Excerpted Inspirations #164Linda Odhner, with photos by Liz KufsFeb 3, 20250 min readUpdated: Feb 10, 2025
![[Martha Abbott and Ivy Carson spend time at the horse stable where Martha takes riding lessons, and they start getting to know Mrs. Smith, whose husband runs the stable. She is a painter, and her gift for seeing beauty sparks an intricate fantasy game in the imaginative lives of Martha and Ivy.]
Beautiful was a word that Mrs. Smith used a great deal, about a great many things. Once she told Martha and Ivy that if they had time to pose for her some day, she would like to paint their pictures. When Martha asked why, she smiled and said, “Because you two are very beautiful.”
Martha was amazed. She knew that Mrs. Smith used the word beautiful a lot, but still it was a surprise to hear it used to describe Ivy and herself. Ivy often seemed beautiful to Martha, but she’d heard grown-ups refer to Ivy as “unkempt” or “pitiful looking”; and as for herself, Martha had always known she was the unbeautiful Abbott.
But the picture did turn out to be very beautiful. They posed for it in the pasture, near the edge of the lake. Martha stood beside to the trunk of a small tree, looking up and with both arms stretched upward on the trunk. Ivy was stretched out on a limb just over her head. Mrs. Smith had them pose for several minutes while she sketched in the picture, and then she let them go away while she painted for a long time. Finally they came back while she put in their faces and hands, which turned out to be just about all of them that showed.
Mrs. Smith had painted a great deal more tree into the picture than was really there. Limbs and branches came from everywhere filling most of the canvas with mysterious green and leafy swirls. Out of the sea of green only faces and hands stood out plainly, glowing with a strange light that was also faintly tinged with a bright soft green.
When Martha and Ivy were finally allowed to look at the finished picture, they were amazed and delighted.
“We do look beautiful, don’t we?” Martha whispered to Ivy, and Ivy nodded.
“We look like we were part of the tree,” she said. “I mean, as if we lived up there and never came down to earth.”
“Exactly,” Mrs. Smith said.
The game of the Tree People started soon after that, and probably the painting had something to do with it.
[…]
The Tree People lived on another planet that they called the Land of the Green Sky. On their planet all of the land was covered by enormous trees that grew hundreds and hundreds of feet into the air; and the thick roots of the trees were woven together in a great solid floor that completely, or almost completely, covered the ground. The Tree People were very beautiful and good. Their skin was pale green, and their hair was darker green and blossomed with flowers. They lived in softly rocking tree houses and traveled from place to place on highways that were the broad lower branches of their forest world. They lived on fruits and nuts that grew everywhere, and their pets were tiny bright-colored monkeys and singing birds. Although the Tree People couldn’t fly, the gravity was not very strong on their planet, and they could glide like blowing leaves from the higher levels to the lower ones.
However, the good and beautiful Tree People had very terrible enemies, who lived underground beneath the interwoven roots of the great trees. They were called the Lower Ones, and they were very cruel and ugly. Then, because of the death of one of the tree roots, a hole was formed in the wall between the two worlds, and the invasion of the Lower Ones began. Down in the great caves in which they lived, the Lower Ones had discovered the secrets of a powerful dark magic; and by using this magic they were able to turn some of their people into other forms. By doing this, they were sometimes able to kill or capture the leaders of the Tree People. In time the beautiful Land of the Green Sky could be conquered and ruled by the Lords of the Lower Level.
Martha and Ivy invented and played the Tree People Game in many places, but most often up among the wide branches of the trees in Bent Oaks Grove.
Zilpha Keatley Snyder, The Changeling (1970), pp. 84-85, 94-95](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/6feacf_0ae54bc7e5f245668b13439cdbe0277b~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_980,h_2967,al_c,q_90,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_avif,quality_auto/6feacf_0ae54bc7e5f245668b13439cdbe0277b~mv2.jpg)
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