In The Cedar Weave Two https://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/t2285 Runboard| In The Cedar Weave Two en-us Fri, 29 Mar 2024 11:39:30 +0000 Fri, 29 Mar 2024 11:39:30 +0000 https://www.runboard.com/ rssfeeds_managingeditor@runboard.com (Runboard.com RSS feeds managing editor) rssfeeds_webmaster@runboard.com (Runboard.com RSS feeds webmaster) akBBS 60 Re: In The Cedar Weave Twohttps://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p16287,from=rss#post16287https://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p16287,from=rss#post16287 ******* “These are the articles of my religion, granddaughter, the things I’ve always kept from prying eyes. I can’t be certain how you will receive them, but I believe you are what we call an intuitive. If this is so, then the ways of the Old Religion will come to you naturally, come to you as if they are things you already know, and you will surprise yourself by how easily you respond to what we think of as the traditions of mystery fertility. But here I am already pacing out in front of myself. An old woman, and I’m suddenly feeling giddy. An old woman, and it’s summer when I’m always feeling like a new moon girl again. The story I want to tell you is just such a rounding thing I don’t know where to begin. “I am a witch, dear heart, or that’s what they would call me. But names are such funny things, don’t you think? And so very powerful. When I’m working my magic, I know it. When I’m calling on the Mothers, or drawing down the moon, or celebrating the holy, cross-quarter days, even when chatting with my familiars, many times I’ve known how a name can carry one away, how they can work my will, how they can even hurt. But as I started saying, I am a witch; a word that originally meant wise one, or, even, wise woman. Not that I’ve ever thought of myself as wise. Oh, but where to begin? “We are nature worshippers, we Wiccans. We work to keep inside nature’s rhythms, something you didn’t have to work at before the great divide. Yes, here is the place to start. We are inclined to see the whole order of the natural world, an ecotonal order smart people now call it, as animated, alive, aware of herself. There are different traditions within our religion, and we tend to think each one is like a rune falling from an ancient, everliving tree. Each tradition having its own partial truth to tell, and its own way of telling the story, but no one truth more truthful than the other. They all come from the same tree, you see, like leaves. Gather them up, and there will still be the new leaves sprouting in their season. And we like to think that if we circle our tree of life, each of us with what we’ve come to, we will complete the circle of our reverence for life while still learning more. So we dance and sing together there on the sacred days, we mourn there and we go quiet there, worshipping the larger orderings of nature. As for the rune I keep, or the tradition I’ve followed, we call it the cult of Diana, the Great Goddess whose faces are seen reflected in the phases of the moon, whose body is the ample earth, and who has a way of rising up over herself knowing herself. I read, once, where the old Alchemists decided that the world has a soul. It was good of them deciding so, or putting into their high words what nature worshippers have always known. But of course the world has a soul. And she has feeling, Ena, and moods, and cyclical neaps and floods tending upon her seasonal swings. Just like you. “As you’ve probably heard, witches work magic. For us, everyone is a priestess or a priest, everyone is capable of working their own will. I’ve often wondered why magic became important enough to us so that rituals were made for the work. It must have started a very long time ago when our ancestors were hunters and gatherers, and then planters, when food and fertility were the preoccupations leading wisewomen, I think they must have been women, to first observe the patternings of life, death, and renewal. With their insights into the patterning, an insight likely inspired by the cyclical patternings of the moon in her phases, must have come the rites of celebration, then the magic making when they would want to renew life in their sympathies. Then must have come the deep reverence for the mystery of it all. It also seems to me that later, much later, the need for making magic took a desperate turn. This would have been after the great divide and during the dark days when witches were hunted down, tortured and killed, their lands taken from them, for what they held to, for worshipping the earth and her mysteries, for keeping to the fire festival and earth festival days, and for insisting upon the older, cyclical ways of life in death. Magic may have been the last defense of country folk against the rich and the powerful coming out of their cities and castles to gobble up new lands, turning free born pagans into worker serfs. It also may have been the only defense against the crusaders of that crucifix religion seized by the notion that theirs was the one true