No Woman is an Island

I take the light scarf from my bookcase and unfold it, the sun passing through the red roses and their green leaves that stretch across a black background.

It's dusting day, and it's time to clean this as well.

I fill a bowl in the kitchen sink with cool water and submerge the scarf. As I dunk and squeeze, the water becomes a deep, warm maroon.

I laugh, and look over at the kitchen table.

"You never washed this, did you, Grandma?"

The sun spills down from the open blinds and streaks across the empty chairs and a painting of two blue birds. All of this - the kitchen set, the painting, the scarf - all belonged to my maternal grandmother.

She crossed over last year, and still I speak aloud to her. She is there, I am sure of it, within the sparkling particles that dance in the air. A piece of her must be somewhere there within the table she sat at for so many years, within the painting that she saw and loved so much she just had to buy it. Even in this scarf that I am handwashing.

I can hear her chuckle and reply to my question, "No I didn't!"

But that's alright. Here I am now, letting the water darken deeper and deeper as I continue the process. It is a thin consistency, but it begins to look like blood. Not the sort that has leeched out in death, but rather the kind which sustains life.

I read many years ago how all of us were once in our maternal grandmother's wombs. When our mothers formed in utero, so too did their eggs that would one day become us. In this way, our grandmothers also carried each of us.

I think of that, of having been everywhere that my grandmother carried my mother. She had already had five children before that. Perhaps I am with her as she vacuums a hotel room, as she props her feet up on the couch with a cup of coffee, as she drives in the middle of the night, uncertain of where she is going, a cigarette between her fingers.

My paternal grandmother and her maternal grandmothers before her have existed in the bounds of California for millennia. The minerals in our bones are the same which make up the Sierra Nevada range, the same as the bones of the Tule elk which ran through the valleys, and as the pumas who lurk in the shadows.

California has cradled my ancestors, through and through, for generations, since time immemorial in some cases. Her rolling green hills, jagged mountaintops, sloping coasts; her behemoth trees which stretch towards the heavens, valleys which plunge so far downward they reach below sea level; her rich soil, the scorching embrace of a hot summer sun and the gentle caress of a springtime breeze; the acorns she drops from oaks, the snow that melts and rushes into roaring rivers for salmon to spawn and begin the cycle again - Grandmother.

She who came first, before my first female ancestor took a single step, she who is ancient and loving and vast and as mysterious as the dark side of the moon.

I think of all my grandmothers, and of how like the lunar goddess, they relied on two sides of themselves for survival. One to show the world, the other to keep her secrets, her desires, her very thoughts, all within a heavily guarded chest.

"I wanted to go to school." My great-grandmother smiles at me as we look over an old family album. In the photo, she is in her Sunday best, a smile almost as bright as the one she gives me now.

"That's all I wanted to do." She shrugs, her smile fading only slightly. "But I had to get married."

I wonder how much rage passed through the blood barrier within all of us while we grew in our mother's wombs. How much had flowed through them through their own mothers'.

It's not their fault.

The water in the bowl is at once deep and bright, red as rubies, as a dragon's scales. Red for life, red for anger.

"Grandmother,

Thank you for your rage. How sorry I am that you could do nothing with it the way that I can today."

Behind rage is enormous power, as grand and consuming as any sea.

I am angry

But I am free.

I give the scarf a final rinse, and pour the water down the drain.