Reflecting on one of my recent posts, it has come to me that part of the reason for the strange silence I find around me rather than the loud enthusiasm we surely all feel at the possibility that we will finally elect our first woman President probably has roots in the profound disappointment, even despair, I felt when Hilary Clinton was defeated. I remember thinking, “There’ll never be a woman president in my lifetime.”
Disappointment and depression are hard to shake; they become a habit, protecting us from hopes that seem doomed, and yet as I begin to know Vice-President Harris in all her complexity and power, I do feel hope that our deep-rooted misogamy will not, this time, bring her down.
At the same time, I have a bit of renewed hope that we—all of us who care—may be able to save Hopscotch House. I’ve been thinking of organizing a “Friends of Hopscotch” to give all the many women who loved being there a chance to express themselves; I would welcome reactions to this idea.
And, to increase the positivity of this season, I’ve begun to feel that I may be able to reclaim and restore to usefulness Apache Mesa Ranch here in New Mexico. It’s lain more or less abandoned for the past two years, but now an effort to put the 1220 acres into conservation easements (my model is Wolf Pen Branch Mill Farm in Kentucky), helps me to feel that perhaps the ranch has a future useful to me and eventually to many others. I’m including photographs from twelve years ago when we were building the barn and its attached duplex and renovating the stone shepherd’s hut that was meant to be my writing studio.
I hope all of you who read this post will search deep and long for your own impossible dreams and perhaps revive them.
Mark me down as a friend of Hopscotch. I have been there many times with Dana Sue Walker’s “Spirit of Sophia” women’s group of spiritual and feminist old gals. The core group in which I am no longer a part of the leadership are older, retired, middle class women. Dana has gotten grants from the KFW in past years. She is a powerhouse wrapped in a small package. Go Hopscotch House and rise from ruin as the house sits empty.