fairy ring

Photo by Dave Hoefler on Unsplash

I wish I was more connected to my ancestors, I tell Nicole, after she says she talks to her mom and grandma. 

Let's face it: I am a middle-aged white woman. Of course I want this. But I cannot join the folklorico group, and my grandmother has never spoken to me in the form of a luminescent manta ray. I am not Moana. 

Nicole and I share cancer-dead mothers, and fear of our own genetic codes.

At the coffee shop, a friend of a friend is talking about her engagement. She and her boyfriend went hiking in Santa Cruz. She planned to propose. She designed a pendant for him, a sunflower with an opal at its center and a spiral on the back.

For growth and interconnectedness, she says.

They were deep in the forest, the dappled sunlight starting to fade. The right moment had not yet 
announced itself, and so the young woman seized the one they were in. 

Would you—

The young man said, Wait! He put his knee to the forest floor, and presented her with the opal ring that glints from her finger as she tells the story.

And then we found a fairy ring with a spiral in the middle of it.

I tell my friend and her friend about our family fairy ring, the one on the plot of land that bears our last name because my dad gave money to the Save the Redwoods Foundation. When we visited, foundation officers brought a picnic lunch and a bottle of champagne. We walked, reverent, through the trees. A giant coast redwood, the tallest species in the world, will sprout a circle of saplings that thrive on her root system, even after she dies. Metaphor thick as bark. Trunks firm and strong like my dad. Someone had hung little charms from the young trees. We all felt my mom's witchy side here.

And also, I felt the present of the foundation officers, the words donor stewardship buzzing like flies. Our magic had required money, but the land was open to everyone, and I like thinking that maybe a young couple proposed to each other in this very ring.

*

I spiraled again this week. Maybe it's nothing. Possibly it's something. Why am I only able to believe in dark magic? I dot my texts with blue evil eye emojis, I never say I'm dead when something is funny. Why can't I hear my mom's voice or manifest a destiny? 

Photo by Audrey Hoover on Unsplash

My doctor says I should meditate, and she's Russian, so I believe her, because they seem like a practical people. My other doctor said I should try intermittent fasting, so I did, and I lost weight, and my stomach and liver enzymes looked good. But then the city caught fire and we all caught the flu and a strand of strep infiltrated my toddler's eye socket and he spent a week in the hospital. I ate sleeves of Oreos and bags of chips to comfort myself, or test fate, depending on the moment. And I worried that I'd fucked everything up—I'd been handed the world and what had I gone and done with it? Wasted time. Treated my body like a temple, but the kind that got burned to the ground.

I confessed all this to Nicole, who said, Well there's the root. And when I said that sometimes I follow my anxiety deep into the woods inside me, I find my mom, or the hole where she was. Nicole said, There's the root.

I have a large and complex root system, I said.

This morning I left the toddler and the cat curled in bed, and I slipped outside and touched the half dead grass and whispered, Hello, world, I'm glad I get to live in you. 

I looked up at the white sky, but all I noticed were the floaters in my vision like stick-and-poke tattoos of my past worries, so I returned to the ground.