Grandmother Spring was worried about the cold rocks down below her. They were bare and empty and had no covering to keep them warm, and the year was still chilly, especially at night. She pondered and pondered on this problem.

“What can I do to help the earth stay warm?” she asked herself. “I wish I had a blanket I could put over the rocks to keep them cozy.” She thought and thought as she strode over the land, leaving the bare beginnings of flowers and green leaves in her wake.

The rocks, however, stayed bare and cold. Grandmother Spring shook her head sadly. This just wouldn’t do. Things were supposed to turn green and warm in her wake, not stay grey and cold.

 As she strode through a forest full of tall straight pine trees, she had an idea. She would make the rocks a blanket. That would warm them up, surely. 

She took two of the straightest pines and carefully took off all the bark and branches. Then she polished them to a fine sheen and whittled the tops down to rounded points. Her knitting needles were made. Then she started to look around for the materials to make the blanket from.

A road, made of black asphalt, straight as an arrow, ran nearby. “Too hard,” she said, “Even if it is straight. I don’t want anything that hard.” So she kept on looking.

She looked up at the clouds above her. They certainly weren’t hard, but she thought that perhaps they might be too fluffy to knit with easily. Still, she would keep them in mind.

A field of soft green wheat growing nearby caught her eye. “But if I take the wheat, then that field will be cold, and I don’t want to warm one thing at the expense of another.”

She kept looking and looking.

Then she spotted a wonderful field that had been plowed, but not planted. It too was cold and bare, but it was plowed up in wonderful straight furrows running back and forth across the field. Since it was cold, too, and not growing anything this year, Grandmother Spring didn’t mind using it for her blanket. She picked up one end of the plowed furrows in the fallow field and reeled them in. They came up in one long row, back and forth across the field, and Grandmother Spring wound them into big brown ball that smelled of spicy rich earth. Then she took the end of the furrow-yarn and cast on the first row of her blanket with her pine tree knitting needles.

All too soon, she was out of her yarn, and the blanket was only half done. Sighing, she looked around for another field that had been plowed and left fallow, but she couldn’t see one. They all had tiny green plants poking up through the soil or stubble left from last year.

Then she noticed the river flowing through the fields. It was long and such a lovely shade of blue! It would add a nice stripe of color to her blanket. She went to take the end and wind it up into a ball like she had the plowed field, but then she realized that the river was too big. If she tried to knit with it, just a few stitches would take up almost as much space as everything she had knitted so far. She just couldn’t mix the sizes of her materials like that – not and have her blanket come out nicely.

A stream that fed into the river, though - now that was the right size. She wound that up into a ball, and another stream as well, just to make sure she had enough. She knit the blue stripe into the blanket and looked at it and smiled. The stripe was lovely, rippling in all sorts of shades of blue, and it gave off the sound of a babbling brook when she ran her fingers over it. This blanket was turning out to be a very nice blanket. Still, it needed something else.

Just at that moment, a shaft of sunlight split through the clouds and beamed down to the earth. Grandmother Spring could see the lines of the sunlight in the shaft and she laughed happily. “Of course!” she said, “This is exactly what my blanket needs! Some nice warm sunlight for the last stripe!”

She went over to the beam of sunlight and carefully collected the strands of it. She twisted them and twisted them until they made a light yarn just the right size and then she wound it into a ball. Then she took up her needles one last time and knitted a beautiful golden stripe of sunlight onto the blanket. When the last little bit of the sun-yarn was gone, Grandmother Spring put down her knitting needles and held up her blanket. It was beautiful – the bottom was a deep rich brown, smelling of good clean earth; the next stripe was a rippling blue, dancing with the sounds and colors of living water; the last stripe, at the top, was glowing golden spring sunshine, light and warm all at the same time.

Grandmother Spring spread her blanket over the cold rocks. The rocks sighed and wiggled a little bit, like a child does when a warm blanket is spread over him on a chilly night. Then, to Grandmother Spring’s surprise, as the blanket settled onto the rocks, a bright covering of spring flowers began to grow from it. There were pink ones, yellow ones, blue ones and white ones. Some were vines, hugging the ground, and others reached up for the blue spring sky.

Grandmother Spring laughed in delight, a deep belly laugh that shook the fields and hills. “I should have known!” she said, “Good rich earth mixed with water and sunlight will always yield green growing things! And since I am Spring, the green growing things are flowers, my own beautiful flowers!”

Now the rocks were warm and Grandmother Spring was happy. She went on her way once more, striding over the earth, leaving fresh green leaves and flowers in her wake.

She Wolf (c) 2007