religion. There is still a legend about a woman who came to help the simple people. They say her name was Aradia, and that she was Diana’s daughter by Lucifer, her son and Consort, whose name means Morning Star. She is supposed to have come teaching the older ways of magic on the shores of Lake Nemi, teaching how to draw down the power of the moon, how to make oneself invisible, even teaching how to fly away from persecutors. I don’t know, dear girl, but I’ve always found a kernel of truth in the tales of the Mothers. Maybe there was an Aradia who lived in the darkest days of persecution. Maybe she taught the art of self-defense while teaching the lore of Diana’s worship. I think Lake Nemi is also called Diana’s Mirror. Maybe Aradia was a priestess. Or maybe she was just a woman tired of being told she was helpless and dependent upon the handouts of a man and his idea of conception. And how can a man conceive, Ena? It doesn’t make sense. “We have our magic, Granddaughter. We also have our laws, and we have our Way. It’s all in the Book of Shadows I’m leaving to you, what I’ve kept through the years, as are the festival days. Magic is so easy to make. The hard part comes in knowing when you should and shouldn’t work your will. That’s why we have our laws, there being only two. ‘Love is the law,’ this is the first. ‘Do what you will and it harm no one,’ being the second. We also have a saying: ‘Watch to the magic you do, as it will come back on you threefold.’ Then there is the Witches Way, the seven steps, the seven bridges, the seven rainbow runs leading us through the labyrinth of our Mother’s home: Balance, Harmony, Trust, Humility, Truth, Learning, and Reincarnation. But most importantly we have the unwritten accord. It’s just that ours is a religion of the freeborn, Ena, who willingly suture themselves to the Mother-of-All-Things-Living. The men I’ve known, such as your grandfather, the men in black, have never thought of stopping the wheel of life, or of transforming the earth’s bowl into something it cannot contain. Instead, they have learned to sing, and to counsel upon the medial means, and to always stand in surety, sometimes to fall, for the sake of seasonal renewal. And the women with whom I’ve worked, the wild sisters with whom I’ve danced and woven the spells of love and life, of nurturing time, and with whom I’ve walked through the downside doors of winter’s wastes. Funny, but even now when I’ve come into the Old Crone’s cradle, I can still see the young girl in myself and that first time of my first crescent in my first moon dance of abandon. It’s how I know I’ve kept to the accord. And I wont be coming back this time. It looks as if I’ve learned the life and that it’s in my slope side where I’ll find my new home. In the dark ground, the coils of the soil, the rich gossamer loam through which goes running the up-from-under things, in the side of our Mother with whom I’ll ride through the wake of spiraling space. And so Granddaughter, if you come to stay in the cottage, well, I’ll not be far. “What a chatty old thing I’m being and using words you’ll not connect to what you know of me. I keep so much hidden in my body. But I have to remind myself there are some things the Mothers say I can’t give over to you. Not that you don’t already have them in the body knowing way. I think you do. They say that, in learning the Way, what you have naturally will not mean anything to you until you’ve brought it up to the surface by yourself, and that, to do so, you must bring it all up originally, by your own means. But you’ve always been a reflective sort of girl. I see no need to worry about you overly, except in your choice of men. Pardon an old woman her remarks, my girl, but do show a little more care in your choice of men. A woman, Ena, always does choose her men. “No, there is no reason to worry about you too much. I’ve kept in touch with you through the cards over the years. They’ve showed me not so much where you’ve been, but how you’ve been, and the rest I’ve been able to guess. I’ve thrown them again, just now, and the same high card of yours comes up, the card of the High Priestess. It is the sign of every woman’s high quality and every man’s inside sister. But in you the card is especially strong. Maybe so. Maybe my cottage is where you’ll make your turn, rising with the shining face up over the world while turning your own face to the inward place. There also seems to be a woman who will affect you strongly. Hard to say how, but maybe she belongs to one of the lady’s more daring names, she who has 10,000 names. Yes, she will show you something you’ve not known. And, oh dear, there he is. An Earth’s son, and probably tall and dark. And the Secret Fame. And the Sun Bowl. And the… “Ena, dear girl, you must listen to me. It’s all, and I will tell you so no matter what the Mothers may say, it’s all just a game. A song and a dance, and just a game. It’s what we do, we play a game. It’s the most serious game there is to play, which is all the more reason to remember our life is just a game. But, still, why