Sister

 My sister Willow talks with the birds. They know her, and come to visit when she sits alone with her weaving. If I am very still when I am with her sometimes they come then, too.

Still, I don't understand them. They speak so quickly, and from all directions at once; two chirps, a turn of the head, legs angled just so, tails feathers lifted so high but no higher. She smiles and nods, fingers never faltering on the reeds. She never looks right at them, either. I think that helps. She shares her food with them, sunflower seeds, crumbs of flatbread or bits of dried meat. Not the way a rich man throws food to a beggar, but the way companions share bread in a pause on a long journey.

Once I understood, on a hot bee-droning day when she and I sat in a peaceful stillness that stretched and stretched until I could not remember what had come before or imagine what could come afterward. A starling came to sit with us, so naturally, like one of the little children who came to play or hear stories, that the conversation came and went and he flew away before I even noticed.

I could not tell you what he said to us, because I cannot use their language to tell you, but I remember something about how the snails had grown fat on the thick summer sun, and how the trees were tickling the aquifers with their taproots, and how the wind up under the clouds was swift and smooth; a story about summer. But when he said "summer" it meant summer and spring and winter and fall all blending together in a long, disappearing curve stretching back and back, to a time when birds were kings and queens and emperors on the earth, and in the seas as well. And my sister laughed because she knew the story and because it was a fine bee-humming day in a long curve of fine bee humming days and the weaving bent easily under her fingers.

She does not speak with people, as a rule, my sister. We are like children sitting by a stream, and my sister is like a fish in clear water, in a world where words lose their power, their purpose, and are not of much use. It is not the world of the Dream People, or of the Spirit People, although they know her, but a place with more light and more air, where many different kinds of visitors are free to come and go.

I know that about my sister because a Treebeard told me that the Spirit People mention her by name; how she joined them on the night of the long sun, or dances with them up where the breath of god blows between the stars.

Unlike the Treebeards, my sister does not bring us back news or warnings or omens. Still, her jewelry is prized among all the coastal peoples for its beauty and for good luck. It is said that the Spirit People recognize her work and welcome those who carry it with them in their dreams, or in death.

My father had named her Black Willow, after the tree, but mother never called her anything but Willow. There was nothing black about her, except her hair and her eyes. Grandma Jay sometimes called her "jiaotu", after her brief, elliptical swirls of words. And then she would laugh, watching Willow out of the corner of her eye with admiration.

Parents always say that they love their children equally. Pop must have loved me more than life itself, then, because I know that he loved Willow at least that much. Strangely, she was the only one who didn't seem to miss him when he died. Most people thought it was because she never seemed entirely connected to this world, but I think it is because he never went anyplace where she could not find him.