baba yaga – Indicative Mood

Trash-picking: It’s one of life’s great joys. The pickings are pretty good where I live, too. My neighbors throw away perfectly good stuff, if you ask me, and some of them take the trouble to separate things they think someone else might want and set them gently near the curb in a little box that says FREE on it.

Yesterday we walked past a free box on someone’s front step that had some books in it. I can never resist looking at free books, and I usually take one home (though those Little Free Library things tend to have disappointing selections, don’t they?). This time I helped myself to Fun and Fantasy, an anthology of folk and fairy tales compiled for a children’s series called Through Golden Windows, published by Grolier in the 1950s. I reached for it instinctively because it has one of those pastel midcentury hard covers with the illustrations printed directly on it. Gorgeous. Plus, there’s just something so appealing about an old book of “wisdom,” like a medical manual or a history book or, say, a collection of children’s stories, which tend to be about the lessons life has to teach us. I’m always imagining a book like this, once it’s old and dated, will be rich with irony, and sometimes they are, but I usually come across some things that surprise me, too.

For instance, Fun and Fantasy is more than 60 years old, but I see from her introduction that by 1958, modernity was already getting on editor Bernice E. Leary’s nerves. She writes about “today’s curiously complicated world,” where “material things are assuming increasing importance” and “global and continental distances are shrinking from weeks and days to hours and minutes.” The right books, she instructs, can help ease confusion and overwhelm by providing company and a better understanding of oneself, an escape from reality and also “the courage to face reality.” I agree with her on all counts.

I don’t have children, and I also haven’t been especially drawn to the symbolism of fairytales as an adult—at least not until a few years ago, when my family was going through something very painful and I was able, as if for the first time, to find comfort and magic in them. The last fairytale I read and wrote about on this blog was called Bony-Legs, and it was based on Baba Yaga, a scary witch from Russian folklore. It was almost exactly a year ago that I got it, right after the pandemic had started and we were newly housebound and deeply spooked. I ordered it from a small local bookstore and got it via “curbside pickup,” still a new idea then. I was so distressed and unable to concentrate on much that I mined that little thing, all 40 pages of it, for something that might help or comfort me. And you know what? It didn’t let me down. In fact the story and artwork were so reassuring that I pulled out two of the illustrated pages and taped them to the wall behind my desk, where they still hang. In the drawings, the little girl who is the story’s heroine is smiling as she fixes the witch’s gate and feeds her cat—acts of kindness and ingenuity that later in the story help her escape the witch and get home safely. I sit at my desk and look at the pictures every day.

A whole year later I’m still here, warily eyeing the news and trying to stay well. I wish I could think of something useful to say on this shitty anniversary, some wisdom or lesson I could share with you, but I don’t know. Some days I feel okay and other days I feel dragged out and half ruined; even in my better moments I’m pretty unwise. I do find it interesting, though, that I’ve happened upon another book of fairytales a year later, almost to the day. There must be something in them that I still need.

My new book of fun and fantasy contains excerpts and condensed versions of several stories, and many of them are old ones. Hans Christian Andersen and Rudyard Kipling are in here, and so are versions of The Forty Thieves and Icarus and Daedalus, Cyclops, Aladdin, and Alice in Wonderland. Baron Munchausen, harmlessly pompous, narrates his extravagant travels in the first person: “The lively fancy of your young minds will find no difficulty in following me from tropic climes to lands of ice and snow.” Some of the book’s contemporary stories are pretty wonderful too, colorful and inventive. I find I like being reminded of unicorns and still enjoy spending time with kings and wizards, even waggish ones by James Thurber.

It’s always sort of astounded me to think of adults writing stories for children; I guess it struck me as odd to consider writing for a reader who was unlike you in such a fundamental way. That’s because I used to think childhood was like the old country, a place you couldn’t return to. But I was wrong. Childhood goes on and on. And right now, the kid who is still alive inside me needs some company and understanding, not to mention a little escapism. I think I’ll give her some of that today.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
“Diving Into the Wreck,” Adrienne Rich

I haven’t been able to write for two weeks now. Sometimes I’m afraid to leave my house, even for the things I’m craving, like exercise and fresh air. During this strange time I have also gone through whole cycles of worry: I worried at first that the things I care about, like the new job I was so excited to start next month, would be disrupted. When I realized there was no way they wouldn’t be disrupted, I accepted it, then was hit in the face with a wave of sadness because some things were more than disrupted: They were gone. The job I was about to begin doesn’t exist anymore. I have savings and another job, so I’ll be fine without it. But I felt sad to have to let it go.

I have other worries, too. One of the weirder effects this pandemic has had on me is an anxiety, painful in my body, that’s affixed itself to all the people in my life. For a week straight I woke up every morning thinking about a different person I know, realizing I didn’t know whether they were okay or not, if they felt lonely or scared. So I started checking in—we’ve all been checking in with each other, and that has been beautiful in its way. Feeling dislocated from individual friends and from communities and networks of people generally has truly disturbed me, much more than I would have expected. It feels good to know that we’re all thinking of each other now and refusing to lose contact. It seems like something we could build on.

