Wednesday, April 28, 2004

For a week the days were warm and pleasant; yesterday the temperature reached 80 degrees. Then last night a great wind came from the west, sweeping up over the mountain from the Modoc Plateau and down across the little farms and woods at its feet on the eastern side. All night it roared through the woods, blasting the brown needles from the pine trees and the white dead limbs from the balsam poplars. The bright morning is cool and somewhat calmer; the air moves just enough to keep the worn tip of that forsythia twig screeking against the bedroom window. My friend Molly was here last night and we told stories and popped corn and watched Big Fish. It feels good to have made such a dear friend. In the letter that came in the mail last week with Jeanne Flowers' tarot readings (there were two, using different decks and systems), she mentioned she was making a will and getting her papers and things in order. Jeanne will be 85 this year. On the phone she still sounds young and sharp, with a sense of humor every bit as ready as it ever was. The sound of her laughter is precious to me. (Who else gets that my llamas' names--Fernando and Lorenzo--are supposed to be funny?) My mother and I lived with Jeanne and her husband Shelley for a summer when I was 12 and again, for nearly a year, when I was 15. Jeanne and I discovered tarot together, and studied together, that year. She carried on with it and over the years has become extremely adept, insightful, and absolutely spot-on. I set the study aside in favor of "living a full life here and now," committing myself entirely to this material plane, because I felt that's what we were here for. But I picked up an old, cheap deck at a junk store in Bisbee, Arizona, some years back, and about six months ago, when I was living upstairs here and turning a little inward while waiting for the Unwanted Housemate to leave, I began studying again, meditating on the images and constructing stories from the layouts. When Jeanne mentioned her will, then, I took the opportunity to make an awkward request--that she consider allowing me to be the keeper of her cards when the time comes. She's acquired a great many decks of all kinds in her 35 years of study. So she phoned the other night to tell me--to my horror--that she was sending them all to me now, but for the two decks she uses most. I feel honored, and although I'm a year or two older than Jeanne was when she began her explorations, I hope I arrive somewhere near where she has by the time I'm 85. 10:22:12 AM    comment []