Singing
Gretchen and me. On the porch. At a house of mid-80s hippies. Olympia.
Inside, the air thick with the smoke of childhood. Barely steamed kale
on the stove, drenched in squeezed lemons and their seeds. Sara licks
her fingers and holds a leaf up over my open mouth. Baby bird. Open
throat. Her brown hair like a tuft. Her smile sweet like the grassy
smell of her deeply colored Ecuadorean wool sweater. She is tea on a
wood stove. A black iron kettle. Coals. She laughs as I eat, the kale in
my mouth rough and chewy and stingingly sour.
On the porch in the cold night we sing rounds of goddess songs.
Gretchen teaches, and we go with it, singing simply for the pleasure of
making noise, looking at each other open mouthed and happy, playing with
tones in the electrified air.
I will go on many adventures with her. We will dance half naked in
the pouring rain at night, in a parking lot, at school. We will hunt for
little people and fairies in magic land out in the country. We will
traipse on dark roads through blustery nights to find a long house that
never appears. We will tell tales by a wood stove in a tiny wooden
a-frame on Hood Canal.
Gretchen will always wear purple. She will always laugh and talk in a
tiny, beautifully seductive voice. I will always imagine a world of
spirits and sorcerers in her presence. Together we will sing and become
more than the sum or our parts. She from the edge of Mount St. Helens.
Me from everywhere from San Francisco north. We of the redwoods and
evergreens and sweet grasses and fairies. Friends.
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