Women. Chloe Caldwell

      My mother still lives in the house in which I was raised – a woodland cottage in a small hamlet in the country. As a child, I adored the woods and spent the days playing in streams, sitting on my singing rock making up songs, crowning my head with dandelions and using berries as lipstick. I loved chewing on mint leaves and chives. My mom showed me how to soak Queen Anne’s lace in food coloring overnight and we’d wake in the morning to bright pink and blue flowers. We often took walks in the woods, sometimes together, sometimes alone. In my teenage years, it was inevitable that after an argument, the door would slam and one of us would trudge off toward the woods. When I was sixteen, a lesbian couple in their forties built a house across the woods from us. This was significant as we’d never had any neighbors. The woods behind the house were chaotic. Walking through you were bound to return home with scratches and tick bites. But when the lesbians moved in, they landscaped the woods so that there would be a loop on which they were able to walk their dogs. Right away, my mom took to walking the circle as well. We’d leave notes for each other on the kitchen counter, Went to walk the circle. The lesbians were an intriguing couple, one was wealthy and of some notoriety, the other a struggling artist. My mom often chided me when I was a teenager for calling them ‘the lesbians’ but the only reason I called them that was because she did.

      Ten years later, in late summer, some nights before I move out of my mother’s house, she takes a gig dog sitting the lesbians’ poodles, and I join her. We pack overnight bags and cut through the woods to their home. Their house is something out of Home & Gardening magazine. There have been articles written about the house describing how it is ‘non-toxic’ and ‘cutting-edge.’ While the sun goes down, we sit outside, marveling at the view, drinking expensive wine from their wine cellar and eating their exotic cheeses. While we have a warm buzz, we get the idea to pull the pillows off of the lounge chairs, lug them up the hill. We lie on our backs, giggling, looking at the stars, pointing out constellations. I remember thinking to myself that this was one of the best nights I’d ever spent with my mother. I felt content in her company, like there was no one else I’d rather be with. As though I never wanted to leave. But a few days later, I left. I boarded a plane and was gone.