She was exiled upstairs, to the windowless room under the thatch, to practice lying in darkness. So it is with the very old, whose lives are spent in dusk just as newborns must learn to live in the dawn. It was not Great-grandmother’s illness that made me eligible to enter the Hall of Grief, but my own signs of adulthood: the small breasts just beginning to bud, the fine curlings of hair in the cave places of my body, the rush of fresh blood from the untested nest of my womb. I was ready. Had I not spent many childhood hours playing at the Hall game? Alone or with my brothers I had built my own Halls of willow branch and alder snappings. We had decked the tables, made signs, drawn pictures. Always, always my table was best, though I was the youngest of us all. It had more than just an innocent beauty, decked in ribbons and bordered by wildflowers: red trillium for life, blue-black elderberry for death, and the twinings of green boughs for the passage between. No, my tables had a character that was both mine and the grieven one’s.
