Through My Grandmother’s Eyes

I’ve been writing a lot about The Land. This is by no means my definitive Blog About The Land. I’m still processing my experience. Some of it I’m going to keep for myself. I learned that, to keep things secret, sacred, and safe.

This was my first lesson from Michfest.

But I wanted to put something out there from my trip to my grandmother’s home.

When I came to Michigan I felt underwhelmed. The first thing I did upon arriving to the holy space known simply as “the land” was wait all day in a line of cars spanning miles from the entrance. I missed dinner. When my feet finally touched on sacred earth my aunt Candy ushered us to another line to purchase t-shirts commemorating the time We Went to the Lesbian Mecca and Waited in Some Lines.

At the gate a woman in a neon vest and straw cowboy hat smiled at me and said “welcome home, sister!” And it felt….

Really fucking gay. Like my aunts dragged me to the world’s largest UCC picnic.

That night, hungry and too tired to sleep, I decided to what felt natural. At home when I can’t sleep I walk the city, in this case the city was a make-shift town of tents and trails. I took my pink plastic hardware store lantern and followed the trails around camp, watching the women still arriving in the night with their gear like refugees. It was the first time no one catcalled me walking alone on a dirt road.

As I walked among the ferns that populate the land I could feel the collected release of thousands of lesbians coming home. I can feel their tears and laughter. I thought of my grandmother’s arrival here, newly out, newly divorced, seeking refuge from the hostile world. I thought of her coming though the gate and hearing “welcome home, sister” for the first time.

And I wept.

Because for me walking around topless is a novelty. For me this is just a vacation, a little time away from the world, a retreat to the lesbian Antioch. But for my grandmother this was real life. This is where she could hold her lover’s hand on a path away from the jeers of men. She could escape her family’s questions about why she left. In my family lore she famously said “who would choose this? Who would choose to be so hated?”

At night on the land sisters drum and call out to the goddesses in the stars. Amazons in the sky. Other women keep watch so no one will come for us in the night. I listen to them as I walk my family herstory, a story told in a few hidden photographs; the secret lives of women who love women. And I know at this moment that I’ve come on pilgrimage to my grandmother’s secret home. A place where I am a citizen by birthright.

Witches will always make their home in the wilderness away from the police raids, the outing, the assault, the rape, the conversion therapy, the questions, the florescent hospital halls  where “family only” policies means being left in the dark about a loved one’s condition. Here in the woods a primal sisterhood is formed: a bond as deep as any forged in blood. Here under the blue moon the land nurtures and provides, it shelters like the womb.

When I left the land I anticipated a difficult re-entry into the consensual hallucination of society, this bad trip known as postmodern life. But in the hotel lobby an old woman admired my shaved head and I, perhaps renewed by the sisterhood I experienced on the land, let her touch the bristles on the back. She welcomed me to Chicago. At the airport I was read as female. A beautiful young woman smiled at me. I returned to work the following morning to my coworkers who go home to husbands and wives and no one cares which.

And I wish on every star that my grandmother lived.

I wish her cells found something better to do than multiply in mutant lumps. I wish it had been her to close out the land for the fortieth and final celebration instead of me in her stead. She is the lodestar of my life, the goddess in the stars over an August night sky in Michigan pointing my way home and whispering through the wind “welcome home, sister.”

It’s not just the freedom I want her to see, I want her to see to fruition the culture sprung up over four decades. I want her to see the girls that become women on the land. On this land every voice is valued. On this land there is free healthcare, free childcare, and admission is based on income almost at cost for the services and experiences provided. On the land everyone woman has a job and works for the benefit of her sisters, there is a job for every talent from the nurturers in the daycare to the kind but stern enforcers at security.

And every woman meets your gaze and sees you as a woman, as a sister, as a person. Every woman is free. The bounds of the self start to dissolve among the ferns under the goddesses in the stars as someone says “welcome home, sister.”