A Cherokee legend you can read to your kids about the origin of the woodpecker

[cdinanno]

                       I want to tell you the origin of the woodpecker.

There was a hateful old woman that lived in a Cherokee village a long time ago.  I mean hateful!  Like she hated children.  But she loved her garden.  Each day she would dress herself in a long black skirt & a red handkerchief on the top of her head and she would go out & spend hours and hours among her plants and trees.  She carefully picked off the bugs & she would trim all the trees each day & get all the dead branches & leaves off of them, even to the point where she would scream at the children if they got close.  She loved her plants & flowers, but she didn't like people, especially kids that went too close to her garden.  On the other side of her garden was a creek.  That's where everybody went to throw rocks & go fishing & swimming.  Every hot summer day, the kids would try to go thru her garden to get down to the creek.   That made her so mad!  She'd run at them, and she'd say "Get out of here.  I told you to never..."  Oh, she'd just scream at them  something awful & scare the kids so bad!  The little ones would cry & the older ones would get mad and say, "Well this belongs to everybody.  You don't have the right to keep us from the swimming hole."  They'd go back  & tell their  mom and dad & the next day they"d do it again.  "I told you to get out of here.  Run, I told you.  Don't you run thru here anymore."  Oh, she was awful.

But the medicine woman didn't like that & thought, "You know these kids do have a right to go down there to the water, & she put a spell on her. 

The next time she ran out to the garden & yelled at the kids & threw her arms up & said, "Get out from here."  She went up to the air & she kept going & looked down & her black skirt had turned into black feathers & her red kerchief had turned into a top knot on the top of her head & her arms had turned into wings & she turned into a woodpecker, even today.  What do you see a woodpecker do on a tree? 

That's the old woman trying to get the bugs off the trees 'cause she's still trying to take care of her garden.  And that's how we got woodpeckers.