The Silence of Trees by Valya Dudycz Lupescu

and me. Short with long brown hair full of red highlights. She looked so much younger than her fifty years. She always looked young for her age; but unlike some girls, she never minded. Zirka always wanted to grow up so fast. Katya savored her childhood, held on to her fairy tales and fantasies.
    Katya sat back down between us and pulled an egg out of the carton.
    "First, you need to choose an egg. The egg symbolizes the return of the sun, the coming of spring, the renewal of life."
    She was in her "teacher mode." That’s what her brothers and sisters called it when Katya was a little girl playing "school" with her siblings. She did go on to teach. I smiled at her, but Katya was looking intently into the candle.
    Lesya plucked an egg out of the carton and set it down in front of her. I heard the cuckoo clock in the kitchen. Five o’clock.
    "Then you need to find a pattern," Katya continued. She pulled some books of designs out of the box and handed them to Lesya. "Here, look through these for some ideas."
    "It helps to divide the egg into quadrants. It makes it easier to design the rest, Lesya," She turned toward her niece and furrowed her brow. "You need to really think about what you want this egg to mean. What story you want it to tell. You see, the patterns are ancient symbols. Even the colors have meaning. Our ancestors would carefully choose these symbols and colors because the images they chose would tell a story. The story of their past, present or future. Sometimes all three."
    Katya smiled, that devilish, faraway look in her eyes. When she turned toward me, I quickly looked down at my embroidery. "The colored eggs were also used to cast spells, "she said, "fulfilling the secret wishes of their makers—"
    "Aunt Katya, if you’re going to tell me that the eggs are magic, you can stop right there."
    I looked up from my red cross-stitches in surprise. "This from the girl who used to tell me that she could see fairies in her bedroom?"
    "I was a kid, Baba." She looked up for a moment, then back to the book. "A kid with an overactive imagination."
    Back to my embroidery. I would let Katya handle this one. Khvostyk purred beside my leg.
    "Well, kiddo, the eggs were believed to hold magical powers, carrying with them the energy of creation. Each painted symbol was charged with magical energy. Each animal, flower and geometric shape had layers of sacred meaning.
    "Older people were given pysanky with rich designs and dark colors because their lives deserved the ornate patterns. They had lived those patterns. You’d have quite a decorative pysanka, eh, Mama?"
    I ignored her and kept stitching.
    "Young people’s pysanky had a lot of white and sparse designs because their lives were still new," she continued.
    "Okay, no disrespect," Lesya said, "but the origin of the word pysanka is pretty ordinary. The root is pysaty, ‘to write,’ and writing seems pretty logical to me."
    "Sure, but writing was once considered magical," Katya said.
    I looked up and watched her hands. Tiny hands with long, strong fingers. Gentle hands. Her left one held the raw egg while her right hand gently sketched. Soft, scraping sounds.
    "Is it such a stretch for you?" she asked. "Writing in so many cultures was considered magical. Think about ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics or the Hebrew Kaballah. I know you studied some of these in college."
    "Stories, too," I added, lowering my eyes to my embroidery. "Stories have been considered magic."
    "That’s why I study history and not mythology." Lesya said, yelping as her egg cracked. She must have pressed down too hard with her pencil. Yolk flowed over her fingers as she jumped up and ran to the kitchen.
    "Lesya, you need to be gentle with the eggs," I shouted into the kitchen.
    "I know, Baba," she shouted back, her voice irritated. I added a few more red crosses to the cloth.
    "Maybe you can talk to her, Katya, about this boy she likes," I said quietly, glancing toward the kitchen where Lesya was wiping