Commune of Women (25 page)

And that was just the smells. There were all the other senses left to indulge – like sound! There on the mountain, the wind always speaks in a low moan through the pine boughs, day and night. And in a storm? The voice of the gods! Wotan bemoaning his scooped-out eye! Isis anguishing for lost Osiris!

And the conversation of birds and animals is the sub-text; trilling and hooting, coughing and chattering, howling and snuffling – a poetry too mellifluous, a symphony too polyphonic to convey. We rational beings, so stunted, asensual and sad, lack the vocabulary or the instrumentation. We grownups.

She’s carried those childhood experiences with her into adulthood and that, she supposes, is why her dreams are so vivid and premonitory now. In sleep, that well-honed instinctual self is still roaming the woods of the unconscious, picking up cues.

So, many mornings she’s gone through her routine in a daze, still pondering the inner images and whisperings, and just waking to the gossip of the natural world. First thing every morning, she puts the kettle on for tea before going out into the cold morning wind to split kindling and lug in firewood, so the wood stove can take the chill off the house.

This time of year, the east wind is a gale as she steps out into the dawn light. It cuts right through the wood-hauling jacket she always throws on, that’s snagged from hugging oak logs close to her chest and sticky in spots from pine pitch.

Splitting sticks of kindling off the straight grain of a cedar round, she uses the strokes as a metronome to orchestrate the images of the last night’s dream – like the one she had just before she flew down here to L.A...

She’s in a city intersection, surrounded by buildings. Power poles support scalloped black cables that cross the intersection diagonally, marking a big X in the yellow sky. She’s under the X in the center of the intersection with traffic rocketing all around her, not paying her the slightest heed. She looks over her shoulder and sees a white delivery van bearing down on her. There’s no way to escape. A step in any direction and she’ll be mowed down by traffic. She stands there helplessly as the bumper of the truck comes at her like the lowered horns of a bull.

And then, of course, she wakes up, with her heart pounding.

So while she’s still lost in those images, she’s pulling back a black plastic tarp and beginning to stack wood in the crook of her left elbow; a few small pieces of limb wood to feed the first flames from the kindling, some medium-sized logs to add next, and just at the edge of her arm’s strength, one big split of oak to top things off.

She lays the fire the same way every time, with crumpled newspaper first, then crossed sticks of kindling, a couple of thin pieces of limb wood balanced on top of that. That just about fills the firebox. She closes the damper so the updraft won’t blow out the match and lays the flame against the bottom wad, where it hesitates before grabbing hold of the paper and then eats greedily.

When the fire’s fully engaged, she opens the damper and the heat rushes up the stovepipe with a roar like the afterburner on a jet. Once she hears that sound, she can relax. When a stove draws like that, a fire isn’t going to smolder down to nothing; it’s going to burn like a barn in August.

Winter on the mountain can be trying. Storms race in from the Pacific and dump rain or snow, then keep blowing eastward until they thump up against the Sierra crest where they moil and toil around a day or two, dropping snow and scouring the peaks with wind. Then the clouds wheel around and come charging down from the heights laden with cold they’ve picked up over the eternal snow-fields and glaciers.

When they reach the high foothills where she lives, they’re moving with the power and speed of a runaway freight train and, because the house sits right on a ridge, the east winds slam into it like the Furies. The whole house concusses, as if it were being beaten by a giant sledgehammer.

When the east wind blows, there’s really no way to keep the house warm. Frigid air seeps into every crack. Sophia stuffs the stove full and it eats and eats logs, all day long. By evening, it’s warm enough to sit by the fire in comfort. An hour after she’s gone to bed, the place is frigid again. In the morning, she starts the process all over again.

She likes living that way. It keeps her honest. There’s no ignoring the cycle of the seasons or denying the intensity of cold or heat. There’s nothing artificial about the way she lives; she and Earth commune.

In November now, she limits her time outdoors and treasures her indoor hours. When spring comes, she’ll throw the doors open and let the fresh wind cleanse away winter’s smoke, while she washes windows and scrubs floors.

