Becoming a Herbalist
by Susun S. Weed
www.susunweed.com
~ Part Six ~
"You definitely don't want to buy that place," the realtor said. "It has a mile-long driveway that goes straight up. It's all right for a summer house, but not much else."
"She's right," I thought, "but the privacy, and the price, are hard to top." My sister/lover/feminist friends and I had been looking to buy a place in the country, without success. Now I was in the Woodstock real estate office, the one office we had not set foot in during our year of searching. (We figured the prices were beyond our means.)
"This is your lucky day," she continued. "I've been clearing out my files and removing the properties that haven't sold. The owners will be ready to bargain. How much land did you want? And how big a mortgage do you think you can get?"
I named a high figure for acreage and a low price. She crinkled her brow, then a slow smile broke across her face. "Otto's place!"
The story she told was a true Catskill tale, full of surprise and mystery: Karen and Otto bought an old blue stone quarry. They built a modest house there and raised their children. When the children grew up and left home, and they planned to sell and move South. The house was too big, winter was too cold, they needed the money.
There were plenty of offers, plenty of buyers. But Karen and Otto loved the land too much to sell it. When Karen fell and broke her hip out in the quarry, they almost sold. But she came home, walking with a cane, and they pulled out of the contract. Then she broke the other hip, got pneumonia in the hospital, and died. The property had been on the market for nearly ten years.
Everybody thought Otto would sell for sure now that he was alone. And he did spend a lot of time showing the property. But no one passed his muster, and he refused to sell. Then one winter day Otto fell on the ice and broke his hip. He died in the hospital. The property was inherited by his alcoholic daughter, who, without even setting foot in her childhood home, hired an attorney and put it on the market at a very high price. Like her parents, she said she wanted to sell, but kept refusing all offers from potential buyers. Four years had passed since Otto's death and the house was still sitting empty.
Would I like to see it?
The snow was higher than our knees and it was clearly impossible to drive further. At the far end of the curving driveway the snow outlined a house, cold and dark. Fortunately, I had my snowshoes. Going ahead, I packed a path for the others, and we made our way to the front door. The stench of animal excretions that greeted us as we opened that door was staggering. To the right a glacier of ice mantled the kitchen from roof to floor. To the left, two small steps led into several large rooms. "It's a real fixer-upper," the realtor confided, "but I think you can get it for a good price."
And we did, oh, we did. It was not easy dealing with the alcoholic daughter who loved us one day and hated us the next. But it was even harder dealing with Karen and Otto. The second time we visited the house, they made their presence known to us. In fact, they told us we were trespassing and ought to leave! Months passed and we seemed no closer to closing on the property. We called other realtors and continued our search elsewhere, but our thoughts kept returning to Otto's place.
Then one afternoon while passing by, I stopped in. Karen and Otto were there, as usual, but this time when they told me to leave, I realized: They don't know they are dead. A releasing ceremony was obviously in order. We three sister/lovers met at the house on the next full moon. On the tarpaper floor, we scribed a pentacle big enough to hold all of us. We cast our circle, with salt, with water, with fire, with song.
We placed whole cloves of garlic on every windowsill and every doorsill to contain the spirits of Karen and Otto. We raised a cone of power. We called upon the shades of those who had lived in this place to appear to us. We told them who we were and what we intended to do. We promised that we would caretake the place as they had. And we asked them to leave, to leave the land, to give it to us.
And they did. Soon thereafter the alcoholic daughter signed the legal papers needed to complete the sale and we became the proud owners of 55 acres of Catskill mountain land and a house in total disrepair. When we asked for help in planning our gardens, we were told by the county agricultural office that the property was worthless: "Fit only for goats and weeds!"
And for quarrying rocks. Rocks. Rocks. Rocks!!! Big rocks. Cliffs of rock. Huge holes where rocks were blasted out of the cliffs, shipped down the Hudson River to Manhattan, and used to pave Wall Street (really!). Rocks. Stones. Blue stone, to be exact, a kind of shale, which is sedimentary rock. Layers of sediment fall to the floor of the ocean and slowly build up over the millennia. These rocks are the sediments that accumulated on the bottom of the Earth's first ocean, hundreds of millions of years ago. Old rocks. So old they carry no fossils. Stones that can tell the oldest stories on earth.
What irony that we three had spent a year cataloging the herbs at property after property and now found ourselves on a piece of land that didn't even support a single dandelion. Findhorn had it easy! They started with sand. We looked at our future gardens and all we saw were rocks.
Winter was fast approaching. We had to put in a heating system. And fix the roof. And the plumbing. And the electricity. And put something nice on the tarpaper floors. It took all our attention, all our effort, all our money. All our money. Then the property-tax bill arrived.
Unknown to us or our lawyer, the town used some arcane rule to estimate the price we paid for the property and said we owed four times as much taxes as we thought we had to pay. We didn't have the money. Would we lose the property before we'd even begun?
Despairing, uncertain of what to do, I took a walk in the late autumn woods. When I came to a sunny rock on top of a small cliff overlooking a lush area alive with spice bush, butterflies, Indian poke, violets, senecio, and skullcap, I sat down. With open heart, I called out to the devas. I told the fairies what the problem was. I asked the nature spirits to help me. And that is exactly what they did.
