The Elegant Gathering of White Snows (39 page)

Everyone understood at once this ritual was like receiving a diploma.

The stones filled up Alice's entire hand, and she moved them gently from one palm to the other, waiting for someone to come and get their stone. Susan jumped up first and moved to Alice, kissing her on the lips, pushing the hair from her eyes, draping her arm around Alice's shoulder. “There are no secrets here.” She moved her hand across her stomach. “And although I could take responsibility for initiating this pilgrimage, I think it could have been any one of us. For me, it's not just the baby and my husband and what I have or haven't done. This is just my time now, my time to put one part of my life behind me and to start again. It's finally time to just be happy, and I think that's true for all of us. So Alice, will you just go with me right away, then it can all start for me, really start?”

“Absolutely, sweetheart,” Alice said, picking out a stone that was pure white and round on the edges and not much bigger than the nail on Susan's pinkie finger. “Here's your stone now. You can use it right away.”

J.J. moved over to Alice next, smiling, hands on her hips, her feet spread apart. “I just feel so strong all of a sudden,” she said. “It's time to let go of what happened to me, time to tell my girls, time to forgive my mother and to just move on with my life, like all of you. That's really what this is all about for me anyway.”

Alice handed her a brown stone that would look brilliant when it was polished. J.J. held it in her hand, closed her fingers over it and said she was sure the hard parts were over, that what was left to do was easy and she was going to keep walking—every day, every chance she got for the rest of her life.

Chris cleared her throat before her speech, then said the walk had given her the bonds of friendship, staying in one place, having a family of women friends to delight in, to hold, to call, to count on, to help erase all those years of loneliness and travel and sidestepping her own feelings. “This feels sacred to me,” she said, clasping her fingers over her stone as if she were receiving a gift from heaven. “My realization, what I've felt happened, is a mingling of our hearts, souls, and minds to have been here and done all of this together. I will be grateful to each and every one of you for the rest of my life.”

“My goodness,” Gail whispered next. “It's so wonderful to feel this much, to know that it's okay to love and to hold on and to feel safe and happy. I wish I could stop crying now, because there is so much I could say, but mostly I know that I can simply surrender and lie in Bruce's arms and love him completely. Oh, that feels so right and good to me knowing that you will all be out there too. It's so overwhelming, so beautiful to me.”

Alice slipped a stone into Gail's hand that was the largest of those she'd collected. Chipped on one edge, but still beautiful and solid. Gail moved it along the palm of her hand and then kissed Alice, holding her for a long time, until Janice stood up and placed her hands on Alice's face.

“I am not foolish enough to think that every day I have from this moment on will be clear and that my mind will suddenly line up the way it is supposed to,” Janice said. She dropped her hands, palms out, open to the sky and the air and the sunlight. “But I know more than ever that whatever happens, I will be able to make it through and to stop thinking of myself and my mind and all those years as wasted or my fault. There is so much good, so much to try for, so much more in this world to see.”

Alice placed an oval black stone into Janice's hand. When Janice opened her eyes to look at it, she saw the color and she laughed.

“Oh Alice, it's perfect, just perfect.” Then she kissed Alice too.

Sandy wanted her stone before she spoke. “I can feel it already,” she said, holding out her hand and immediately taking the stone with the green edges and gray center and the tiniest hint of blue to her lips and kissing it.

“It's so damn easy when we get hurt to shut ourselves off, isn't it? To think that nothing will ever be the same, and that it's impossible to go on and be happy again. The truth is that once we love someone and they become a part of us, nothing, even death, can stop our love for them. But also you can love again and take that other love and use it in so many ways, so many positive ways.”

Sandy stopped for a minute, brought her stone down to look at it, and then closed her eyes so she could finish.

“The people who love us would only want us all to be happy, would want us to love whomever we wanted to love, and would tell us that running off like this or running naked down Main Street—all of that is just okeydokey if it will make us feel better. It's the lingering in the painful past and indecision that will kill us, the goddamned lingering. And what I think is that we should all keep walking, and stay connected and just keep moving.”

Alice had one stone left. An odd-shaped piece of quartz that looked as if it had fallen off the moon. She held it up just above the side of the fire, saying it was for Mary.

In an hour when Mary rolled up, screeching the tires of the old van and almost sliding into the slanted ditch, the women couldn't wait to give Mary her perfect stone.

She strolled over, hands in her parka pockets, a smile on her face, and gave each one of her friends a hug. “All ready?” she asked.

They were. The women rolled up sleeping bags and carried the cooler to the car and picked up every scrap of paper or food that had been dropped while they camped.

