Tessa and the Humming Wind

Chapter 1: A girl who thinks she can’t sing finds that the whole village loves her cheerful humming

In a village called Larkmeadow, everyone sang.

The baker sang while kneading dough. The blacksmith sang over his anvil, clang-a-dang, in a voice like thunder. The children sang skipping rhymes on the green, and on Sunday evenings the whole village gathered in the square for the Singing Supper, where voices rose together like smoke from a hundred chimneys.

Everyone sang, that is, except Tessa Pickering.

Tessa was nine years old, with a sprinkle of freckles and a cowlick that refused to lie flat. She loved music with her whole heart. But she was quite sure she could not sing.

It had happened at the spring concert, when she was seven. She had stood on the stage in a paper crown, opened her mouth for her solo, and a squeak had come out, high and wobbly, like a door in need of oil. Somebody in the back row had giggled. It was only a small giggle, not meant unkindly. But Tessa had heard it, and she had never forgotten.

"I'm no good at singing," she told her mother that night. "I'll just listen."

And so she did. At the Singing Supper, she sat at the very end of the bench with her lips pressed shut while everyone else sang. At school, she mouthed the words. In the garden, she kept very quiet, in case a neighbor might hear.

It made her sad, though she didn't say so. Being the only quiet one in a village of singers felt like being a gray pebble on a path of colored glass.

But there was one thing Tessa couldn't stop herself from doing.

She hummed.