Page 176 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015

recommend it, but I do encourage it. I wake everyday in homesickness and while I don’t

remember the way, I keep the homesickness alive because it is the only entry I have that

might lead me into the way it should be. I may not get there, but I keep it open for you, or

for someone who comes behind you.”

For the past thirty years Sophie has lived alone in the house her father and mother built

at Scantic Gap. She has neighbors, including Anna Holmes on Mountain Road. When

she reads Anna’s newspaper announcement of the funeral for the Eastern Gray Coyote,

Sophie attends the ceremony. Afterwards, at her home in Scantic Gap, she is given a

dream vision that brings her story full circle.

The Taxidermist’s Daughter is what some would call a coming-of-age story, but in

Jamieson’s hands, it is a coming-to-sanity tale that sutures a whole skin from things that

have been split down the middle, the ripped and torn fragments of childhood, a

necessary triage that allows the wise woman teachings to live and breathe.

“My name is Louise Estey Sewell,” announces the narrator in the first paragraph. She

has returned in late middle age to her childhood home where her father, following three

generations of workers in the fur and hide trade, had a taxidermy shop.

“You might wonder how I could, for a time, turn away from what I came to know in these

rememberings... I left home at seventeen, moved to the small city nearby and turned my

back on what I knew for many years. I became sick–heart sick, home sick, bone sick,

city sick, is this all there is sick. Desperate, I took to walking, like I had as a girl.”