Chapter Twelve

July 1974
At the next community meeting, there was an update on the progress of the summer school and the snow ploughing, but most of it was given over to organising the Wobbly weekend, in terms of practical logistics. I agreed to give two workshops (stained glass and fingerpicking) and working concessions; George to give three workshops (fiddle making, universal energy, and a fiddle class) and to help with the carpentry setting up the booths. It ran unusually long, nearly four hours, but we had a singsong afterward anyway. We all played a slip jig, then George said, suddenly, 'Here's a cowboy song for all you high country folk,' and, smiling, he launched into

I often have wandered in deep contemplation
It seems that the mind runs wild when you're all alone
The way that it could be
The way that it should be
Thing's I'd do differently if I could do them again

I've always loved spring time, the passing of winter
The green of the new leaves and life going on
The promise of morning
The long days of summer
Warm nights of loving her beneath the bright stars

I'm just an old cowboy from high Colorado
Too old to ride anymore, too blind to see
I sleep in the city now
Away from the mountains
Away from the cabin we always called home
I dreamt I left there
On an old Palomino
Whispering Jesse rode right by my side
I long to hold her
To hear her soft breathing
The touch of her cool hands on my fevered brow
'Whispering Jesse still rides in the mountains
Still sings in the canyons
Still lives in my heart.

The next weekend we had another work party to lay sod on the roof, with a potluck afterward. Anne and Jack Burke came with their brand new baby and their other three kids, and the group of men who'd done up our windows brought their womenfolk. The Wheelers had their six kids, the Oldfields their son, Dave and Carrie their two, Shirley and David, their son; James and Betsey had no children. We were bursting at the seams – mainly outdoors, but we'd had people bring their camp chairs because we had only those at the table in the kitchen.
In the rest of town was baking in the heat of high summer, influenced by the altitude, but here it was fairly cool – only about 75 degrees – in the shade of the great pines, with the breeze moving up now and then from the lake. The garden had begun to grow in earnest, and the plants were recognizable now as their kind. The men laid down black oilcloth tarp, a couple of layers of bark, then the sod, and lashed the whole thing down with twine to stays about a yard apart, until it should hold together.

'You'll never get this off you know,' James warned, 'once it's set it will become part of the roof, of the house itself.' He looked down at me from his great height, red from the work, and wiped his face with a bandana. He was wearing a western shirt and jeans, and looked like yer average grassland farmer.
'I don't want it to ever come off,' I said, holding up the bowl of strawberries I held. 'I want birds to nest in it, heather to grow in it, and to be able to hide from the excise man in it.' He took some of the strawberries, and laughed.
'Oh setting up a still next, are you?'
He called the last up to George, who was still on the roof.
'Eh?' He shook the hair from his eyes.
'Claire says you should be able to hide from the excise man up there.'
George smiled. ' If we can't import Laphroaig, then we'll have to make our own! She can't help it, it runs in her blood.' He winked at me.
'I have family in Connemara who make poitin.' I explained.

'...Oh moonshine!' Joe said, who came up for the strawberries. 'There's a guy up on the ridge who makes that. What's his name?'
'Watson?' James said,
'The man who makes guitars?' I was incredulous.
'I think he makes more money from hooch,' Joe said, smiling. He looked up.
'Hey, what are you doing up there?' He called to George.
George looked up.
'Burying a sixpence in the corner for luck.... but I want to remember where I put it,' so he had flagged it with a nail and blue surveying tape.
'Oh, that reminds me,' I dug in my pocket – and yes, there was the bag. I gave Joe the strawberries.
'Wait a mo, babe, before you come down,' I called to George. I went about halfway up the ladder at the corner of the house, and handed him the plastic bag from my pocket.
'What's this?' He asked.
'Wildflowers,' I grinned. He shook his head. 'I got them at the General.'
He stood up and strewed them about thinly all over, sowing broadcast like a Dorset farmer from a woodcut, with the perfect balance of the climber he was on the pitched roof.

