The first day it rained in Rivendell, I barely knew what to do with myself, which is a shameful sort of thing for a English person to say. Rain is an integral part of our identity. The human body is anywhere between 50% to 65% water, and in the case of the British body, it's 50% to 65% rainwater.
Since coming here, though, the rain hadn't fallen once. I ended up sleeping until 7:00 in the morning because the sunrise had been obscured by such thick, dark clouds. I must admit, for a few brief moments as I stirred awake and saw the foreboding shadow outside, I thought that I was about to relive the end of the world again.
"OH MY GOD!" I shouted furiously, throwing my blanket off as I sprang out of bed. "NOT THIS SHIT AGAIN! I—oh."
"Rhodri?" came a voice from outside. I heard hurried footsteps coming toward my room, and the door burst open as a worried Bregedúr burst in. "Are you all right? What is it?"
I stood there sheepishly in my pyjamas. My own shouting had woken me up properly from my half-dreaming state, and when I looked around properly, I saw rain falling from the sky.
"It's… ah… raining," I murmured, pointing pathetically out the window.
Bregedúr looked at me like I had just laid an egg.
"Yes, Rhodri, it is," she said in disbelief. "I hope this isn't how you usually react to rain, because you will suffer greatly here come spring,"
I couldn't help it. I laughed myself silly, and when I got my breath back, I explained my mistake to Bregedúr, who herself dissolved into a fit of the giggles.
"Get yourself dressed, you fool, and I'll show you what we do for fun on a rainy day."
I didn't need telling twice. I dressed myself in record time, grabbed Bregedúr by the arm, and we shot off to the dining hall to eat breakfast at a speed that would have made anyone else sick. I attributed the sudden rush of skittish energy to excitement. Something in me knew I was going to enjoy myself today, even though I had no idea what the day's activities entailed.
"Wurryurr 'ntenta somi, Gegur?" I vocalised to my friend through a mouthful of bread.
"Calm yourself, or else you will choke to death on your food and I shall not be able to show you anything!" Bregedúr affectionately scolded me. I scowled as much as a person could when their cheeks were fit to bursting with bread. With great effort, I swallowed my food and spoke again.
"Do excuse me," I said. "But fine, my mouth is empty now. What is it you intend to show me, then? I have a lucky feeling it will be very amusing."
"Your feeling's not wrong," she said with a wink. "Come on."
We snaked our way through the halls to a part of Imladris I had not seen before. It must have been the plains behind the waterfall, where a part of the river fed into a large, forested lake. There was a handful of people swimming and splashing around in it, and I could see people climbing up the absolutely colossal trees that bowed over, and partially entered, the water.
"Oh, we're going swimming!" I exclaimed happily. "Marvellous!" I loved swimming, and it had been a while since I'd gone to the pool back home, since I would habitually refuse to indulge their exorbitant entry fees.
"Not just swimming," Bregedúr replied, her eyebrows flicking up. "Get one of the bathing outfits for yourself," she pointed at a nearby wooden hut, "and meet me back here."
I dumped my things in one of the small, wooden boxes lining the shelves there, picked out a swimsuit and pulled it on. It was a curious garment, not unlike the Victorian-era men's swimsuits, only much looser. As with much of the Elven garb, though, it only looked odd until someone actually put it on, and then it was a Best On Ground sort of masterpiece.
Dressed in our fabulous costumes, we made our way down to the water, and I was met with a sight that made the child (and the adult, admittedly) in me squeal with excitement. Someone had carved out and varnished the insides of these networks of huge tree branches and made-
"Waterslides," I breathed, hardly daring to believe my eyes.
"They're better during the rain, as it makes them more slippery," said Bregedúr, "which is why I waited until today to show you. Do you forgive me for keeping it a secret from you this entire time?"
"Let me try out a slide while I make my mind up," I said playfully as we scaled the tree to the highest slide. The rain was pouring down so heavily that the slide looked like a gutter in monsoon season, so we zoomed along much quicker than I had expected and when we hit the end and landed in the pool, we cut through the water like a couple of torpedoes.
"Well, I think I can overlook your sins just this once, friendo," I said to Bregedúr, who splashed me as she rolled her eyes.
We had a grand old time for quite some hours in there, and eventually decided to start making our way back to the dining hall to get something to eat when an Elf with blond hair and deep brown eyes gently called to us and swam over.
"Mae govannen, I am sorry to interrupt you. My name is Tharanor. Are you the one they call Rhodri?" he asked me.
"Mae govannen, I am indeed," I replied.
"Ah, wonderful," he said with a nod. "I wonder, could I possibly speak with you a moment?" He looked at Bregedúr nervously, then me. I looked at Bregedúr and saw that she appeared to be thinking quite hard for a moment, after which she nodded, perfectly calm.
