Blog

I cut off my own hands for the promise of a cherry tree. My father never taught us better, and my mother– she was so deep in worry, keeping the world turning like the stream under a great millstone...

Seven swans flew down from heaven each evening at sunset. They flew to the stubbled cornfield to eat, and each swan had a silver star on its forehead. One day, the youngest swan took off her star and hung it on a tall stalk of corn, or was it on the branch of a reaching oak tree?Anyway, she set it down… and when the time came to leave and fly back up into the sky with the others, she could not find it again.

Once, there was a poor wretch whose eyes and hair and even skin were often gray. Who ‘went to sleep in her dirt’ night after night for lack of a bathtub, for want of the ease of hauling water, or extra wood for heating the fire. And she was all the more sorrowful for thinking she was to blame for it...