We're working on the next book
about women in their Glory Years
We don't have a book yet, nor a contract, nor a publication date.
What we do have is some stories. Here is one of them
From Caldera Walk
We're in Idaho City, a resurrected gold town surrounded by a Ponderosa forest, at the rustic turn-of-the-century B.I. Inn for a weekend poetry workshop. We arrive in ones and twos, and trudge up the flight of stairs into the warmth of the kitchen. Tea water is singing on the stove and Hershey's Kisses are on the counter. Someone has gathered rocket, robust greens, from the garden for our salads tonight and another woman has brought a vase of black-eyed Susans. We eat unconsciously and sip cinnamon tea against the early fall weather. We're distracted and exhausted, and we talk obsessively.
The stories we've been hearing and the stories we are telling are intimate. We speak of numbness and anger, a grief that can hardly be told. My own story is this: My mind will not, cannot wrap around the fact that three thousand people have been murdered. I had believed at a level deeper than thought that most of them got out.
Didn't they?
On the third day after, the veil in my mind swayed slightly and the horror finally crossed the barrier into consciousness. I've been weeping since. I wake up with tears in my eyes and on my cheeks. It looks like war is imminent. I am terrified for the families in Afghanistan, women and children who no more deserve raining fire than New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C. We know what the families and the survivors are feeling, because we've lived through multiple losses; multiple traumas of our own. We have no illusions about just how hard life can get.
It is eleven days after the eleventh of September, 2001.
Later in the evening, we write. Our teacher and mentor, Joan is guiding us, helping us find the words for what is lodged in our viscera. Some of us write about New York, a newly experienced terror; others family, nature. I don't write very well. I can't get close enough to the questions Joan poses; my edges are still too raw. We lose two students. One, a young mother, can't bear to be away from her children; another has an emotional flame-out and leaves for safer ground. We understand, but know as well that we can write our way to sanity and clarity. We stay to chase down the demons in our own brains and hearts—and those without.
It's time for sleep now, around ten or so, and most of the women wander off to their own bunks and sleeping bags. Three of us stay up late over a bottle of red wine, a Merlot maybe, maybe a Syrah. We tell secrets; one of us has suffered childhood sexual abuse so perverse that it rattles my belief about life. The grandmother, our elder, is so tested and sturdy that she offers solace without so much as a hug or a word; just an immense acceptance of life as it is; of people as they come. Her eyes are as kind as God's.
Just about midnight we trundle off to bed. My choice is the outside porch, which wraps around the house. I've slept out here, off and on, for six years during these workshop weekends in September. It's the only place I sleep with my glasses on, because when I open my eyes, there is always a star-filled sky. Truth be told, I hardly sleep out here. The stars beguile.
I can see my breath and tightly wrap my sleeping bag around me. The floorboards on the porch have little spaces between them, allowing drafts of cold air to really startle me, especially if I've left my hinnie somehow vulnerable to outside influences.
There's a saloon not a stone's throw from me, and the band is not sparing amperage. The music could shake loose my fillings. "Boot-Scootin' Boogie" and "Friends In Low Places" are uproariously received, belted out by a woman no longer an ingenue. Her voice is roughened by too many whiskeys, too many cigarettes, too many road miles of her own.
Everybody in town seems to be there, though, and if I had a lick of sense, I'd pad down—jammies and all—and chug a beer with them. They are well past caring about a dress code. I can either fight the music, or ease back and just enjoy it, imaging the sloppy kisses and the eternal promises of love or friendship; well kept at times, at others, not so much.
The music stops. I'm grateful that last call has come at last. I hear a shuffle of chairs, but no one is leaving the bar. I'm not hearing hearty good nights or a clumsy search for keys or the slamming of truck doors.
Just silence.
Then, the woman begins to sing, a capella, an aching, mysterious hymn. Her voice is poignant as a whiskey life, plaintive as misspent hope.
Amazing grace! How sweet the sound,
My heart is breaking open.
That saved a wretch like me!
Even the owls are still.
I once was lost, but now am found;
Tears are blurring the stars.
Was blind, but now I see.
My heart, those hearts, our heart....
The poets are scattered through out the old inn tonight; their sleep restless against pain, fear, and grief. These writers harbor no illusions about the danger the world will face over the next few years, and the endless gripping thief of peace and well-being that is to come. I sense how much we have in common with the chanteuse not a hundred feet away; singing in her whiskey voice, sending her wailing prayers winging into the darkest hour of the night.
© 2004 Barbara Herrick
