Amelia and the Chickens

The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction) Part 14

I am thoroughly urban. I am more comfortable standing somewhere on Montgomery Street in San Francisco then anywhere else in the world. The little marble tables in North Beach, the fresh killed black-footed chickens hanging in the shops in Chinatown, the retro smell of fresh baked bread from some lunch shop in the Financial District, cheap cut flowers everywhere.

I still have a coloring book of The Saints I picked up at the Catholic store on the floor here when I was in the market for a rosary in my witchy phase.

So it is no surprise really that I got lost in the woods when I went to the one and only “Writer’s Workshop” I’ll ever go to, “Flight of the Mind”. I went the last year Judith and Ruth ran it. Beautiful spot on the McKenzie River, I loved the huge dragonflies and white butterflies that accompanied me through the dry grass labyrinth at this retreat center in Southern Oregon.

The place was pretty darn rustic. I am used to wandering off by myself and had done so in the afternoons a few days before the day I fatefully fell for the scrap of caution tape tied to a tree as my marker for a return to civilization.

Some forest workers were actually doing something with that tree so when I blissfully headed back in the late afternoon light I had not a care in the world other than to think how strange and sad it was that at the assignment earlier in the day in poetry class, when asked to write a poem to an unborn child every other woman in the class wrote one to a miscarried or aborted child.

I took the assignment literally and imagined Amelia. A child I may or may not ever have. And wrote about the world she might or might not come into.

I thought I was mistaken and the tree must be just over here, down this kind of sort of trail there, as I totally and completely managed to get myself in the underbrush and disoriented. I know nothing of the life cycle of pollywogs or what one is supposed to do in a situation like this but have blind faith it will all work out.

Like some crazed deer I stood stick still and used all my senses, heightened by fear and feeling like an idiot and then headed off in a stumbling branch and bramble poking in every possible place of uncovered skin extravaganza as I blundered off.

And I was lucky.

I managed to find a house with a naked woman sunning herself on a lounge chair placed in the rough driveway. She was as startled as I was when I burst out into the clearing.

As cool as a filthy young poet can be I strolled down that driveway to the road below and made my hasty retreat back to the company of all those hungry wanna be women writers and the blessed sound of the dinner bell.