I always loved the pale green colors that were everywhere in the springtime. Penny and I had graduated to four times around the field, and we would dedicate each lap to one of the elements, usually saving Fire for the last lap to give us extra energy to finish.
The famous Olympic gymnast Nadia Comaneci was still on everyone’s minds, and one day a teacher asked me if I wanted to take gymnastics lessons.
It was tempting, but didn’t feel quite right. I said no thank you. I had other plans. After school, I learned that Penny had received the same offer, and had also turned it down.
In early June, we finally realized that next year would be different.
“You’re going to Middle School next year, aren’t you?” Penny said. “I almost forgot we were in different grades. What are we going to do, Ariel?”
“We are going to be strong, Penny. We can meet after school most days, and spend Saturdays together, maybe Sundays too. And what about this summer? We’re going to spend it together, aren’t we?”
“I hope so! My mom usually enrolls me in the YMCA program,” she said.
“I’ll go home with you today and hopefully we can talk her into letting you spend summer with me. You can eat lunch at my house everyday, and we can run and climb in the woods and do all kinds of things!”
“That would be great! And we can learn to make fire without matches, and swim in the inlet,” she changed to a whisper, “and learn more magic!”
“And next year,” I said, “we should both make new friends. It will be good
for us, and we might find someone who can join the Grove! But we can’t tell them anything about it until we know them and agree we can trust them, okay?”
“Yeah. We have to be careful!” Penny said.
It was easy to talk Penny’s mom into letting her spend the summer with me by telling her about all the things we did together on the playground, and reminding her of how much money she would save. School finished, and the very next day we hit the park to do what we couldn’t do at school — climb trees! We coached each other up the big maples near the beach. “Trust yourself and the tree, Penny. Pull up on that branch with your left hand. Now find a foothold. Yes! You made it!”
Penny was scared in the trees at first, but got better quickly. We both climbed a tree everyday. We wore pants so we wouldn’t scrape up our legs, and I finally worked up the courage to do what I had wanted to do for a long time — shimmy up a straight alder. At first I had to pick just the right size, and I couldn’t go up very far.
“You can do it, Ariel! The next foot of that trunk is exactly the same as the last foot!”
“Yeah, but I’m tireder!” I said from 15 feet up.
“Are you going to let that stop you?”
“No!” I said and started climbing up the tree some more. “How high am I now?”
“About 20 feet!”
I looked down. Oh my God! I hugged the tree and started down.
We always got home dirty and tired, but my mom didn’t care — she saw how strong and happy I was. Penny kept her play clothes at my house and changed back to nice clothes to go home. Sometimes her mom would let her stay for dinner and spend the night. It was then that we would light candles and write in our Grimoire.
While running that day, I had remembered something, and now I wrote: When doing physical things, let your body limit you, not
your
mind.
Not too long after school got out, Penny turned nine, and we started swimming twice a week, once at the YMCA pool, and once in the salt water of the inlet. We helped each other to swim and to float. Penny had trouble with water in her nose, but I told her to just leave it there and breathe through her mouth, and after a while she got used to it. We swam hard and got tired, but we were becoming stronger. A college girl at the pool gave us some lessons one day, and our swimming strokes improved. One, two, or three kicks per stroke, depending on the speed we wanted, and one, three, or five strokes per breath, always an odd number so we’d breathe on both sides.
When we swam in the inlet, we used a little bay where the water was cleaner than near the city, and where no boats went. Soon we were able to swim out to the channel buoy about half a mile out. At first we had to do some floating on the way back to conserve energy.
One day, when we got back to the beach, there was a high-school guy there. “Hi. You two are really good swimmers. Have you ever thought about going all the way across?”
“How far is it?” I asked, looking across the water.
“About four miles right here. If you ever want to try, I can get my dad’s canoe and go along beside you. See you later! I live right up there.”
We never tried it that summer, but it gave us something to think about.
We practiced running through the woods without any roads or trails to help us. It was hard since there were bushes and thorns just about everywhere. We learned to scamper along fallen logs, hop over low brush, and crawl under tall bushes. We came home more scratched and dirty than when we climbed trees.
“We need to start deciding on tests for ourselves and other people who might want to join the Grove,” I said.