Her day is made up of these small, elemental rituals. She keeps her life simple and deliberate. She digs and weeds and plants in her garden; she goes for walks with her dogs; she washes and irons her clothes. She writes in her journal. She sews or reads or cooks...

“But Sophia,” Ondine blurts out, “how do you make a
living?
”

Sophia shrugs. “Money’s usually the last thing on my agenda. I’m not a person who cares to have it. It’s simple necessity, nothing more.”

Heddi scowls. Ondine looks at her in confusion.

“But...I mean...you have to
live!
You’ve got bills, surely. You’ve got a car. You need to eat.”

Sophia shrugs again. “I grow most of my own food. But you’re right. I do have a few bills; property taxes, if nothing else. And I have an old ‘57 Chevy truck that I maintain myself...but it does need gas once in a while.”

“So...?”

So she does astrological readings for a living, by phone or by mail. Every once in a while, she gets a client who insists on meeting with her personally. That’s always a bit of a jangle to her nerves because she’s so reclusive, but it’s interesting to see the face of the person she already knows so well through their chart.

Seeing their reaction to her and her situation is pretty interesting, too. They always arrive a little shaken. There’s a narrow, twisting, five-mile grade up the mountain, with a 500-foot drop into the canyon. People have to really
want
what Sophia’s got. And fortunately, she has a good reputation, so they keep coming even if the journey’s death-defying.

Once they pull in, they sit in the car for a minute or two, sort of collecting themselves. When they finally do open the garden gate, it’s with the trepidation of Vasilisa sneaking into Baba Yaga’s hut to steal fire.

Sophia admits her place is a bit odd – an accretion of her personal aesthetic and the materials that fall to hand. There’s a high wall around house and garden – that’s to keep the deer out, or they’d eat not just the roses but her kitchen garden, too. Also, it’s a psychological boundary between her little enclave of civilization and the surrounding woods. Otherwise, her place would feel like a raft in the middle of an endless ocean.

The wall’s a daub and wattle affair she pieced together out of oak branches, suckers pruned from the fruit trees and woven into screens, boulders and local clay. It’s a toss-up whether it supports the rose and grape vines, or they support it. It gives the place a distinctly medieval ambience, as if serfs in coarse tunics bearing scythes might come stooping by any minute.

Inside the garden gate – an old cast iron bedstead that she’s outfitted with leather hinges – the courtyard is filled with herbs and native plants that she uses for her concoctions. Wind chimes clank in the branches of the fruit trees and fetishes of feathers, twigs, and colored twine, binding little sacks of this and that, twirl in the wind.

The compost pile is lying ripe and black in full view. The woodpile and her chopping block are to the left of that, with the kitchen garden beyond. Chickens scratch under the rosemary and lavender bushes and peafowl strut among the cabbages.

A huge iron hog-scalding cauldron dominates the center of the courtyard – not to scald hogs, Heaven forbid! – but as her primary aesthetic statement: the Vessel of the Divine Feminine. It’s six feet across and four feet high and must weigh two tons, if it’s an ounce. Too large to ignore or to take lightly, it looks like something from a cartoon about cannibals cooking missionaries for lunch. It always gives people a start when they first see it, a momentary intuition of their mortality, she supposes, looking into the maw of the Life-and-Death Mother.

When she comes down to greet them, that gives them a jolt, too, because she always puts on her ceremonial garb. What’s the use of arcane practices without ritual trappings? Would you go to a wedding in a bikini? The opera in your nightshirt? So why do a reading about the designs of the Cosmos in bib overalls?

She’s been working on her robes for years, starting in her early twenties with a coat that she found at a thrift store, stitched from a two-point Hudson Bay blanket. From the early days of the fur trade, she explains, point blankets were made into hooded coats called
capotes
by both natives and French Canadian voyageurs. Whoever designed this one was off to a good start – wide straight sleeves and a pointed hood with a long streamer cut from the border hanging down the back. It’s bright rosy red with two black stripes running around the hemline and the two 6-inch points along the front edge. She figures it was well over a hundred years old when she found it.

