Dirt Road Roots

Dirt Road Roots

Drizzle permeates the long weekend Emily and I spend at Dirt Roads Roots III. This is the first year I attend the event. Emily says that this is because I wasn't interested in prior years, but I think we were just too busy. Even if objectively I would not want to spend a fall weekend camping, I would always want to have an adventure with Emily.

Dirt Roads is an annual private Pagan festival held on Orien and Christine's property in Warwick. They come from a teaching tradition wherein a student must successfully lead a class for advancement; creating this festival just seemed the most economical way to have a handful of the clan's students to play professor. The mission statement this year is to foster community, but for me this breaks down to hanging out around the fire with Pagans I actually like (and some I do not know but who come highly recommended by virtue of their presence at the festival). Everyone brings food and teaches classes, but arguing politics and spirituality around the glowing embers is my community.

While this festival does wisely have an age restriction, the children of Emerald Terra Gate wander. The rule the children must abide is that any adult counts as a parent and our decrees must be obey. A new child tries to test this when he drops popcorn on the porch and Lynn tells him to pick it up.

"I don't have to," he barks, tiny hands on hips, "my mom's a witch!"

Lynn points out that so was she and everyone else here and he would be cleaning it up now. He quivers and obeys without another word, his bluff called. By the following day, he has fallen more in line and listens to adults without much argument and is thereby having a much better time.

This is supposed to be a camping festival like Free Spirit Gathering in June. Despite having a tent, M and I opt to squat in an abandon bungalow on an air mattress. I don't quite understand why it is abandon, it is fairly hospitable and could easily be sold; the living situation on this property so closely resembles a commune and I am positive someone could make a better use of the building. The only thing I can image is that the right somebody has yet to be found. Still, I am grateful to have an enclosed area with a space heater and find I have no trouble sleeping. Emily's body against mine provides more than comfort, despite the staccato snoring of the heater. In fact, the end of each day finds me exhausted and eager for the rest, bundled as tightly as can be against Emily.

Meryl arrives Saturday morning before I wake up. The night before, I had made generic and impersonally lascivious remarks regarding her scheduled yoga class this morning. (Not that I intended to participate. I was going to eat biscuit and gravy and watch. Despite fireside comments to the contrary, I was not going to film it.) It was cancelled not simply by virtue that there existed dwindling interest in group sun salutations before seven AM but because Meryl was wearing a wrist brace. One of her autistic students had attacked her, fracturing her arm. She takes this as an omen that a career change is in the cards, that she needs a break and could hear nothing less subtle then splitting bones. Her injury is damaging enough that she cannot teach yoga, but not so terrible that she cannot play a show that night; a guitar requiring much less strength and mobility than the down dog pose.

Read the rest

Bookmark/Search this post with:

| | | | | | | | |