tell you so, since, you wont remember? You’ll forget. In the spiraling dance, in the abandon, in the deep feelings you’ll forget, the way we always do. Maybe we must, as who else is there who can play out her rituals so well, so convincingly, who else but her earth sworn will keep on dancing the world into creation? “You’ll see a single star shining in the smoky sky. No other stars will be out. It will be spoken of as the star of the night, and dark age children will sing a song about Aradia who has come back…Just another old wives’ tale I thought you might enjoy hearing. “What more should I tell you, my dear? There is so much I could say. Familiars, and how they come of their own when they know you to be instinctive, how they ground you, grounding you in a way the Indians of the land also know. It’s a funny similarity, this – between a witches familiars and the animal guides belonging to Indians. But it’s only one of many similarities I’ve noticed. I could also tell you about the three faces of Diana’s moon, the new, the full, the old, and about her fourth face, the dark face of her far side where every woman becomes a wild woman reveling in the cold, cruel, unfeeling things. And I could tell you about many of the Lady’s 10,000 names, how old she is, and how many millennial turns she’s made. We witches trace our religion back through the European days, back before his-story was created, even before the sister seeds were sown by our first village mothers, and maybe as far back as a hand held oil lamp can throw its light on cave painted walls. Not that we look for a place of origin, as it seems to us now that there may have been a kind of crescent described and reaching from European shores as far to the east as the Sacred Lake, a kind of continuation out of which came ancestral, lunar-wise wisdom and calendar days. There must have been a day, Ena, when our gardening Diana was not just a half-memory, a dream kept alive in privacy, or even islands of traditions isolated from each other by unfriendly times, but a home-reality. That would have been a very long time ago, a time coming before the unbalancing warrior wheels, before consorts and kings betrayed their territorial queens, no longer standing in surety of the fertile zone’s yield. And you must pity them a little, Ena, these men with the uneasy memory that makes them always jittery, sullen, or angry when standing before a naturally strong woman. They have so little to stand on, and they always know it in the end. “Maybe there is one story I should be sure to tell you, the story of the year which has come to be woven through the tapestry of our religion. Not that there’s only one story to tell. There are many variations, with still more likely to come. But it is what we call the story of love, life, and death. It tells of how the territorial queen chooses her lover some time after the Eve of February, when the ewes are lactating; how he proves himself in battle, while his strength is waxing, with the king of stags, sometimes with the bullman; how the two lovers then come together during the earth festival of May, when, between them, the fields are made fertile and the forest game is renewed; how he continues to wax in strength while she grows in ripeness until the turn of midsummer when he loses her, sometimes to his rival who is the spirit of the waning year and sometimes to her other-truth needs; until he must go questing after her through the portal of August Eve when he turns down into the wasted lands where she is sometimes a captive and sometimes a queen of the underworld, and only then, really then, proving he is worthy of her harvest of love; and so she gives him a drink of the golden bowl, some say it is a grail of sunlight, as they walk through the further door of Samhain, they call it Halloween, to travel through the rainbow lands where mountains walk and rivers dream; until they finally emerge in the upper world through the swinging door of Winter Solstice, her sacrificed lover now her boy-child and the land lady a renewed queen. “It is all just a half-forgotten romance now, the story of the territorial queen in her lunar year. And so many variations. But there was a time when the story’s drama was taken seriously, with scenes of single combat, or with oak kings flayed alive deep inside the trees, with whole villages seized by the fertility fever and coming together at the fire and earth festival times, and with the queen in close attendance upon the rituals marking each of the year’s stations. Funny thing is, Ena, witches nowadays keep to the story, and to its stations, as emblems of our reverence for what is natural in life, death, and renewal, and as trumps in our own progress through the Way. We celebrate the fire festivals in circles and the stations of the sacred year. Time, for us, is a joyful dance, not a burden. We also find deep need in going to a secluded spot under a full moon. On Samhain, talking of one station, I always spend it alone, remembering the dead, turning down the underworld door, and praying for the not-yet-born. But the