Jaci Dawn

Shortly after my mom died, we went camping at a place called Fawn Meadow. It’s just a pull off by the side of the road that goes up to Granite Peaks above the Collowash River and close to the Bull of the Woods Wilderness area. Nothing special, really: deer hunters camp there in the fall. It’s not far from Hawk Mountain Lookout (or, rather, the trail head to the trail to Hawk Mtn Lookout).

I wasn’t much into camping or anything as grief was all-consuming that summer. We made several camping trips that summer and each one served to heal my broken heart a little more. But it started at Fawn Meadow.

I found this dried up old limb on the ground as we hiked out a ridge. It was the right size for a walking stick and was much sturdier than the silver-grey wood suggested it should be. All the bark had long since rotted away, revealing the traces of some sort of borer beetles in the wood. The intricate patterns of their paths fascinated me. So I picked up the stick. Don warned me that it was too old to be a good walking stick, but he was wrong: the thing was not brittle.

Then I found a couple crow feathers, so I tied them onto the stick.

I added things to it for a number of years, up until the time that Chrys came to live with us and the circle seemed complete.

At first, all I added were little wood-burned items, like check marks on a list. It is a list, of sorts.

I was consciously building what is referred to as a memorial to God, or an altar. In ancient Israel, the Hebrews were always doing that: anywhere they felt God talked to them, they built an altar of stones. I think a lot of cultures do that, but I know of it from something I read in the Bible at the time I was mourning my mother and i thought, “This walking stick is my memorial.”

I wrote down little things I considered miraculous, like the time I spied the bobcat kittens in the draw below us. There were two kittens playing on an old log and two human families up on the ridge above, enthralled in the deepening dusk as they watched the kitties romp. That is miraculous to me.

I wrote words from dreams I’ve had, like the words to a song i woke up singing once, “You don’t have to dance the dance your mother danced.” I took it to mean that I don’t have to die young and tragic, like she did.

I wrote the dates of my children’s births: 5/22, 9/6, 5/6. The day I got married to Don: 6/7.

I wrote answered prayers, even if it was as silly as finding a set of luggage on sale just when I needed a set of luggage.

And I started tacking things on to the crow feathers. One of my parrot’s feathers. Some “bear balls” (jingle bells) that a girlfriend gave me when she thought I might go hiking in grizzly bear country (trust me: we were in bear country, but we had more to fear from the mosquitoes than any bear that never materialized). Bits of ribbon. A pair of favorite earrings after they broke. The green glass pendant that Arwen bought me when she went to a bluegrass festival with a girlfriend.

It isn’t all seriousness.

There’s the crow, for instance. He was perched upside down in some craft store bin around Hallowe’en time. When I saw him, I thought, “Oh! A Two-Crow-Feather-Woman find!” He just gets dusty and looks rather moth-eaten, but I know my mom would like him.

And there’s the “coconut” bra that Arwen brought me as a souvenir from Hawaii. I like the way the bra halves clop together when I shake the stick.

Memorial to God: coconut halves and bear balls and stuffed crows. Oh my.