Another unpleasant feeling inside me has been the fear that people’s small businesses will be crushed by the economic tidal wave over our heads. Locally, those businesses are my neighbors; I care about their owners and don’t want them to lose their work or their dream of owning their own place. I’m afraid of what I stand to lose, too. I feel needy. The time you spend in a coffee shop or bookstore or bar makes it a kind of home, and I need these homes, those places where I feel safe and welcome. I don’t want them to go away.

There’s an independent bookstore near where I live in Philadelphia called the Spiral Bookcase that I really love. It’s such a special place—all small bookstores are, I think, but this one is especially dear to me for a few reasons. First, they sell both new and used books, which has always felt correct to me. Why should the two be separated when most readers need both the old and the new, the popular and the just-plain-weird? Second, a sweet cat lives in this store. If you sit in a chair she’ll jump on your lap, or climb on your knees when you crouch down to look at things. Third, the shop is magic. Its main room has fiction and nonfiction books on a variety of subjects, and off of that is a smaller room of occult books. They’re about witchcraft, theology, philosophy, and metaphysics, and the atmosphere in there is delicious. A small collection of healing gemstones, tarot decks, and candles are tucked in and around the magic books, being magical. I always leave the shop feeling softer, walking lighter, and sparking with ideas.

Last week the store’s owner announced on social media that she was working to get more books and other items listed on its website. I was excited when I made my order. They offered delivery by mail and curbside pickup, and I chose the second one thinking it would be a nice reason to leave the house. J drove me over there this afternoon, just a minute or two in the car on a major road with very little traffic. A bus pulled over in front of us and a few people wearing surgical masks got off at a quiet bus depot that is usually a literal mess of human liveliness, people smoking and laughing and pushing as they wait for their rides.

When we got to the bookstore J parked the car, and he stayed in it while I walked up to the pretty storefront. Following the protocol they’d emailed me, I knocked, then stood six feet back from the doorway on the sidewalk. The sweet-faced young employee who answered the door looked like she’d been having the same tense two weeks as I had, but when I said I was there to pick up “an Adrienne Rich book and a witchy kids’ book” she smiled. She went back inside to get them and I was alone for a moment on the street. Quiet, quiet, so quiet. When she returned she had my books in a bag that was marked with my name, which touched me in a funny way. My name had also been written on the bag of muffins I bought yesterday from the coffee shop around the corner, another business I dearly want to stick around. In pink, in a person’s hand, on brown paper: Katie.

I have these two books at home with me now and I catch myself mining them for meaning, the meaning I’ve been having a harder time holding onto recently. All around my house, at any given time, I have several stacks of books in various stages of being read—they sit on the floor, teetering a foot or two high, like prehistoric cairns. I’ve been trying to shake some meaning out of those books but their pockets are empty. Maybe these acquisitions from the magical bookstore will be the ones that do it for me.

The Adrienne Rich book is Diving Into the Wreck because of course it is. Of course that’s the book. Diving into the wreck is what I’ve been doing for months now in therapy, pulling up things that have been buried for a long time and letting them see the light of day, turning them in my hand so I can see them from all angles; some of them disintegrate when they finally hit the air. I need these poems now. I’ll need them tomorrow, too.

The witchy kids’ book is called Bony-Legs, and I bought it for a dollar because it’s about Baba Yaga and because it was published in 1982, when I was a little kid myself. The illustrations, scary but cute and crawling with detail, are by Dirk Zimmer, whose wonderful imagery still dances across my early memory. Watchful eyeballs, grinning skulls, vines twisting into shapes. I don’t think I ever had this book, but my school library might have. Looking at the pictures stirs something very old in me, something not uncomplicated but basically good. They make me feel alive.

Baba Yaga is a figure from Slavic folklore. She’s a witch, a mean one, who lives in a house that stands on chicken legs. There are lots of stories about her. In this one she is called by her nickname, Bony-Legs, and she tries to cook and eat a sweet young girl who comes to her door looking to borrow a needle and thread. But before she meets Bony-Legs, the girl shares her food with the witch’s neglected cat and dog and greases the squeaky, old gate with the butter from her sandwich. (“Poor gate!” she says.) Because she was kind to them, the cat and dog—as well as the now-silent gate—help her trick the witch and get away.

The story is a lesson about being kind, but it’s also about living in a place where magic is ordinary, expected. The cat gives the girl a mirror and tells her to throw it away when she’s in trouble. The dog gives her a comb and the same instructions. As the witch chases her, the girl throws the mirror behind her. It turns into a lake, but Bony-Legs finds a way to cross it. When the witch gets close again the girl throws the comb on the ground, which grows from the dirt until it’s as tall as three trees. It forms a barricade that Bony-Legs can’t get through and the little girl runs home, safe. Not only that, but we’re told at the end that she never saw old Bony-Legs again. Phew.

We don’t question the logic of fairy tales when we read them. We know that in these worlds, witches can live in enchanted forests and cats and dogs can talk. These are the worlds of childhood and deep sleep and old fears, and they’re real, as real as a book you can hold in your hand. The stories don’t all have happy endings, but in them, anything is possible.

Tag: baba yaga

Fun and Fantasy

There is a ladder.