This story is part of a collection,
tentatively called “Ghost Whisperer:
Stories from a Nordic Witch Stranded
in the South.” They were mainly written
during my first year in the Appalachian
Mountains, having moved from Sweden,
living at the end of a road, with no green
card to allow me to work and my husband,
Michael, working at the Monroe Institute.
Being a stranger in a strange land those
days, ghosts started to talk to me.
Spider Old Woman walks among the stars. She was the one who helped me
make peace with the kingdom of crawlers those first months after I arrived. Not
in the form of the two inch wide, fat spider who sat on the bathroom wall close
to my face and scared me half to death; that Michael killed, accidently rubbing
purplish goo in his eye, leaving me laying awake for hours watching his face,
fearing his eye would disappear into a tennis ball of swelling; but as the thin
legged slow moving creatures Michael called Daddy Long Legs, and I sometimes
called Mama Long Legs. Watching them carefully testing their surroundings with
tiny feet before they took a step was calming. And that is how I was inspired
to talk to Spider Old Woman when I sat in the swing chair, rocking back and
forth.
She is ancient, and native. Therefor I trusted her. With her came
another new and unexpected friend. Unexpected as it is more or less forbidden
in the circles I usually move in to claim a Native
American guide, out of embarrassment from earlier overexploitations of
Native American people's culture. Nevertheless, here I was, a guest on Native
American land, so it would have been highly impolite to ignore the presence of
this ghost because I came from a country with unresolved, collective, cross
cultural relationship issues.
I was thankful when he accompanied me on my long walks. As far as ghosts
go, he was less intrusive than most. He had no immediate needs, but simply
walked beside me in soft deerskin clothes and the most impeccable hair I've
ever seen, talking loosely of the dreaming mountains, deer tracks and the
incomparable virtue of turtle soup. Sometimes we didn't talk at all. I just
heard his footsteps beside me, and that made me feel safer. Because as hard as
it is for me to admit, those first months I was afraid.
There are different kinds of fear. This was the stomach-turning fear of
being on a thread of life where the only way is forward. It came from knowing
I'd made all the right choices, but not trusting that I had what it took to
measure up. It was the fear of having lived half my life and knowing that the
trial period was now over. Whatever happened for the rest of my life was
entirely up to me. It was a fear enhanced by my location, far away from all
familiar distractions: a draining job, friends to gossip with, well known toys
to play with, intensified by the shame in realizing I was more dependent on
these familiarities than I cared to admit. It was the fear stemming from having
a roof over my head, food on the table, of being showered in love, of falling
asleep to the music of crickets and having oceans of time to create all I ever
wanted to create: in short, to have all I ever wanted.
"You’re a weaver now," said Spider Old Woman, as I rocked back
and forth.
"Keep the balance, all you have to do is to put one foot in front
of the other," said the Medicine Man,", as he walked beside me.
I didn't know his name, so I called him the Medicine Man. I didn't dare
to ask, with the deep-seated anxiousness, when faced with the risk of doing
something inappropriate, that only people raised in Sweden can understand.
The Medicine Man suited him. He healed my most urgent needs effortlessly
and discreetly. So inconspicuous was his presence that I might have missed him
altogether had I not been told of the Native American ghost family who lived
close to the house. First, they lived in the house. Or rather, where the house
happened to be built: their dwelling place forerunning the cabin. To be even more
specific: their living quarters happened to be just where the closet of the
cabin was placed. When Michael had his first round of Rocky Mountain fever, he
was almost delirious from the disease and his efforts to try to work at a new
job regardless. He suspected there was ghosts in the closet and cleaned the
closet repeatedly with smudging sage. Finally, two local healers took pity on
him and came over to the cabin armed with herbs, therapeutic sprays, big hearts
and clear seeing.
"There is a family living in the closet who wonders why this crazy
man insists on running into their living quarters and smudge sage around them
time," one of the healers said. A deal was made that the Medicine Man and
his family would move to a suitable spot just outside the house, and Michael would
stop smudging their home.
The Medicine Man's family consisted of a wife and a child of
indeterminate gender. The few times I got a glimpse of his wife she always
leaned over a cooking pot: content, lean and quiet.
"She doesn't talk much," confirmed the Medicine Man.
The silent, constantly cooking, humble woman created small jolts of
uncomfortable electric shocks along my high-strung feminist nerves. The
Medicine Man rebuked me. It should be beneath me to interpret silence as
weakness or cooking as unimportant. His wife did more in her stillness and
silence, than he himself did with all his walking and words. When he spoke I
started to understand - on a much deeper level than ever before - silence as an
active agent. Stillness as a necessary force to move the game forward. To
change the game.
Silence.
I had not gotten around to replace my Swedish cellphone and its
connection was stone dead by the cabin. Neither did I want to overuse our data
plan, which we had ended up paying loads of money for as a result of our Skyping
sessions before I arrived. I didn't care for news, not having decided if I were
to read Swedish news or news from the States, longing for none of them. When
Michael went back to work during the days all of this made me feel a bit isolated.
Now, I deliberately began to enjoy the silence. And the walks. And even
cooking.
I looked up the tribes who have lived in the area or nearby, out of both
curiosity and curtesy. With my usual inability to limit myself I covered the
timeline of 50 000 years until now, tried to understand the movement and
development of at least ten tribes, that of course intermingled and changed
course over the years. The only thing I found out for sure was that turtles
used to be a delicacy consumed over many thousands of years, the animal having
the practical inclination to hibernate just under the sand in the creeks, ready
for plucking even in cold winter season. Apart from curiosities as such,
details have never been my strength: years, numbers and names often tumble
around in my brain with nowhere to anchor. What stays with me has always been
the stories, the heavy, sweet sap stories that flow over in all directions:
Coyote: beloved trickster, Turtle: foundation and prosperity bringer, and
Spider Old Woman: grandmother, weaver.
She taught me how to shoot threads directly out of my own body, out of
my own life experiences. Creating life from life.
I didn't do much those first months. I had been under the illusion that
as soon as I settled in, which shouldn't take me more than a week or two, I
would use the time being in a constant flow of creativity. This did not happen.
Even to think about opening a sketchbook, or edit a text, made me unbearably
and unexplainably tired. I wrote something here and scribbled something there,
but with little or no evident result. Instead I walked, cooked: adding to the household
by making tasty vegetarian warm soups and casseroles that cost almost nothing.
And I talked to Spider Old Woman.
I worried sometime that I was turning into some kind of housewife, even
if the concept was as alien to me as talking to ghost are to many other people.
But in Virginia the homemaker concept seems to be a real thing undertaken by real
people. What if it was contagious? Michael managed to convince me I was in no
way in the risk zone of waking up one day longing to make apple pies. The
Medicine Man said nothing about the subject.
I asked him one day, on a walk that gave us breathtaking views over the
mountains, why him and his family stilled lived by the field. Where there no
place they wanted to move on to, somewhere their families and friends where?
"We lived in the best of times, in the most prosperous of places:
game everywhere, boundless of things to pick and eat. Everywhere were materials
for art and games. The whole of nature was our garden. There was no shortage of
land, no strife’s there. We stayed for this. But also, for the ones that came
after us ...".
I didn't ask what the last sentence meant, and he did not offer to
explain it.
It was a mystery far beyond me, interrelated to his people and their
faith. Though in my soul of souls I knew it was interrelated to all of us.
And the small woman leaning over her cooking pot was a key player. When
nature rests and the stars glow bright and cold, she is the listener, the
source, the cooker, the weaver, and she is walking over the stars with Spider
Old Woman. Changing the game. Creating the world anew again, while her husband,
the Medicine Man, heals it.