"I'll get changed and wait by your clothing for you, yes?" she said to me.
I smiled. She was doing well in noticing her own moments of hostile attribution bias, and seemed not to be offended by the guy's request to speak in private with me. I gave her a nod, saying "I'll be there in a moment."
After Bregedúr had swum away, Tharanor spoke again.
"I am told that you offer counsel on problems pertaining to behaviour," he said.
"Among other things, yes, I certainly do," I replied with a nod.
"Indeed. Do you work with children?"
"Well, I mainly work with adults, but I have worked with children and families also, yes," I said. In the time between acquiring my master's degree and finishing my doctorate, I was working in my university's family psychology centre as an assistant, meaning I could make assessments and plan treatment, but lacked the power to make clinical decisions. I explained this to him, and he nodded and rubbed his chin.
"You see," he said, "we are having problems with my youngest child, Turil."
"Oh?"
"Yes, she is constantly bringing handfuls of leaves into her room, and then becomes very upset when we ask her to take them out again, or when we try to take them out ourselves."
"That's curious," I said. "Well, I'm happy to have a look and see if I can help, but if I feel like it is not in my scope of practice, I will have to bow out, I'm sorry. Is that fine?"
Tharanor nodded quickly. "Yes, absolutely."
"I would be interested in seeing Turil's room, if you wouldn't mind," I said. "When would be a suitable day for me to visit?"
"You could come today, after lunch, if you wish."
"That will be fine. Just come to my office, just near Lord Elrond's study, after lunch to meet me and we will go to your place from there, all right?"
Tharanor nodded, said his thanks, and I headed off to find Bregedúr.
After we'd eaten, I said my goodbyes to Bregedúr and sat in my office, listening to the rain thrum on the roof as I continued my cartoon chicken drawing, which had now morphed into a ridiculous comic strip involving a court case and mandatory installation of crosswalks so it could safely make it to the other side. A knock at the door made me look up from my work, and sure enough, there was Tharanor, a tiny, nervous smile on his face. For someone whose name had the word 'vigorous,' in it, he certainly didn't behave that way, and his especially muscular build made for an even stranger juxtaposition between mind and body. I gave him a friendly smile back and invited him into my office.
"Now, if you don't mind," I began as I poured him a glass of water, "I just need to explain a few things." Cue five minutes of talking about ethics and the Ts and Cs, easily the five most boring minutes any person experiences in my office. His eyes were so close to glazing over, but he ploughed on through it and decided to sign the forms.
"Thank you for your patience," I said with a laugh. "Okay, before we set out, could you give me a bit more backstory regarding Turil and the leaves?"
Tharanor nodded and started to talk.
"Turil is four years old now, and has always loved the outdoors and everything in it. Trees, plants, animals, clouds—all of it. She would live outside if she could, I think," he laughed to himself, and then sighed. "Some few weeks ago now, she has started bringing in leaves and keeping them in her room. We initially thought it was because she was sleeping with her window open, and because it is early autumn and the leaves are beginning to fall, they must have blown in from outside. When my wife or I cleaned her room, we would dispose of the leaves, and she would become very upset with us."
"What would she do?"
"She would beg us to leave her friends alone, and would scream and cry, sometimes throw herself on the ground and bang the floor with her fists."
"Does she do this for anything else?"
"No, she is usually a very calm, happy child. I think I can count on one hand the number of times she has cried before this, and even then it was because she injured herself."
"Has she gone through anything traumatic lately? Someone dying or being hurt, perhaps?"
"No, nothing like that," Tharanor shook his head. "We have a very happy, calm home life together otherwise, but the leaf collection has become much worse this last week. We looked out the window as she played outside one afternoon and saw that she was picking each leaf carefully and putting them into a huge pile to bring inside. Now, she is collecting masses of leaves and hiding them all through her room, and they decompose wherever she has put them. There are now black patches all over the floor from where the leaves have rotted away and stained the floorboards."
I scribbled down a handful of notes, and then collected my thoughts for a moment.
"Well, I think we should be just about ready to set out for your house, but one final question: do you know anything about these friends she speaks of?"
"That could be anything," Tharanor answered with a sigh. "The clouds are her friends, the trees, the animals… she has a social network most can only dream of."
I chuckled and noted his answer.
"In which case, I think we'd better head over to your place for a closer look at Turil's room."
