By the time Dody Dog sat up and collected his thoughts one morning, we had possessed our half-wild property for five years. It was originally part of an extinct farm, Core Hollow. After decades of abandonment, the place had been broken into two saleable parcels.
In Dreams I return alone to that place, where the wild ones still laugh, and run down the moon.
When we made our purchase, the rocky ridge we wanted to call home was completely devoid of human habitation. Only the bleak wail of wolves traveled the night wind, the eerie moans of coursing owls, the creak and groan of trees in the windy dark; trees that had claimed their territory undisturbed for fifty years. We huddled in our sleeping bags within the bed of the rusted Ford, our only shelter then, clung to each other until the sun crept over Baldy Hill and exorcised the night creatures.
We awakened frowsy-haired, frightened–and fascinated. We were already beginning a transition, changes deep within us that would enable us to survive this place.
Where?
Put your finger on a Wisconsin map, choose that hard-hearted space between bleak wind-scoured farmhouses and stony, unrelenting soil, and you have landed. Ed Gein lived around here, and murdered his mother, if that’s any consolation.
With that first fascination, and without realization, we were already falling headlong into the romance, the mythology, the fickle, feckless wonder of it all; a place of wild, winsome heart’s connection and abrupt, harsh, haunting beauty; a passion of purple blossom and sweetness under a downy blanket of sky blue, without yet a glimpse of the other…
But why dwell on that, now?
As for me, I loved – and lost – Core Hollow. One terrible winter’s evening I hid all the guns, under the bed, in the pillows, behind the rocker, under my shirt; fled down the icy steps and through the red garden gate, slamming it shut with freezing fingers.
I was never to return, never ever to lie abed by the open window, stars rushing over the roof, firefly sparkle drifting down the ridge, and the night birds crying…crying.
There are times in our lives when we find ourselves forever changed, our hearts altered in some ineffable way, like feral children stolen back from the wild, unable, ever, to be the way we were before.
That is Core Hollow’s legacy to us.
But sometimes through the heart’s entrance, that portal between sleep and waking, we find ourselves again within the stilled snapshot of Core Hollow. We all sit again beside the warm stoves in the dim of the lamps pooling like moonlight on the worn carpet, listening to the hiss of kettles on the grates, while the ghosts standing in the corners thin to shadows, and take flight.
In dreams I return alone to that place, climb the rocky ridge up, up to where the Milky Way paves the night, to the place where wolves leap the ladder of stars in their courses, where the wild ones still laugh and run down the moon.