“We know some of it already, don’t we?” Penny said. “Swimming to the buoy and back, climbing maples and alders, running two miles without stopping, running through the wild part of the park. What else?”
“We still need to learn to make fire. How about rope climbing and swinging?” I suggested.
“For sure! I think we have a good one in the garage I can use.”
“Thick?”
“Almost an inch,” Penny said.
“The rope test could be climbing up a good tree with the rope, tying it to the tree, coming down the rope, swinging, climbing back up the rope, and climbing back down the tree. Just like our Teacher did.”
“Climbing up the rope will be the hardest!” Penny said.
She brought the rope the next day, and we started climbing with it and swinging.
A few weeks later, we were getting to the point where we could climb most trees almost effortlessly. If I wore a jacket to protect my arms, I could go as high up the alders as I wanted — 40 feet or more. It was eerie when they started to sway at the top, but I got used to it. Penny preferred the maples, but she made herself learn to climb the alders too.
In the maples, climbing down the rope was easy, and we were already experts at swinging, of course. Climbing up, as Penny predicted, was much harder. I raided the mountaineering section in the library, and we learned how we could use our feet to lock the rope and hold us in place to rest our arms. At first we could only go up a third or a half the way without resting.
Penny was the first one to make it all the way up without stopping. I clapped and cheered 40 feet below her. She rested in the tree awhile, then pulled up and coiled the rope. About a week later I made it all the way up without stopping.
“What if one of us gets hurt?” Penny asked one day.
“I guess the other person will have to help them, or get help,” I said.
“I don’t know much about that stuff.”
“Me
neither.”
We were at the library a couple of days later to get books on fire making. I was checking the books out, and Penny was looking at the bulletin boards.
“Look, Ariel!” She pointed to a poster about a wilderness first aid and rescue course at the college.
“That would be perfect!” I said.
“But it’s $50,” Penny said, disappointed.
I was reading the fine print. “Wait! It says here that if you’re auditing the course for non-credit, it’s only $10! We don’t need college credit, do we? It’s all day, four Saturdays in September. Do you think your mom would let you do it?”
“I’ll find a way!”
It took some pleading, and my mom calling Penny’s mom, but we did it.
We took the bus to the college to get the forms, had our moms sign them, and were enrolled the next day.
It was just early August, so we started learning fire making. We went to the rock shop and got pieces of flint, then the welding shop for little pieces of steel. We got out the sewing machine and made pouches for both of us that would hold all our fire-making things.
Making sparks was easy. Getting those sparks to be flames was the hard part. We worked in the backyard at the fire pit, and after a couple of hours, I finally burned up a cotton ball.
We did it a little each day, and after a while we could both get a flame in just a minute or two. One evening we gathered twigs and sticks, Penny laid out the tinder she liked to use, and I invited my parents to watch. Penny’s second spark caught. She blew on it until it came to life and we laid on little twigs. Soon a roaring fire was browning our marshmallows. That day was my 11th birthday, and we all went out for dinner afterwards.
Summer was nearing its end. A windy day made me remember the Athame, so I got it out and we went down to the beach. No one was around. I held the magical knife in the wind and said:
“I consecrate thee, O knife of steel, by the Spirit of Air, that thou shall be potent in thy magical work, that thou shall always serve God, and that thou shall break in twain before I may ever use thee to gain wealth.”
We climbed to the highest hill in the park. I thrust the knife into the dirt and repeated the incantation for the Spirit of Earth, which ended, “. . . and that thou shall become dull and useless before I may ever use thee for evil
constructions.”
Last, we went to the little hidden spring we knew. I held the blade in the water and said the incantation to the Spirit of Water, which ended, “. . . and that thou shall rust before I may ever use thee to turn the heart of any person to evil.”
“Our Athame is ready for magical work,” I said. “Now we must prove ourselves worthy!”
We had two more days that we could be together before school started.
The first of the two days I would be tested and Penny would be my assistant.
That night, I lit candles and wrote in the Grimoire: Ariel - first test for mastery of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water Then I closed my eyes. “God and Spirits, I want to be strong. I want to pass my tests so I can do good magic. It will be hard doing it all in one day, but I want to. I’m so glad Penny is my friend.” I washed my pen and curled up in bed.