There can be a lot of reasons children hide things. Sometimes past experience, such as other children stealing their possessions, or living a life where lacking family finances allow ownership of anything, can give children the idea that they have to hide whatever they own, to save them from the pain of losing it again. Other times, it can be a symptom of an urge to hoard things that can be characteristic of obsessive-compulsive disorder or some other anxiety disorder, where the desire to keep things—even when they don't really want them- is so overwhelming that the child will feel irrational terror at the prospect at not being able to keep things. It could even be a learned behaviour- perhaps Tharanor and his wife also had a hoarding compulsion and Turil simply picked it up from them. I hoped there would be some other explanation, because I worried it would not be in my scope of practice to administer psychotherapy to such a small child.
Tharanor and I walked together on a path leading away from the main house out to another big house at the bottom of the waterfall. It seemed that many families here shared big houses, having a floor or several rooms to themselves, with big, private balconies for when they needed a break from communal spaces. The house they lived in had a splendid, airy feel to it, with small but unmistakable signs of having been lived in: a blanket on the back of the sofa, a wooden toy horse on the table, an open book on the kitchen counter. I felt at home right away.
We took a turn to the left and opened a door to a room I can only describe as part bedroom, part forest floor. There were leaves absolutely everywhere. On top of the bed, on all the shelves, the drawers in the dresser were all open and blanketed in them- I couldn't see a square centimetre of the floor for all the leaves. I don't think even Tharanor was expecting this many leaves to be in the room, as he let out a small, mortified gasp and said, "Ai, Turil-nîn!"
I was startled for a moment as a child stood up—I hadn't noticed any people, I had been concentrating so heavily on the leaves. She was a tall four-year-old, with a mop of white-blonde hair and huge, liquid brown eyes which were filling with tears as she anxiously looked up at her father.
"May I talk to her?" I asked him. He nodded.
I went over and stooped down so that I was eye-level with the child, and said, "Hello, Turil. My name is Rhodri. Your ada brought me to your house today so that I could see the leaves you've got in your room."
She watched me very carefully, saying nothing. I continued.
"I'm not here to remove them. I like leaves, too," I said with a smile. "They're very beautiful, aren't they?"
She nodded, a little more relaxed, but still wary.
"And this is a very special time of the year, with all the leaves turning such lovely colours. Walking through the leaves outside is one of my favourite things to do. Especially when I get a biiiig pile of them and throw them up in the air." I gestured like I was flinging something in front of my face. "Do you like to do that, too?"
Turil smiled. That was presumably a yes.
"What do you like best about your leaves in your room?"
She froze up for a moment and looked at her father fearfully. He looked genuinely confused by her look, hurt even.
I knew I wasn't going to get any details out of her while her father was present, so I had to find a way to sit comfortably with her while he was out, which is easier said than done when a stranger has just come into your bedroom.
In my experience, children enjoyed speaking over shared activities, such as playing board games, or drawing, or building something. I stood up and asked Tharanor to fetch a game Turil liked to play, and he came back with what looked like a pack of animal-themed memory cards.
"Ooh, I love this game," I said enthusiastically. "Would you like to play it with me while Ada starts making dinner?"
She nodded shyly. I gave Tharanor a polite smile which he correctly interpreted as an invitation to leave the room.
We sat cross-legged and turned all the cards face-down over the carpet of leaves.
"Do you have a favourite leaf?" I asked her as I turned two mismatched cards up.
"No," she replied, much more calm now that her father was out of the room. "I like them all."
"All of them, huh?" I said. "Those leaves are very lucky to all be liked equally. How many do you have here?"
Turil flipped a fox card I had picked up, and then another one, and made a match. "Oh, a lot. I don't know exactly how many, but definitely a lot."
"Do you want more?"
"If I need to bring in more, then yes."
"So you only bring them in when you have to, you mean?" I clarified.
"Well, yes," she said, making another match.
"Do you… do you like having leaves in your room?"
Turil sighed. This was getting curiouser and curiouser by the moment. I was starting to get the idea that she was experiencing the urges of anxiety to bring all the leaves inside to keep that feeling of irrational worry away. But then, she said, "I like keeping my friends safe."
Her friends. Had she befriended every leaf and wanted to save it from rotting outside after falling off the tree? Was there a witch she feared would steal her pile of autumn leaves to flop into?
I rubbed my chin as I turned up two more cards.
"It's always great to have friends looking out for you. You sound like a very good friend," I praised her warmly. "Are all these leaves your friends?"
Turil looked at me in confusion, and then said, "Oh, yes, the leaves are my friends, too."
"Too? Is there something else apart from the leaves?"
Turil gave me the polite but withering look so many children give a grown-up who just doesn't get it, and patiently said, "Oh, yes, I wouldn't just bring leaves into the house. They make a terrible mess, don't you see?"
I nodded. "I certainly do. It must make your bed uncomfortable to sleep in at times." I glanced up at her bed, which looked so crunchy that my skin started to crawl at the thought of having to sleep in it.
