wish.