Cutting Scenes - The Fine Line

-3-
MOTHER EARTH
Speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee.
—Old Testament. Job, XII, 8.
Betty Ross placed the plastic baggie inside her apron
pocket, just alongside the clothespins and walked out into her
backyard. It was early in the afternoon and she had a load of
wet clothes to string upon her clothes-line. She stared up into
the sky and saw the sun shining brightly and stopped abruptly.
Suddenly, she was a little girl again and it was 1950, and she
closed her eyes and saw her grandmother who was also her
teacher, and this caused her to verbalize her thoughts, without
her even realizing it, a she whispered: “A ke yv ku gv, Squa ne
lv nv hi Ha do, wa do. Ye ho waah, Oo n jl nauh hi. Yo, U ha lo
te qa, A at nv ti.” ‘Sun, my Creator, thank you. God, Maker of
all things, good and great beyond all expression, here is the
place of uniting.’
She stared at the sun for almost ten minutes before walking
to her clothesline and hanging up the wet clothes. She then left
the empty clothesbasket and walked to the first of the mounds—
which was slightly sloped and similar to what Betty knew her
ancestors had copied on a much larger scale, in centuries past.
She pulled the plastic baggie from her apron and spread some of
its contents across the mound, closing her eyes as she did so.
- 61 -