funniness is how other, more modern folk treat these things, especially people living in cities. It is as if they are the ones still seized by the primitive times, still playing through missed steps of a dance whose rhythm they know they know, if they could just remember. Under a big moon they can lose all control, become lunatics. In spring, even in a small town such as this one, you hear the roaring fire of automachines. In summer it’s the banshee screams of sirens. And Samhain seems to be a time for everyone to parade about demonically, while winter becomes a time of depression when it should be the season for working inside one’s own retreat, for the inside, personal, underworld retreat. All I can think, granddaughter, is that your world is desperately trying to get back to a path in keeping with a familiar’s instincts. But as always happens when instincts’ inclinations have been held down too long, suppressed, coming up again they come up twisted, deformed like an oceanside oak standing against constant, harsh winds. Pardon an old woman her remarks, but I’ve thought about these things for a long time. It’s just that I think Christianity’s fathers have much for which they need to be forgiven, much bad karma needing the centuries to work through, what with their otherworld virtues having lost, for their followers, the silver thread leading them back here to home. Not that they’re alone, mind you. Like father like son, mind you. And so to the free thinking sons who’ve made a disconnected world of science and cities, then whose own sons have cleared and cut whole bodies of my earth mother as if she were inert, not feeling, who’ve smeared oil on the seas, and who rend holes in the airy veil our Mother holds so high in the sky to keep us alive…Oh, but listen to how I’m going on. I guess I’ve become a garrulous old thing. Besides, neaps and floods is how it goes. It’s how she measures out her time. Land loves coming in, spilling out again. Speeding up and slowing down, rounding and round, La la La. And she still keeping inside her orbital swing like a dancer in the universe. “It’s a lengthy letter I’m leaving you. Maybe I should sit with you, instead, to tell you these things. It’s what I’ve thought. But your mother will soon be taking me to the nursing home, not understanding I might want to be alone with this one, and there isn’t much time. She doesn’t know, by the way. She has never seen with the sight or asked the questions, and I’ve never pressed these things on her. And you, my dear, you may do with this box of goodies what you will. I would only ask that if I’m wrong about you, if you feel the distrust and uncertainty in walking down the serpent Way, that you forget about the box and my book, and just remember me fondly. Blessed Be.” nondisclosed_email@example.com (Terreson)Sat, 14 Sep 2013 15:48:07 +0000 Re: In The Cedar Weave Twohttps://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p16269,from=rss#post16269https://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p16269,from=rss#post16269 ******* Ena opens the unmarked box first, maybe wanting to steady herself a little before opening the second, and still watching how the snow turns into rain, and how the rain washes away the whiteness in the grass. Then glancing again out the window, before turning to the contents of the box, and seeing that there must be twenty or thirty of her winter friends, the gray jacketed juncos, feeding on the uncovered seed. Coming first to the photo albums on top, but Ena knows them, associating them with one visit or another carrying her back to her first memory of her grandmother’s house. Pictures of her grandmother’s childhood in Arkansas on the family’s Ozarks farm; an old truck overpiled with the household belongings, or her grandmother as a young girl smiling just perceptibly when no one in the family group is supposed to be smiling. And the great-grandparents dressed in black, dressed for circumstance, standing with backs straightened. Then the pictures of Ena’s grandmother with her husband, with the grandfather Ena never saw who was an itinerant, her grandmother told her once, while smiling the way she always smiled while talking of him. A natural born salesman, she always said, who could sell snake oil with his charm alone, and the best fiddler she ever heard. How he could sing, Ena’s grandmother once declared, and how he could leave a girl feeling charmed and pretty. Ena remembering too what her grandmother told her when she again asked about him, and learning how he had tried for ten years to be a family man, her grandmother said, and that he had been a steady provider and constant friend. But then the day coming when he stopped his singing, gradually turning as quiet as a senseless songbird on the window sill. And she finally telling him to go, asking him to please leave. Not but that she wouldn’t have word from him after he was gone, from time to time, or the money he could send when she seemed to need it the most. Then the visits when she always welcomed him, letting him in, never even wanting to say