When she bought it, it was full of moth holes, so she spent the next ten years embroidering moths over every hole, using her insect field guide for accuracy. The smallest is a tiny gray thing barely half an inch long and the biggest is a full-sized Luna moth in an exquisite pale green that looks very exotic against the fuzzy red wool.

The coat is never really finished. Every summer, when she stores it away, the moths eat new holes. When winter comes, she begins stitching all over again – which is okay because there are still so many moths to choose from in the book.

If butterflies are the symbol of the soul, she thinks of moths as night steeds that carry the soul into the deep realms, other dimensions or alternate realities – places into which she’s never been afraid to venture. They’re bringers of the energy she needs for the readings.

But red was never really her color. She’s a Pisces and drawn to cool, watery shades. So she’s made herself a skirt of aquamarine silk cut from a single old drapery she found at the flea market. The places where it folded outward and caught the sun are faded and the interior folds are dark, so it has the tonal variation of water that she loves.

Being so big – not fat, of course, but just so tall and broad-shouldered – she’s lucky to have all that curtain yardage for her outfit. She’s like one of those jokes men tell about women who have their clothes made by Omar the Tentmaker.

And she’s also working on a cape that’s to look like sea foam when it’s done. The base is a curtain of handmade lace, one of a pair that a friend gave her when she cleaned out her grandmother’s house. It’s wide and long and trails behind her a bit because she doesn’t dare cut it.

Then she started gathering bits of lace, old linen napkins, a tattered antique Chinese shawl in white silk pongee, embroidered in white with flowers and birds. That, she stitched down whole over the shoulders, using the ends to tie the cape on. The other scraps she just sews side by side, making an incredible patchwork of white fabrics and textures: old crocheted doilies, lengths of tatted trim, bobbin and Battenburg lace – anything white and feminine, and only those treasures actually made by women’s hands.

She started at the hemline and after about seven years, she’s reached the waist. Other than the shawl it’s just lace from there up, but she wears it anyway, just like the moth coat. Probably neither one will ever be finished.

Someday, they’ll bury her in her unfinished finery.

So with her gray hair hanging to her waist, her aqua skirt, red coat and white cape, she supposes she’s quite a spectacle coming down the stairs to greet her clients.

She doesn’t do this to alarm or impress them. She does it to honor the old gods and goddesses who honor her with their inspiration. She knows the God of modern religion doesn’t care if you’re in polyester or Spandex, as long as you’re decent. But she believes that her goddesses
do
care – they’d rather she came naked than in synthetic fabrics. Natural fibers are gifts they give us, and using them in ritual is part of the sacred cycle.

She always starts her astrological readings with a Tarot reading. She never touches the cards without washing her hands first. Then she prays over them that only the truth will manifest there, that the best and highest good will come through them.

Sophia stops and glances around to see the women looking at her oddly.

“You must think I’m incredibly weird. Sometimes, I think so, myself. But really, I was just born in the wrong century or the wrong culture. Women like me have been carrying forward the rituals of humankind since we lived in caves. I’m just a latter-day shaman, is all.”

Sophia sings the sun up in the morning and down again at evening, in Sanskrit – the
Agni Hotra
. She blesses the yogurt to set while it’s still liquid and thanks her vegetables and flowers before picking them. It takes so little effort and energy to honor the sacredness of the world.

Lately, she’s taken to blessing road kill, those poor little creatures and rags of bloody fur that people whiz past so thoughtlessly. They break her heart, so she prays for their souls. She’s sure they have them, just like people do. So as she’s rolling along in her pickup, she says her prayers. Her eyes aren’t what they used to be and if she blesses a grease rag or a shoe lost beside the road, so what?

The other day, she mistook some fast food trash for a dead skunk and was well into her prayer before she realized she was praying for a bag of Taco Bell Styrofoam. Well, who’s to say Styrofoam doesn’t need our prayers?

Sophia looks around at her audience again. Pearl is lost in some reverie of her own. Erika is tossing in a sweat-glazed doze on the couch. Ondine looks listlessly at the floor, while Heddi and Betty stare – Heddi with fathomless eyes, and Betty as if Sophia might suddenly straddle the broom and dematerialize through the wall.