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In days not so long past, I used to enjoy the friendship
of a fox, an old gentle red, who would jump through
the glassless open window by my bed in the early, dewy
dawn and land on my chest. I'd half-awaken. He'd glare
down at me with gleeful eyes, salivating small drops
onto the apple of my neck. And then he'd leap out again,
beckoning me to join the chase.
"Chase him, daughter!" my Tom would say, and how could
I resist? And out and down I would go, moistening my
feet on the grasses and rousing them fully on the humps
of stones, towads the winding, labyrinthine roots of
Old Man Willow.
I am called Goldberry. I live by a river, Withywindle
River, among the ancient boughs of Middle-Earth's Old
Forest. A house is a comfortable shelter amidst the
unflaggingly changeable will of the weather. Constructed
carefully and lovingly, it may still aspire to harmony
with the weather and the river. I think of my house,
Tom Bombadil's house, as a harmonious extension of the
river and of this Old Forest where I am called River
Daughter.
Hobbits are curious guests. At turns merry and fearful,
but always grateful and good-natured even as the olk
of the Forest, they are welcome guests. It has been
estimated that the odds of an asteroid with the random
fortune to approach, and the constitution to survive,
Middle-Earth's atmosphere and actually reach the ground,
denting the earth, are greater than the odds of retrieving
a grain of sand dropped into the riverbank by a passing
wren. So must be the odds of four Shire hobbits finding
themselves held fast by the gnarled but perpetually
robust branch-arms of Old Man Willow here in our nestled
swatch of Forest.
But Tom was aware of them, as he is aware of all creatures
gret and small that grace these hallowed woods. And
he came to their rescue, for their vulnerability and
harmlessness were as transparent to Tom as the reflection
of one's physical features in the telling mirror of
the river's surface.
One of the hobbits had a ring. Rings can be very sentimental
things. I had a ring once, as a girl, and I then afforded
it the treasured status I now save for the lolling song
of the river as it flows around the bends between horseshoe-shaped
banks that point to the promise of sacred errands deeper
and deeper into the secret gardens of the forest.
This hobbit's ring was extremely powerful, he said.
Once, he even disappeared after placing it onto the
mildly adorable plumpness of his little hobbit's finger.
But Tom demonstrated as he has so often in the untold
seasons we have enjoyed together that such things are
triflings before the hum of pure life-force (and, as
I suspect, before the ever repeating, ever unfolding
wonders of the Forest). Trying on this purportedly wondrous
ring of dull gold himself, Tom did not disappear. And
I am reminded as I am on a daily basis, that Tom Bombadil
is all the compass I ever need follow here in the rushes
and rustlings of the River Withywindle.