Where I am, it’s already gone autumnal— the afternoon slants its slow rays across everything as if recognizing summer’s waning with hard won gold. We are balanced now. In Brazil, Australia or New Zealand spring’s light is arriving. Here, above the equator, the dark is inexorably rising. But right now—tonight—we are balanced on the edge of a turning. The Equinox: an equal night.
I can’t help but remember this Bronwyn Wallace story about blackberries. I would say that she was a kind of surrogate mother after my mother died (and they were best friends) but she didn’t really act like a mother. Instead she talked politics and taught us swear words and played us Talking Heads and The Violent Femes on vinyl and introduced us to Alfred Hitchcock and just treated kids, adults, bus drivers and truly everyone she met as an equal without reference to gender or age or status. Anyway, as a result I got access at a young age to an unedited poet’s perspective and some stories that I will never forget.
My favourite one, with the blackberries, was when she and her friends rented a big cottage somewhere way up north a sprawling place with a big yard and wrap-around porch and the backyard sloping down to the lake. A getaway weekend at the end of the summer with her closest friends, and I can almost hear the clink of glasses and the laughter and the rich wild spirals of overlapping conversation going on almost forever. I can see the fat candles melting over the chipped plates and into lacy patterns onto the big wooden table. There must have been at least ten women, a group of best friends, and they had the whole weekend and bottles and bottles of wine and their overlapping conversations becoming something singular and shared and rising up into the night. We had things to figure out Bron told me enigmatically, and I felt lucky to be let into something secret and adult. It seemed like deep in the night they had become a community of women. A kind of powerful coven up there on the hill. And that the night, and the wine, and their talking, opened up into a sort of dream world. We got drunk she said and decided we would all go for a swim. Black Water. Black Night. The cabin still glowing orange at the top of the hill. And then nothing.
We woke up to the bright sunlight, it was already afternoon, she said. We woke up fully clothed. Not hung over but strangely refreshed. And tiny pinpricks of blood all over the sheets. What had we done?
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