no to him. And so it continued until he died, not so old, which was maybe what he had known all along. Knowing too that he was meant to play his sweet fiddle for all the Saturday night people for as long as he could. She never felt the regrets for how her life turned before or after him, Ena’s grandmother said on that or some other day. No regrets, she said and smiling her truthful smile. Next in the box some old yellowed bills marked paid, along with the account books her grandmother had kept. Then another photo album, this one of Ena’s mother growing up, and of the cottage when it was being built by the two Indian carpenters her grandmother employed, one of whom stayed her man friend, man worker for years. Then the pictures of Ena and Burton as children. The pictures reminding her that Burton always has been the serious one, always being the responsible one, and quiet keeping even when he played. Why has he always been so serious? Why, also, should the bird book be here? But here it is at the bottom of the box, the green cloth covering its boards and binding being so faded, and with her grandmother’s records of her sightings inside, their days and seasons noted. So much regard her grandmother had for everything happening around her, and in words such as “the dunlins flashing their wings in evening display, a thousand or more dropping in a cold light drapery over the bay, making it a drapery of dunlins.” Ena now looking through the book and finding, finally knowing the name of her reddish-orange bird. Its given name giving it the name of a varied thrush. With the first box emptied, Ena goes to the kitchen for the scissors with which to cut the strings of the second. Idly glancing through the big panes of the bayfront windows, glancing out because she can hear the whistling, then seeing a large flock of the goldeneyes flying in, whistling on the wings. Seeing too a cormorant perched on top of an old piling, spreading its wings to dry, making the girl think of a thunderbird dream, the long billed cormorant spreading its angular wings, like a cedar carved thunderbird on a north coast Indian’s totem pole. The rain gradually becoming lighter, turning to a fine mist, nearly a gauziness to her.  Strings cut, the cardboard flaps almost springing up. Box open and the sudden smell of incense. The box’s contents covered with an indigo colored scarf made of silk. On top of the scarf is an envelope. Turning the envelope over, Ena just a little startled to see that it is sealed in the old way, with wax. Impressed on the seal a picture Ena could swear she has seen before. It is of a bare breasted woman wearing a ribbed skirt reaching to her feet, and who stands on a cone, or a beehive, or a pinnacle of some sort. Where has Ena seen that image before? Yes, she remembers. It is the same as the woman in her dreams standing on a mountain or a ridge. It is Ena’s mountain lady dream. And should she break the seal? Should she break it? Should she open the letter that is clearly for her? And should she lift back the scarf? Still her grandmother, her grandmother’s cottage, her grandmother’s things, her grandmother’s slope side ring. Now this box her grandmother has left for her as well. Ena takes the scissors, not really thinking anymore or listening to her own questions. She opens the envelope along the crease of its fold, and she takes out the letter addressed to her. Then sitting back in her chair to read. nondisclosed_email@example.com (Terreson)Sat, 07 Sep 2013 17:17:18 +0000 In The Cedar Weave Twohttps://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p16216,from=rss#post16216https://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/p16216,from=rss#post16216 Part Two The Inheritance Ena’s own day coming to her in the sleepy Saturday morning when there is no place she has to be. The girl still abed, waking up easily, not yet opening herself to the day, then closing her eyes again. The brown eyed girl who sees through flecks of green. She feels the liquid sense, the dreamy tense, of coming just up from under her sleep, of bobbing on the surface there where she floats between the two worlds of waking and dreaming. Then stretching a leg, since, feeling the luxury of stretching her limbs, and opening her eyes a second time that are starting to focus on the bedroom’s window scene. Seeing snow falling, the white flakes largely plopping past her window. And suddenly awake, since, she suddenly remembers the catkins on her willows, the tassels hanging from alder stems, and the maple buds already reddening on their branches. Then pulling back the heavy cover, reaching for her robe, stepping into her warm slippers, and walking to the outside door she opens. The sound of it, the snow, the flicking of the white flakes coming down through the trees, and the fat plopping of heavy wet snow as it falls on the slope grass that never entirely loses its green. And the melting, she can see, the way the snow melts in the grass, in the warming earth bowl, in the soft earth thaw. Only a mantle sticking to the evergreen leaves of the blackberry