Page 172 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015

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.