Once there was a girl with a dragon necklace.

She was idly playing with it - a small silver pendant on a leather cord - while visiting by a village campfire, tucked in
the jungles of Suriname. As she and her new friends laughed and told stories late into the night, the necklace caught the firelight and twinkled. One of the toddling children, cuddled on the girl's lap, reached up to touch it, and the owner obligingly took it off and dangled it above the sleepy head. "Pretty trinket," agreed one of the young men, white teeth flashing. The village girl sitting next to him gave him a push. "Was that a gift to you from some special friend?" she asked pointedly, pulling on a beaded necklace of her own. "No, no," smiled the outsider, "I just found it in a box of beads and jewelry once, and I liked it." Except for the little one on her lap, still intent on the twisted metal shape, everyone looked a little disappointed.

"No story?" The girl shook her head apologetically. "That's all. It suits me." And so it did, as she sat cross-legged on the ground, in a black tshirt and worn brown cargoes. The toddler lost interest as he drowsed off, and she carefully refastened the cord around her neck. "Although...." she said slowly, and the group shifted curiously. "Yes?" came the question from two or three dusky faces. She looked up absently at the scattered stars. "I do have a small story... I lost this once." The cluster shifted to more comfortable positions in anticipation, some leaning on logs, some against each other, as she traced thoughts from before into a story between the faroff old days and the warm evening there in the rainforest.

"A few years ago, I moved North, taking the dragon with me. I found a cord for it in a market there, and wore it everywhere. And I wore it when I came back to the South to visit. I--" her voice caught a little. "I knew I would move back to the South eventually. And that scared me."

One of the village girls patted her shoulder quietly. "I have never moved," she offered carefully, "but it seems a hard thing." The outsider nodded gratefully. "It is a hard thing, even when it is a good thing. I knew God was with me, and to see my family and friends was special. But it was hard, to think of returning. I spent a lot of evenings at my sister's house, finding comfort." The heads around the circle nodded in understanding. They knew very well the strength of family- life in the culture often centred around it. To be family was to be bound together within and across communities. But the understanding turned to concern as the storyteller from a different land went on.

"It was at her house that that I lost my necklace, the night before I returned North. I missed it around my neck. When I wrote to her, she asked if she should send to me." "There's a good sister for you," came an approving voice. "That she is. But I told her to wait, to hold onto it for me, to give it to me when I returned." The one village girl stopped playing with her beads and made a confused face. "But wasn't it a long while till you came back?"

"Yes... nearly a year..." Raised eyebrows seemed to imply that she must not hold her pendant in high value, to leave it so far away for so long. "There were still days I wished I had it, to be sure. But..." her voice grew soft. "It made me feel better, knowing in some way it was waiting for me at her house. If I believed in magic, I might say it was watching over her, but only God can do that. Instead, it was a small reminder to me that it- and my sister - would be there when I moved to the South again. That I would have them, familiar, and precious to me, when other things might be strange, and unwelcoming."

She touched her dragon necklace as it lay comfortably in the hollow of her collarbones. "And now I wear it here, where a small child can play with it, and where I can share my stories with you, my friends."

Once upon a time

There was a Welsh vacation, up in the high hills, for a girl and some hiking teammates. They all enjoyed the sunshine, and walked through the mist, and tramped over the hills, and camped by the rivers.

But for this one girl, there seemed to always be tickles round the corner of her memory, especially in the mist.
When she walked the trails up Cadair Idris, she wondered who had walked there before her, and what tribes had slept in the fields where she and her team slept each night.

Once she saw a heron perching on a bank, lazily watching her and her friends as they walked a path where the old railroad used to trace the land's curve. There were seagulls at Barmouth, playing tag in the sunlight as she warmed toes in the hot sun with the others. Their group, tracking small bits of peat moss and mountain grass over the cobblestone streets, had walked into a small store and bought fish and chips, from a row of nondescript buildings that gradually stretched into prettier Victorian homes up the coast.

They carried on from there, reluctantly stuffing sandy feet back into hiking boots and pulling their heavy packs back on. They camped, and marched, and rock climbed; they joined with other groups, split off again. They forded streams, spent nights under the stars, hid faces from the rain that dogged their way and stripped off outer layers when the sun welcomed them into new mornings and roads. And eventually they circled back to where it all began, on the hills overlooking the Avon Dyfi, or River Dyfi. They dropped their packs for the last time at Aberdovey, up above the Outward Bound Training School, and the girl wondered at all the ground they'd covered. When she held the grimy map, she traced the way they'd gone all around the northern part of the country, and all the big places marked, and all the small memories unmarked. Llyn Cau, a turquoise surprise of a lake, where one teammate had twisted an ankle. An anonymous bog valley where they'd pitched tents on the softest moss imagineable, and played cards all one morning while a storm blew around and slower teams tried to catch up. The mountainside where they'd paused to eat, and to look out across the sea as far as they could through the curious mist. The roads that passed equally calmly through little houses with laundry outside, to fern forests where any moment a harping bard or wolf might casually cross the path.

She folded up the map. Maybe she'd be back in Wales some day. Maybe not. But the memories don't go away so easily, and they find their way into other places and stories in sweet odd ways, magical Cymru....

once upon a time there was a pear tree by a pond
in the fall it dropped its leaves one by one
and while it cried for its loss
the dragonflies came to play tag
and the mother sparrows taught their babies to dart in between
and the pixies used the heaps to build houses in
and when the winter came, the mice borrowed fireflies and had council rings under the sheltering leaf piles
and the worms wore long sleepy smiles at all the delicious earthy food the leaves would turn into
and the baby leaf buds grew quietly and comforted the pear tree and reassured it that
there would always be more, there would always be life
the caterpillars rustled and nodded peacefully in their cocoons and promised to teach the new leaves all there was to know about flying when the time came
and the drowsy owls thought that everyone complained too much all the time and should just enjoy life while it was there.
in the end, they were all right
the end