June is the month during which I usually go to Maine for the week of the Summer Solstice. I am usually accompanied by one, two, or three of my good women friends. We missed the summer of 02 but 03a, b, c, and 04 were worth blogging about. [For some reason, some punctuations in those old posts show up as question marks; I don’t have the energy to go in and fix them. Sorry.]

No Maine for me this year. I’m packing for our big move out of what Old Horsetail Snake calls “the old folks home.”
For all the effort I’ve made to try NOT to be like my mother, here I am confronted by the fact that I’m almost as bad a pack rat as she. This time I keep taking bags of stuff to the Salvation Army. But my mother won’t part with a thing. Tonight I found a box she packed filled with such things as plastic lids from various long-finished snack containers; five dish washing brushes, never used; the top of a coffee pot that she no longer has; an old greasy broken wooden hour glass egg timer; the lid I’ve been looking for that belongs to one of my pots…etc. etc.

Me? I just have hundreds of pens and pencils and videotapes of movies I taped from tv.
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On this June night that I am not in Maine, I go out and steal willow branches from the tree on the far side of the building where I live. A waning sickle moon pierces the thick black sky above the pond where bullfrogs are singing each other to sleep. I slip inside the dark heart of the willow….

Here in my apartment,the branches are soaking in a pan of water. Tomorrow I will strip off the leaves and form the pliable willow stalks into circles. I have gathered the materials I will use to make willow talismans. My hope is to start them all on the Solstice, June 21.
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My former colleague and continuous friend who owns the cottage I stay at in Maine has offered me time there this month for free. She reads my blog; sees the stress. I wish I could take her up on her offer. But I’m packing. I’m packing for two. And I’m doing the ol’ “four times a day one drop in each eye of four eye drops” for my mother, who had her second cataract out earlier this week and now keeps marveling at all of the different colors of green of the trees around where we live.
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no Maine for me
just a waning sickle moon
and willow branches
waiting for magic