Florida Woman by Deb Rogers

Author:Deb Rogers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Published: 2022-05-04T14:57:14+00:00

* * *

Before going to the garden, Tierra led me on a hike along a rough, unfamiliar path, her long strides challenging me to keep up. We ended in a clearing where a cast-iron bathtub had been abandoned and filled with forest debris.

“Wow. I’ve been taking showers,” I remarked, “but all of this time I could have been taking pine needle baths.”

This caught her off guard. She let out a charming, breathy laugh. “Jamie! That’s a ceremonial tub. If we swept the ground around it, you’d see stones in the shape of the symbol for woman. Lots of useful herbs are still thriving up here, too.”

“What kinds of ceremonies?” I asked.

“We don’t use it now. It was really a Vessel thing. Before Atlas, Sari and a woman from Oregon named Eva started a community to train traditional midwives. That’s when I moved here, to study midwifery. But that’s ancient herstory now.”

She homed in on a big plant with leaves shaped like dinosaur tongues. “Comfrey, hello, my beautiful goddess! Jamie, hold out your arms. I’m going to load you up with leaves. Comfrey is a deep taproot plant, reaching down into the age-old nutrients of the forest ground and bringing them up into these incredible leaves. Look how green they are!”

“Okay, never eaten comfrey before, but it’s huge. One leaf is an entire meal.”

“We aren’t going to eat it. We’re going to feed it to the compost! The comfrey will enrichen the compost with ancient food. Such a magnificent transfer of energy!” She was ecstatic, and it made every step of the trip worth it.

We trudged back to our garden with arms full of thick leaves, periodically stopping to shake small beetles from our arms. I tried to picture how exactly a bathtub would be used in a ritual with no source of water nearby—and ended up imagining Tierra swimming in comfrey leaves. I wanted to ask her about the pergola and couldn’t figure out how to do it without appearing nosy, but the bathtub reminded me not to jump to conclusions about things I found on the property. Atlas has had many evolutions, so artifacts are likely and not necessarily scary.

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