bushes and to the steps with their railings. Then seeing the slush on her deck that decides for Ena the snow has not been falling for long. Standing where she stands, crossing her arms to hold her body warmth in, hearing the quiet of the hush in the stillness of the cover of the white stuff. Just the quiet, the stillness, the way in which the whole slope side must be holding itself in in the way Ena still holds herself in. The mantel, the coverlet, the drapery of the snow, and Ena who feels in the white quiet the in-between tense of early, early spring. The thawing thought. The tease. Just the easy feeling for the early flower petals of the spring beauties that will soon be twirling, suddenly starting and spreading their parts, while already she sees the catkins on the willows, the soft alder tassels, and the budding red tips in the alders. But really, girl, she thought and blinking her eyes, coming out of her reverie, are you waking or sleeping? You should still be looking after your fire. Building the fire back up from its embers isn’t a task that takes Ena very long anymore. Neither is it something she has to think about. The cottage soon warming, her coffee making, Ena already dressed, and then taking what is probably her favorite breakfast. Peanut butter on toast. Not that it is a dish she would have in company, as friends have always teased her about her sweet morning tooth. But, by herself, it is a treat. Her coffee then made, and Ena moving to sit in her big chair at the side window looking onto the slope. After the big blizzard came through, Ena decided to keep birdseed out on the slope for the birds to feed. First she had thrown the seed out on the grass, but later she took a cedar shake, tacked it to the side of the new wood shed, and now keeps it laden with sunflower seeds. Mostly what come are the crows coming from along the shore whose antics are mantic to her. But sometimes a large flock of juncos can come through, the slate colored birds still like winter friends for Ena. They always seem so cheerful. Then there soon came the wrens, the song sparrows, the bushtits, the towhees, and the dee-dee-dee of the chestnut chickadees, and also the birds she still doesn’t know. Such as the one bird with the bright orange throat, with the black band across its chest, and with the reddish wing bars flashing in flight. Ena thinks she can remember her grandmother having had a bird book, and this morning she thinks again, thinking of it then, of going into the cottage’s one closet, a really deep closet, where she saw the two boxes when first moving in. Maybe the book is in one of them. But probably not, since, it is more likely to have been with the other books that had still been in the kitchen. The cookbooks, the herb books, the wildflower book, the book of local trees and shrubs, and the blank book in which her grandmother kept her recipes. And so the bird book must be lost, Ena thinks. But she has been meaning to pull out those boxes, just waiting for one of her curiosity days. Maybe it is today, maybe it is, but there is a bird Ena knows. Her grandmother was the only person she knows of to call it a great crested woodpecker. Further up the slope, having landed on one of the old rotting railroad ties set in place for terracing, there suddenly the pileated woodpecker. It is a marvel. Just as Ena couldn’t understand the thrill she feels in seeing it there, or in seeing how it came from nowhere, come appearing on the spread of its wide, thick black wings, come lighting on the old tie and looking like some kind of crested forest king changed into the majesty of a bird, if, maybe, to escape some enemy. Changed out of love, Ena thinks, out of great love, she could have hoped, or greater sympathy. Strong talons spread wide, bent legs ready to spring it away, the black shoulders, the light absorbing blackness of its tail, its face painted with white stripes, the brilliant, nearly vermilion red of its crest, and the long spearbill with which it digs into, tearing and drilling its way into the rotten wood. But, of course! There must be the insects, the carpenter ants and the termites, in that wood. Stopping occasionally to side view its own progress, the pileated had already made fly the sizable wood chips, and resting only to take another look-see. Then chiseling again. Then licking with a long and narrow tongue the new cavity clean. But Ena can’t tell if the large bird is finding what it needs to feed. Ena can’t tell from where she sits, and still the strange thrill at seeing the masked stranger crested in red in the white snow still falling in the blades of the green grass. When it suddenly flew away Ena felt how her face was pressing against the cold glass. She must have startled it, she realizes. She must have made a quick move in its view. She belongs here, Ena knows. She is belonging to the little moments she comes to, such as being in the pileated’s window frame, or to the larger latches her moments can trip open inside her. Sitting back in her chair, letting the morning fill up until she is ready to