When he came down he gave me a kiss, and Maggie said,
'Oh, we should wassail the house! For luck! Doesn't it look like a long house now?' It did.
'Is there any cider?' James asked.
'There's some in the cooler,' said Dave.
'Right,' said George.
Maggie and Shirley Fozzie poured out the cider on all four corner of the house deosil, murmuring an invocation to the Great Goddess and the Horned God, to the local spirits, to the Three in One, blessing the life and livelihood of the house in all its generations. Then, children, nursing mothers, babies and adults, we joined hands and danced a cross-ways Whitsun dance about the house round and around until we were silly and laughing, singing the Breton cider song I taught them as we went:

Ev sistr 'ta Laou, rak sistr zo mat, loñla
Ev sistr 'ta Laou, rak sistr zo mat
Ev sistr 'ta Laou, rak sistr zo mat
Ur blank, ur blank ar chopinad loñla
Ur blank, ur blank ar chopinad

'If I'd known we were having a party I'd have brought my pink dress,' George murmured to me, as we dropped our raised arms as the circle fell apart. He was referring to Morris dancing and the Fool. I laughed and shook my head. 'No one would get that! Oh, but you'd look so fetching! '
'Naughty girl,' he said.

By the next meeting of the quilting group I had one of my sections completed – except for the gold and silver thread and beads – and two others laid out ready to be stitched. Sitting at the table under the nasty fluorescent lights as we worked, Shirley asked me what I was doing in London, so to meet George in his shop in the first place – since I was from Glendale. I smiled.
'I was studying Ancient Music at the Royal College,' I said.
'The same place he'd been?" Maggie asked.
'Yes, but he had graduated so I never saw him. I was there as an exchange student in my last semester at Juilliard – spending the weekends with my sister who lives in Wales.

'But I have to back up a bit,' I said. 'You must understand where I was coming from. My father Jack was an investment banker – my brother is too – and my mother a socialite – she went to Bryn Mawr, and we had the sort of life where we went to Vail and Switzerland for the skiing and climbing, and shopping meant New York. I was a spoiled rich kid. Private schools, French, ballet lessons, all that. Studying classical music was acceptable in our house. ' I bit off the thread I had been using.
' In 1967 I was 14, in full adolescent rebellion. I took up folk music, and crafts, became a vegetarian, grew my hair. I didn't refuse to wear my school uniform, but I sure embroidered it! Anyway, the next year my parents were killed in a car accident, and suddenly, I was a free rich kid with a trust fund, supervised only by my elder brother Jack, and he was busy with his own life and family to pay me too much mind. Everybody thought it was great when I was accepted to Juilliard on a scholarship – including me. But I didn't really fit in with that culture. I loved music, but since the summer of love I wasn't obsessed with a career. I had come here with some girlfriends that winter and was absolutely enchanted. I knew that this is was the kind of life I wanted.... Maggie I realised the other day that I was in your shop then, and asked you about how to sell things. You told me it was on commission – and had to explain what that was! I was really naïve. ' I smiled.

'Anyway, I thought it would be the coolest thing ever to do my last semester in London, because I was really into Shakespeare and all that, and so I went. Whatever the opposite to culture shock is, I had that – I have cousins in Ireland and I felt as much at home there. But I felt really at home in England and in Wales where Ellen lives with her husband Morgan. I was so naive. I was 19, never had a boyfriend, was full of ideas, and I lived in a kind of bubble....

'I usually went to a music shop in the Strand for my sheet music for school, but I had been having a strong impression to get a piece of Vivaldi. I don't know why, it wasn't even on our programme. Well, the prompting kept getting stronger and stronger, and one day when I had a day off, I was in Covent Garden looking at the buildings and there was a music shop. So I went inside. And the rest you know. God is very funny.'

Shirley looked incredulous.' Do you mean to say you never had a date before George... or anything?'
I shook my head. 'No. The rarefied world of girls' boarding school doesn't give much room for that sort of thing. I'd never even been kissed before he asked me to marry him.'
'Rapunzel indeed!' Maggie said.
I rolled my eyes. 'Rapunzel and the prince were secret lovers,' I said.
'Pedantic!' Maggie teased.
'An old fashioned romance,' Betsey murmured. I looked at her. She had tears in her eyes.
'Yes,' I said, 'straight out of faerie tales. There is a certain irony in that. His life had been so worldly, so different. We came to the same place from radically different beginnings. But it all worked because we listened to the still small voice of God. '
'It's very inspiring,' Shirley said, stitching. 'The old ways are still alive.' She looked up.
'Yes they are.'