Page 172 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015
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the brambles of bygone times, nose to the ground, sniffing for the ragged remnants of
the old ways that will bind the sorrows left behind by history. Each woman carries a story
bundle packed with grief and loss; each is seeking redemption of suffering, piecing
together a crazy quilt of meaning from odds and ends of memory, dreams, visions, the
hard truths of the body, fragments of bones and scraps of animal hides.
Their stories work to free us from cages of imposed meaning, the baited leg traps of
thought, the colonization of mind that drive us into confusion, that drive us mad. They
are root medicine harvested from the bone yard of memory–astringent, ferruginous,
cleansing –an antidote to poison and amnesia.
Known to each other only through happenstance or hearsay, Anna, Sophie and Louise
live in places like Mountain Road and Scantic Gap, shimmering places between
civilization and wilderness. They are women who when noticed at all are judged as
eccentric, witchy, maybe even scary, certainly strange. They are the kind of women your
mother tells you to steer clear of (unless she happens to be one of them herself).
Ranging in age from middle to late (Lou/Louise’s story is her midlife recollection of her
childhood), they make brief and sometimes surprising appearances in each other’s lives.
As do the local four-footeds–coyote, deer, fox–whose lives and pathways cross trails
with the human ones. In fact, it is the animals in these stories that are the unwitting
game-changers.
“Some would say Anna is a toughened woman, strong spirited, raw boned, the lines of
grief imprinted on her face. But right now she is perplexed and not a little frightened.”
Thus begins Reckoning.