move, and weaving her in and out of her sedentary Saturday morning. They are just the little moments coming to her like visiting friends, or rolling around her like waves, even echoing through her in the quiet, far reaching way. Already the slope has given her many small vignettes to thread, many little fleshy moments bodying themselves out by way of making their own passages. Such as when the harbor seal and her pup had stayed close to the cottage for most of last summer, and how the mother gradually went away for a little longer every day while the pup swam up and down barking for her until it finally understood, until it finally started fishing for itself. Or the family of mallards that started large enough along the shore, the mother starting with eleven mallardlings swimming behind her, and coming through into autumn with the three awkward teenagers left surrounding her. Seeing the mallard and her family touched on the nurturing thing in Ena, and, by the end of the summer, she was thinking how hard it must be to raise the natural family, and how the plans of builder folk could only succeed in making such a thing harder. There is also the family of otters she has seen several times over, coming through usually in the night, always playful, even with the fish they catch. On one night she watched them unnoticed as they came to the shore near to her cottage, then diving back in, circling each other, and the star bursting phosphorescence of broken down life light in the arcing trails they made while describing their intelligent play. Then before the rains came early in autumn Ena was sitting on the day bed, one late evening, out in the big paned window room, and she watched a doe come walking down the beach. A solitary doe coming nearer to town, walking the shore, almost high stepping with delicate grace, then still coming nearer out of her own silhouette until her legs and shoulders were the rounding flesh in the night, until her sloe black eyes were shining, until she came to Ena’s cottage, looking up to where Ena sat on the bed, then quietly, slowly moving on. These are the moments, Ena thinks while noticing how the snow grows lighter, that she is coming to. Or are they, instead, she thinks again, are they moments coming to her? It’s what she feels in them when she lets herself feel that way. The threading, fleshy feeling again of a kind of centering disposition she can’t name. Sometimes, such as now in the still white morning of an early spring snow, she feels as if ensconced in the middle of a grotto in a deep grove. She feels as if the moments are coming to her, one by one and slowly, coming to where she is. The natural moments belonging to familiars, to the little ones, and yes, even to the old souls, the first born who are tilled and fetally curled back under, the ones who seem to be coming back up again in the budding branches, in the ivy vein shuddering, and in the quiver of leaves. Ena doesn’t know. She doesn’t know about such things. But what she does know, and more certainly than she has ever known before, is that she is becoming a natural beauty, and one who belongs to where she presently lives. Snow flakes starting to melt, mixing now with the rain. A south wind gently blows in, and the water trickling down through her gutters from the melting snow on her roof. But there is the bird on the cedar shake again, the reddish orange bird she doesn’t know. So she will dig into the closet that is in the heart of her home, Ena decides. She will do it now. What a strange feeling to be feeling while going into the cottage’s one closet, situated in the middle of her home, and Ena feeling as if she is stepping inside a hidden doorway. But she has gone into there nearly every day, reaching for a blouse, a sweater, or a pair of shoes. Only, she hasn’t had a reason to reach to the end of the deep-long closet, and now she is. Pulling out her things, her small box of tools, her sewing machine, the bag of sewing patterns that tend to hold the almost completed skirts, coming next to the box of Christmas ornaments she didn’t take out this year, since, she had not felt like having a tree, and then the things she keeps for no particular reason except that they are hers. Then finally reaching to the end of the closet and finding the two boxes she saw sitting in the corner when she first moved in. Lifting the top box to her, Ena sees that the second box is labeled with her name, and that, unlike the first box, it is cross-tied with strings. Just her very name and she hadn’t known. Ena who has lived here for nearly a year, and who hasn’t known of this box within the box of her home that her grandmother left for her. It is enough to give her the really queer feeling. Then pulling out the two boxes, stepping between her own things scattered on the floor, and returning to her chair by the window. Ena who is shaking a little and feeling that, feeling the vertigo sense, that mothering motion, that sense of being lifted over and held above a blue-black ocean. nondisclosed_email@example.com (Terreson)Sat, 24 Aug 2013 15:07:08 +0000