Turil nodded, and flipped up a mouse card and a butterfly card.
"Well, what else is there apart from the leaves, then?"
Turil scanned the leaf floor, picked one up, and held it close for my face to look at. I examined it and saw that small things were crawling over the leaf.
"Turil, what are those?" I asked quietly. "They look like… tiny spiders?"
"Yes," she replied. "They're my friends."
"So have you been bringing these leaves in because they had spiders on them?"
"Yes, they live on the leaves and lay their eggs there," she explained like a tiny overworked and underpaid professor.
"Aha, I see. But spiders live outdoors usually, don't they? They don't need to live in a house like we do. How come they have to be inside?"
Turil's expression hardened. She glanced at the door to make sure her father was away, and then looked at me.
"Are you friends with spiders, too?" she asked me seriously.
"Spiders should be everyone's friend; they are a very important part of the world," I answered. "We need them to keep our world healthy." It wasn't an outright yes, as I had no close personal connection to spiders, but was happy to live and let live as long as they stayed out of my food. It was apparently satisfactory, though, because Turil beckoned me with one hand to lean in so she could whisper something.
"I have to keep them safe, so that people won't kill them all," she informed me.
"What makes you think people are going to kill all of them?" I whispered back.
"I heard Ada and Nana talking about it before. They said they hated them and wanted the scouts to go out and get them," she said in a hushed tone. Turil looked up at me now, her huge eyes filling with tears again. "I don't want them to hurt my friends. I love them," she said, sniffling as a tear fell.
"Ah, I see," I said.
It had clicked at last. Children are awfully perceptive, and pick up a lot more than many think- especially when people think they're asleep or distracted with something else. I got the impression she had overheard her parents talking about what must have been some rather bothersome spiders that required scouts to kill (I gulped at the thought of such large spiders existing), and took it to mean they wanted dead all the spiders in the vicinity. Thank god, this was something I could do something about, and right away, too.
"You know, Turil, I think we could reach an agreement with your parents so your friends stay safe. Will you let me talk to them for a moment and see what I can arrange with them?"
Turil looked up and nodded, her lower lip trembling.
"I'll be right back."
I stepped out of the room and headed into the kitchen where Tharanor stood with a willowy lady with ice-blonde hair and striking silver eyes, who I presumed was Turil's mother. They were preparing food together, and once noticing I had entered, turned around and looked at me anxiously.
"Good afternoon," I said politely to the woman. "My name is Rhodri."
"Mae govannen," she greeted me back in a gentle voice. "I am Laerien. Have you been able to speak with Turil?"
"I have, yes. She is collecting the leaves and bringing them indoors to protect the small spiders that live on them. She mentioned something about overhearing the two of you talking of how you hated spiders and wanted them all dead. Do you recall having any such conversation?"
Tharanor had clapped his hand to his head before I'd even finished my question.
"Ah!" he said, looking pained. "It must have been that night we spoke of the Mirkwood forces being encroached on by the giant spiders there," he said, turning to his spouse.
"We had had news that the situation had worsened of late," Laerien explained to me.
"Ah, I see," I said. "Well, look, how big do these leaf-dwelling spiders your daughter has granted asylum to actually grow?"
"Oh, they will not grow any larger than a grain of sand," Laerien answered.
"Right," I said, inwardly sighing with relief that at least these weren't going to get to the size of a small automobile.
"In which case, I think what is called for is an open discussion about what you were talking about, in which you make it very clear that this is not happening here but in Mirkwood, and the reason people are fighting spiders in Mirkwood is because they are very big and dangerous and want to hurt people. Explain they are fighting the spiders to keep the people of Mirkwood safe. Make sure she knows that these spiders in her room are safe from that sort of turmoil, and that they will need to be set free outside because there is no food indoors for them to eat."
The parents looked relieved at this, and together, the three of us made our way to Turil's bedroom again.
"Turil?" I said as I knocked on the doorframe. Turil looked up at me expectantly.
"I had a word with Nana and Ada, and we made a good deal. Your friends are safe. I'll let your parents tell you about the deal we've reached, all right?"
The kid's eyes lit up, and a hopeful smile crept across her face. I couldn't help but smile, myself.
"I'll leave you to it," I said to the parents. "Hop a bit more out of earshot in future, and come up to my office any time if there's anything else, yes?"
"Yes, Rhodri, thank you very much" said Tharanor, Laerien nodding emphatically beside him.
I said my goodbyes to the three of them and saw myself out, singing Splish Splash as the rain drenched me all the way up to the dining hall.
Tharanor (Sind.)- vigorous sun
Turil (Sind.)- brilliant strength
Laerien (Sind.)- summer-daughter
