Jamie Lee

We are home again and I am scrambling to get my home garden in.  We shot a lot of footage and Milt is producing something he calls “The Blueberry Chronicles”.  You can see them at http://www.hollowbonefilms.com  He is having some fun with it. 

I have a cold and am not good company tonight so I’ll skip out and put in a bit of fiction instead.  I like the beginning of this odd series I started that is my version of “Candide” and “Siddhartha” combined.  I’ll let you figure that one out.

Evida
Or How a Forest Girl Discovers the World

Evida Takes a Walk and Finds Herself Separate 
There could be no better place on earth than this the young girl thought as she stepped her toes into the muddy edge of the pool of water to catch a closer look at the water spiders skimming the clouded surface.  She was in a small clearing carved out by road workers who had taken the red soil for their road-like purposes and left behind the moon.   The clearing was dotted with rough craters that were filled with water and each pool birthed a new universe teaming with tadpoles, water spiders, bugs, birds feeding, and scruffy grasses poking up among the reddish mounds. 

She was eight years old the summer she awoke from childhood to find her self encased in a wrapper of skin that separated her from this beloved world.   Up until that moment, it had not occurred to her that she was separate. 

Evida lived along the northern edge of the nation in what she simply called Blueberry Country in honor of the low bush berries that filled her forest.  No one else ever came to this small, scarred piece of earth but Evida, and she came daily that spring to watch the transformation between winter and spring.  It was, in truth, a muddy mess, but she loved it.  She ran along the plowed ridges that separated one small pool from another so often that her bare feet padded and packed the sand as if it were an ancient road carrying tribal inhabitants across the Bering Strait. 

Life was good.

Down the road her parents had built a house that sheltered Evida and her five brothers and sisters in a cocoon of warmth and safety.  That her dad had tried to defy Mother Nature and built his house in a swamp seemed not to matter to them.  When the ditches filled with murky water, Evida and the other kids leaned over the edge to see the wigglers that bred there by the millions and would soon turn into mosquitoes.  It was a small price to pay for paradise–a few hundred red, itchy welts and the little screamers buzzing them to sleep each night.

Evida couldn’t figure out what was different this spring, different from all the others she had endured in her full eight years.  Something had changed.  The color of a single green leaf bud opening on a twig belonging to the larger tree pierced her eyes almost painfully.  The dry grasses of last year, as they gave way to the newer shoots poking up from some mysterious earth ethos, seemed to say reassuringly, “We go gratefully, never mind.  We’ve had our season.” 

Wind, sun, birds, the tiniest flowers, all spoke to her in a language once incomprehensible, but now understood clearly as if by magic.  Going to sleep each night was almost a burden, that she must close her eyes to such beauty for the dimmer world of sleep and dreams. 

She took to speaking aloud, only when alone of course, to the many offerings of nature.  I love you, little bird.  I love you tiny clover.  I love you big mamma tree.  I love you creepy little spider on my hand. 

What had caused such an awakening?  She didn’t know, couldn’t understand.  Perhaps an old bearded philosopher standing beneath a tree watching her from his invisible vantage point would nod knowingly and whisper, “Ah, she now feels her self separate from.”  It didn’t matter to Evida.  In truth, there wasn’t a bearded old one to explain that where once she was simply a part of nature, like trees and grass, now she saw her self as occupying a human body. No, she simply drank the realization in, letting it fill her soul and spirit with such rich nectar that by noon she was drunk, intoxicated and asleep on the grass. 

When she opened her eyes again there was a blue-silk sky wrapping her like a sari.  It was exotic, foreign, scented with the spice of Mother Nature’s unique perfume.  When she stood again and stretched her arms to touch the blue silk, she glanced down and saw the imprint of her own small body in the grass.  She felt just the slightest shiver of what could be fear or foreboding, a wisp of warning of things to come, but she tossed her blonde hair and walked off.

Thirty years later, she would return to this same spot, now an overgrown piece of the forest once again, desperate to find the slightest indentation she had left on Mother Earth. 

Walking back into her Mother’s house in her newly found eight-year-old body was like finding an alternate universe with an entirely different set of shapes, forms, tastes and smells, and its own moon and sun.  The blue silk sari dissolved like a thin skin of ice beneath the heat of this new sun, and the blue was replaced with the gray garb of an ordinary peasant

“Where have you been, Evida?  Lunch was over an hour ago and little Johnny has a dirty diaper and Rocky has a fever and and and and . . . .”

Evida stood for a moment, stunned and shrinking rapidly as all the wide thought-forms fled the little house where her parents ate and slept and were raising six children like raising chickens in a wire coop.

“Yes, Mamma.”  She said.  “I’m here now.”

Here.  Now.  The rest would simply have to wait out there in the wilderness for her return.  Evida turned her attention once again to the business of being eight, third girl in a family of six.  It was okay, this life in this house.  She helped her oldest sister, Kay, fold clothes and roll socks.  She helped her next oldest sister Ann change little Scott.  Ann and Evida got the giggles when Ann removed the nasty diaper and jokingly pointed to his tiny penis and said “Ready…aim…fire.” only to have the little squirt–squirt.  Ann panicked and threw the new diaper over the warm stream, and then had to use a third diaper to have the baby officially and legally changed.  

Kay, Ann, Evida, William, Joseph, and Scott had checked into the family in polite two-year intervals ranging from ages twelve to two.  If you added their ages together it came to forty-two and Evida couldn’t begin to imagine herself at forty-two.  She tried it once, but it was unfathomable. 

All in all, it was a pleasant family to find one self suddenly occupying.