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Let me tell you the story of Sarah Silver Moon.
Sarah, is a Native American Navaho woman from Tempe
Arizona. Her parents and grand parents were farmers,
pottery makers, artists and keepers of nature. They
made their living from raising animals and grain.
Sarah was poor, but she was happy, creative and
internally wealthy. She never gave poverty a thought.
Sarah, a lovely girl with dark skin and silky black
hair, loved to dance. Anywhere there was music,
she would be there. Her body seemed to move effortlessly
as she danced to whatever music was presented to
her.
The year that Sarah graduated from high school,
she met a tall, handsome blond man at a local dance.
All that summer she went to the dances each Saturday
night at the town hall. Hank usually arrived early
and waited for her with a yellow rose in his hand,
sometimes picked from his mother's garden and other
times bought at a local shop. They danced waltzes,
popular dances and, at celebration time, native
dance. With Hank, Sarah experienced her first kiss,
her first moments of ecstasy and the greatest love
she could imagine.
One chilly October night, much to Sarah's surprise
and sorrow, Hank did not show up at the dance. Sarah,
too shy to call him, just kept going on Saturdays
to wait for him. By the New Year she gave up looking.
Sarah was told that Hank had married a wealthy young
woman from town. He settled into a big house and
was waiting for his first child to be born. He never
thought to say goodbye to Sarah or to explain. Sarah's
heart was broken.
Sarah spent years longing for Hank. She continued
to picture him as the handsome young man at the
town hall dance. "The big longing," she
called the feeling which felt like it would damn
near kill her at times. This torture seemed as if
it would last forever and then slowly it melt away
in winter, only to resurface every July, lasting
until the first frost.
Sad, alone and fed up, she protested life by retreating
to the woods. She grew her hair long and wild. She
raised animals and pursued her second love, making
beautiful things, including pottery. Once a month
she drove to town with boxes of hand-made jewelry
and painted pots to sell at the consignment shop.
It was there that, perhaps, Hank saw Sarah, the
artist, pass him by.
On the day the healing story begins, Sarah Silver
Moon had sat at her pottery wheel during the morning
time and then all afternoon. The wheel, kept in
the barn during the cold or rainy months, was moved
out into the fresh air on summer days. This gave
Sarah access to her kiln and the sunny, hot places
of her field. All good space for curing, drying
and painting her pots.
Today she had noticed the sun as it set behind
the pine trees. She had watched as each needle glowed
with the last rays of the days' light. The grassy
field is in the process of softly changing from
a brilliant rust color to a cool bluish gray. Pottery
of every color still sits in the field to dry. The
gaudy colored pots now appear elegant in the soft
moonlight. Soon the artist, Sarah Silver Moon, will
step off her porch and collect each pot before the
night air has had a chance to moisten its tender
skin.
From her doorway Sarah surveys her work. She looks
up at the moon, grateful for the light it brings
to the field. She stretches, yawns and readies herself
for the chore of bringing the pots into the barn,
not her favorite part of the process. Car lights
from down the hill catch her attention. Someone
is parking on the main road, "Oh damn it!"
she says loud enough for the intruder to hear, "Who
the hell is out there at this time of night?"
A truck door bangs and Sarah squints to see who
it is that might be coming through the field. A
man with a body on legs like stilts strides toward
her, his long steps passing right by the colored
pottery as if he doesn't notice the beauty scattered
at his feet. His lanky body, with hunched shoulders
and scrawny legs steps over and around the beautiful
glass pots. He climbs the hill and then the stairs.
In his hands he holds out a bouquet of yellow roses.
Sarah barely recognizes Hank as the young man she
had loved from long ago. She is shocked that he,
after all these years, is here on her doorstep.
He finds her tonight standing on her porch, glowering
at him: her gray hair parted in the middle, hanging
down her back and shoulders. Sarah, now the crone,
is in her sixtieth year of life. In defiance, she
sits down on the porch floor and waits for him to
reach her.
Hank places the flowers on the porch floor between
them, convinced that Sarah would not take them from
his hand. He clumsily takes his place on the floor
with a thud. He looks over at her without making
eye contact. He sits in an uncomfortable position,
attempting to seem comfortable with his bony butt
on the floor.
"He looks so old," she thinks.
Sarah stares straight into his face as they both
sit in silence. "What the hell are you doing
here Hank?" she says, too loud, making sure
he hears her, just in case he has gone deaf. Hank
clears his throat and begins to speak in a loud
monotone as if he had said this speech, or at least
practiced it, many times before. "I knew you
were alone out here Sarah. I remembered you yesterday."
A wretched feeling spreads over Sarah as she listens
to his words.
Sarah holds her hand in front of his face with
force and stopping him cold. His blushing puss now
flattened against an invisible wall. "Stop
right where you are," she speaks in a firm
voice. "What are you thinking? …. "
"I find you attractive," he stammers,
"and you are alone out here and I thought you
might need…," his voice trails off into
a flat hollow silence.
Sarah's eyes fix upon him and there is no sound
except for her breath.
Sarah makes an attempt to say, "Oh, I see,
I am flattered but…." and then her smile
broadens until it turns into a laugh. She throws
her head back in loud guffaws, her body shakes with
laughter, her face crinkles into a round moon. She
wiggles from her toes to her head with a force of
laughter that echoes through every cell of her being.
Her face reddens as irreverent tears stream down
her face.
The man now leans forward in disbelief. He watches
intently at laughing Sarah, not the quiet artist
he remembers from her trips to town or the sweet
young girl he danced with long ago. He indignantly,
without a shred of grace, scrambles to his feet.
He stumbles to the door to the beat of her laughter,
which follows him into the night, around the pots
and back down the path to his old truck. The truck
door slams behind him, headlights flood the field
and tires screech as his truck departs.
Sarah wipes her tears, rolls back onto the floor
and sobs in disbelief. As her mind and body become
still she says aloud, "I loved him all those
years and he thought of me yesterday. The damn old
fool! He just thought of me yesterday and then came
right over, forty years too late."
Through the screen door the pots in the field catch
her attention. They are still there waiting in the
moonlight for her to come and collect them. The
sight of them calms her as she wipes the tears with
her arm and clamors to her feet. She walks alone
out into the night to collect what she had created
by day.
Lovingly and slowly she gathers the pots in the
moonlight, enjoying each step, each breeze that
ruffles her long gray hair in the light that turns
it into silver strands. She makes several trips
from the field to the barn, scooping several containers
in her arms at a time, no rush she thinks, entering
into the joy of the moment.
The pottery all inside, she sits on the porch floor
with one pot cradled in the crook of her arm. With
her fingers she feels the pot's ridges, its pitted
places its smoothness. She knows every crevice of
its shell. She is amazed by her own creations.
By mid tomorrow the pots will be back in the field
baking in the sun. Sarah will go about the creative
work of the day and she will long for nothing.
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