Jump Ring

Today will close a circle a line we three started to draw about a year ago if my memory serves me. Having read some instructional material on how to create a screenplay, and having seen at least twenty-two movies in my lifetime I suppose this is where the music starts to play one of those poignant and heartwarming violin pieces that let you know the tone of the piece has changed and the credits will roll soon.


I'll leave out the prologue, that part's not interesting, or maybe it is, but it's not integral to the rest of the story. Let's just say that there was one character who drew together three women, stirred them up like a hive of angry bees and then exited the scene to leave us to find our own way. This three-way relationship started with armor on, a battle in a pit of words with real sWords, not the blunted toys used for practice. Lest you think of three adults in combat let me remind you that we all acted like teenagers in our thirst for blood. We were angry bees, and swarmed with hive mentality.

We represent three generations; twenties, thirties, forties. We all could have done more research, maybe been kinder, but we weren't. I have the longest life experience, but I think I was the least effectual in scoring damage, and certainly have the most room to be embarrassed about my conduct. Those things are past now.


The players are Jen, who lives here in town where I do, her big sister Jess who lives in New York and me, who you know. Today I get to meet Jess, who has traveled here with her daughter for a family wedding. Not easy to just get together for coffee with someone who lives on the other coast, this is a big event on my calendar.

Jessica was, for the longest time, my secret hero; single mother living in New York, raising her daughter all by herself; using her art not only to lift herself up but to create income and start a business that I think will eventually eclipse any job she has needed. Just the simple act of living in New York, a place that is the land of far-away, the big dangerous city of subways and taxis is daunting to me. Trains to get to work, trusting that you can get your child and yourself where you need to be without a car right outside the door to hop in and go, New York seems frightening and impossible.

When Jen and I began our original spat her big sister stepped right up and got in the game. She came flying into the arena with claws out, ready to feed me my own still-beating heart for engaging that way with her little sister. I am singleton, there has never been anyone to defend or stick up for me, and the way she dealt her wounds was also the seed of my admiration for her. I have always been envious that they have each other, and that three thousand miles has done nothing to diminish the closeness they share. Plus, she can write. Word World battles with someone who shares my love of precision, my adoration for stating facts and drawing conclusions, a truly worthy opponent. 

I had my awakening back in the springtime, when things were turning green and the light was shining just a little brighter. I saw the two of them differently. I found it easy, or at least easier to own my part in a silly childish drama that would have, could have, should have never happened. The sisters I've come to love were gracious and daring, willing to set aside all past transgressions and start with a newly plowed field. There were no rocks in it, we had thrown them all- nothing but fertile earth holding the seeds of love and admiration that had been inadvertently scattered along the way. We've had our summer growing season, and these sturdy vines have produced a crop I could never have anticipated. Today we harvest. We three will be together for the first time, and this circle will close. If I changed my camera angle I'm sure I would see it as only one loop in a spiral, but from my current point of view it looks like coming around to where we started.

Jess is here for only a short visit, a family wedding. They have a large family, with so many people to see, and their joyous event to celebrate. I get a tiny slice of that time, and it's like chocolate in World War II, one square is enough to savor and know you've had a taste. I'll also get to meet her daughter Gabby, a girl who I think would be the girl in the mirror for Molly, growing up without all of the spoiling and entitlement, the immediate gratification that my own amazing young woman has become so accustomed to. Mirror girl though, because from every word I've read and every picture I've seen she shares the same independent and unconventional streak, she is no sheep either. She knows how to ride public transportation, Molly just rode the city bus for the first time last week. She told me in amazement "That thing goes everywhere, you can get all over town in it!"as though that were a well-kept secret. Mirror girls. I so look forward to meeting Jess' little becoming-woman as well. 

With Jen it's been more of a gradual thing, we've had the luxury of time and location to make our way slowly into friendship. I have come to love and admire her, in that natural way that two women who spend time and get together when they can do. Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble, we three will gather around today's cauldron, which looks much like a cup holding coffee, and weave the binding. I have long looked forward to this day. 

In the recent sequence of days and disappointments I've lived, this is a bit of magic that will be healing and completing for me. I will benefit from that right now, because what goes down must come up and I'm ready to change my trajectory. I can feel autumn in the air. Where it is a season of dying and drying, the small death of the year that paves the way for the sleep of winter I have always been invigorated by its arrival. It makes me want to move and expand, to go somewhere I've never been. The smell is intoxicating to me. Autumn is the best season for  beginnings in my opinion, but then again the Moon was in it's last quarter when I was born so that may come as no surprise. For some it's a time to gather what's already been grown, for me it is the time to plant the bulbs that will emerge to be the first bits of color in a white landscape. 


I'm from southern California, and moving to the northern part of the state is as far as I've ever come. If I want snow I have to travel to it, but I beg your indulgence in my metaphor, in Word World all is possible. 

I long to abandon myself to this change of season, to grab the wind like my favorite palette of leaves and be borne far and wide. I was a winter baby, and in the cold I am remade every year. Fall is also a time to close the piece, add the finding that holds the jewelry in place and think about the next project. We three women, the maid, mother and crone will gather at once and start the alchemy. Waxing, full and waning, usually a sequence but today an impossibly intersecting plane. We'll just see what comes next.