The Measure of Moss
By Sherrida Woodley
May 5, 2025
May 5, 2025
Surrounded in death by moss seems likely.
I spent a childhood drawing myself into small cavities called mosseries, moist green the softness of nature’s fleece. Wide expanses of moss were rare, but by the time I was eight I’d discovered a patchy blanket just below most children’s level of curiosity, somewhere between mud pies and peeling sticky bark off pine trees. Moss was fastened to my imagination in a carpet both vast and fragile, but in truth never in excess, often just a ramble over the rotting stump of a fencepost. In my neighborhood, it barely grew on trees. There was no north, no south. Moss was not a crowd pleaser.
Where I lived in the rain-spent hot season of summer, Eastern Washington State cornered moss in communities nameless and hard to find. The long arc of a hot summer sun could turn it to brown crust. But moss would wait through a rain-restorative fall, a living mat of history without leaves, stems or roots. It draped through the world’s rainforests, filled chinks in log cabins, insulated boots and mittens. I didn’t know that moss had a life without me. But when I fell asleep, feet stretched beyond the too-small mossery, I dreamed of fairies tangled in its hidden realms, lifting my eyelids, encouraging my awakening.
“In time you will be buried among us,” one croaked. “Among the forest creatures of the small dead. An honor, my child. Just as myth cannot contain us, neither can death. In the time of Fires To Come the world will ignite as it has before. It will sizzle in death. But not the death of fairies. Or of you.”
In one violent shake, I asked why. In one breath-gulp, I asked why again. The answer was parchment under my feet. A collective message between fairies, like the location dance of bees or the sudden outburst of name recognition between individual elephants told me I was suddenly and defiantly excluded. Packed in moss for safekeeping.
And so I began a strategy of cooperative silence, an extra-sense that has existed between women and wild beings since the dawn of time. Forced to cope with human interaction, I channeled the influence of fairies into a land purchase in the middle of high fire danger. Then too I retained my love of moss, transferring it around an abandoned pond choked in old-growth cattails. Waterways continued to open. Water bubbled from softening of the ground, a spring-fed estuary that brought with it the soggy flourishing of reindeer moss. Fairies kept to the underground, the source below sources.
Summers came and went, but one especially hot July brought episodic wind. The carrier of flame concealed itself in smoke; drove through my woods in long-promised catastrophe. “Wait too long and you’ll never get out of here alive.” I walked to the main road. Watched residents accompanied by their horses, dogs, even a bawling calf attached to the long lines of a gradual, well-planned escape. I waved. They waved. I wouldn’t leave.
Instead, I retreated into a shallow dip alongside the driveway, a cross-hatching of moss overshadowed by young Douglas fir. Barely five feet in length, it might’ve qualified as a grave for one of our dogs. But as I constructed a border of white block, it occurred to me I was building my own burial site. Compressed, fiercely green. What was it that convinced me this was the place I wanted to end up? Far preferred over some high school gym, waiting for sanction to return home days after being forced to evacuate. The fairies, I thought. Miniature minds had quietly convinced mine I would fit into a cavity hardly big enough for our coonhound; that the simplicity of nature only required I accept fire protection via awareness of universes, the fairies’ versus mine.
Precipitous and costly, fire tiptoed around me that long-ago summer but never came close to a siren’s call. A small plane girded by speed and water container hanging from its mid-section traced the path between a nearby lake and a trajectory of flames. Neighbors continued to evacuate. Fire blankets arrived. Little by little I lost my remaining fixation with ground space. “Believe in ancient geometry,” ran through my brain. “I’m the one from out of town.”
I wonder now that I’ve moved, that I’ve spent two more summers away from that residence in Eastern Washington, whether the gravesite will ever be used. Will it hold the same meaning for whoever now resides there? Living among fairies requires mosseries and a slow abiding wisdom that we know little of what really goes on underground in tangles of root, coagulation of fox pee and carbon. Guarded by small entities capable of long-lasting prediction.
Surrounded in death by moss seems likely, especially for those who don’t understand the dialect of fairies. I am one. And, for a long time, that has been enough.
I spent a childhood drawing myself into small cavities called mosseries, moist green the softness of nature’s fleece. Wide expanses of moss were rare, but by the time I was eight I’d discovered a patchy blanket just below most children’s level of curiosity, somewhere between mud pies and peeling sticky bark off pine trees. Moss was fastened to my imagination in a carpet both vast and fragile, but in truth never in excess, often just a ramble over the rotting stump of a fencepost. In my neighborhood, it barely grew on trees. There was no north, no south. Moss was not a crowd pleaser.
Where I lived in the rain-spent hot season of summer, Eastern Washington State cornered moss in communities nameless and hard to find. The long arc of a hot summer sun could turn it to brown crust. But moss would wait through a rain-restorative fall, a living mat of history without leaves, stems or roots. It draped through the world’s rainforests, filled chinks in log cabins, insulated boots and mittens. I didn’t know that moss had a life without me. But when I fell asleep, feet stretched beyond the too-small mossery, I dreamed of fairies tangled in its hidden realms, lifting my eyelids, encouraging my awakening.
“In time you will be buried among us,” one croaked. “Among the forest creatures of the small dead. An honor, my child. Just as myth cannot contain us, neither can death. In the time of Fires To Come the world will ignite as it has before. It will sizzle in death. But not the death of fairies. Or of you.”
In one violent shake, I asked why. In one breath-gulp, I asked why again. The answer was parchment under my feet. A collective message between fairies, like the location dance of bees or the sudden outburst of name recognition between individual elephants told me I was suddenly and defiantly excluded. Packed in moss for safekeeping.
And so I began a strategy of cooperative silence, an extra-sense that has existed between women and wild beings since the dawn of time. Forced to cope with human interaction, I channeled the influence of fairies into a land purchase in the middle of high fire danger. Then too I retained my love of moss, transferring it around an abandoned pond choked in old-growth cattails. Waterways continued to open. Water bubbled from softening of the ground, a spring-fed estuary that brought with it the soggy flourishing of reindeer moss. Fairies kept to the underground, the source below sources.
Summers came and went, but one especially hot July brought episodic wind. The carrier of flame concealed itself in smoke; drove through my woods in long-promised catastrophe. “Wait too long and you’ll never get out of here alive.” I walked to the main road. Watched residents accompanied by their horses, dogs, even a bawling calf attached to the long lines of a gradual, well-planned escape. I waved. They waved. I wouldn’t leave.
Instead, I retreated into a shallow dip alongside the driveway, a cross-hatching of moss overshadowed by young Douglas fir. Barely five feet in length, it might’ve qualified as a grave for one of our dogs. But as I constructed a border of white block, it occurred to me I was building my own burial site. Compressed, fiercely green. What was it that convinced me this was the place I wanted to end up? Far preferred over some high school gym, waiting for sanction to return home days after being forced to evacuate. The fairies, I thought. Miniature minds had quietly convinced mine I would fit into a cavity hardly big enough for our coonhound; that the simplicity of nature only required I accept fire protection via awareness of universes, the fairies’ versus mine.
Precipitous and costly, fire tiptoed around me that long-ago summer but never came close to a siren’s call. A small plane girded by speed and water container hanging from its mid-section traced the path between a nearby lake and a trajectory of flames. Neighbors continued to evacuate. Fire blankets arrived. Little by little I lost my remaining fixation with ground space. “Believe in ancient geometry,” ran through my brain. “I’m the one from out of town.”
I wonder now that I’ve moved, that I’ve spent two more summers away from that residence in Eastern Washington, whether the gravesite will ever be used. Will it hold the same meaning for whoever now resides there? Living among fairies requires mosseries and a slow abiding wisdom that we know little of what really goes on underground in tangles of root, coagulation of fox pee and carbon. Guarded by small entities capable of long-lasting prediction.
Surrounded in death by moss seems likely, especially for those who don’t understand the dialect of fairies. I am one. And, for a long time, that has been enough.