Before they turned to get into the van, each one of them dipped her head toward the sun, which floated seductively in the late-morning haze. Each one of them took in a huge cleansing breath. The air moved down their throats into their lungs, through their bloodstreams past their hearts, and into their very souls. This last saved breath from the walking, pumped through each of them—solid, eternal, ever present.

E
PILOGUE

W
HEN THE WOMEN WALKERS
quietly slipped past the Wilkins County roadblock and were dropped one by one back at their homes, the world refused to forget about them. Women's walking groups sprang up from New York to California, and women's clinics throughout the country reported a surge of interest in women's wellness. Studies about the long-term effects of exercise and natural remedies were immediately commissioned by numerous national and international health care groups.

Women's study and sharing groups that were so incredibly popular in the late 1960s and early '70s formed once again in all types of communities in the United States. Women gathered in church basements, library conference rooms, and in each other's homes to share their feelings, what they wanted out of life, what they could do to get back on track. They encouraged hope in each other for making the world a better place for all humanity. Women who had not held hands with their girlfriends since childhood no longer cared if anyone saw them sitting on the park bench with their arms around each other while the kids played soccer.

The National Organization for Women's (NOW) membership roster swelled, and new committees that focused on education, health and getting more women elected to national and state office actually had to turn people away. A new political caucus, Women United, was formed by women on the political committees, and put money behind six candidates for president of the United States. By the year 2003, such political fervor had doubled the number of women in the U.S. House and Senate. In a dozen major U.S. cities, a female mayor was elected for the first time.

In Wilkins County, the women walkers were never openly identified, although everyone in the county knew exactly who they were. When they went into grocery stores, people would discreetly touch their elbows and say things like “Thank you,” and “What an inspiration!” The women, while not shocked by what they read in newspapers and magazines about their adventure, were completely overwhelmed by the number of lives they had touched. They only knew their own lives changed in many ways because they had the courage to walk out of Susan's front door.

Alice and Chester spent several months in counseling, where they both dealt openly with the death of their baby daughter Annie Marie, and the loss of their own relationship. Within six months of the first counseling session, Alice moved back into Chester's bedroom. With a few suggestions from Sandy, the couple returned to romance and sex that Alice proclaimed “better than ever.” Alice also flew to her son's home and without even asking Chester, purchased a small trailer at the edge of a national forest. She informed her husband they would spend several months each year there so they could have time with their grandchildren. Chester took up daily walking and lost fifteen pounds; he surprised Alice with a Valentine's cruise through the Panama Canal. They renewed their marriage vows on the ship, made love in six different locations, and signed up for a hiking tour of Costa Rica the following spring.

J.J. told both her daughters and her husband about being raped when she was in high school. Her husband reacted with the same loving, caring, and sincere attitude that had made J.J. fall in love with him to begin with. When J.J. saw the effect her story had on her own daughters, she approached their high school and began one-on-one counseling sessions with young girls who had also been raped. A guidance counselor at the school arranged to have J.J. attend a series of university classes where she received grief-counseling certification. J.J. loved her school experiences so much that she decided to return to college and work on an advanced degree in counseling. For her master's thesis, she is currently developing and modifying a program to help in recovery from date rape that is now being tested in six Midwest high schools.

Chris Boyer decided that she really did miss traveling and writing about world issues. She convinced her husband to slow his work pace even more and made a pact with him that she would never leave the country without him. She now travels and writes exclusively for
Ms., The Women's Legislative Agenda
and
NOW—Women Alive
. She refuses to be gone from Wisconsin or her friends for more than a month at a time. She also started work on a novel,
I Lit Myself on Fire
, works two days a month at the Wilkins County Women's Shelter, which she helped start with the money from her first book and where all of the women in her walking group also volunteer.

Within about thirty-five minutes of finishing her walk, Sandy drove back to Lenny Sorensen's pig farm. Within about another fifteen minutes, both of them ended up in Lenny's down-filled bed. Lenny sold her farm in less than thirty days, enrolled in the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, where she finished her engineering degree and promptly received about twenty-one job offers. The two women purchased a twenty-acre piece of land adjacent to Chris's property, where they built a home that has a great room more than large enough to accommodate the bimonthly women's meetings and all of their children, who visit and can't wait to stay with aunties Len and Sandy.

Gail rushed back into the arms of her husband Bruce, never bothered to take a shower, and drove him right to the spot where she had imagined making love to him and then did just that—for about twenty-four hours straight. She also made Bruce fly with her to Las Vegas, where they were married again in the Little Chapel of the King on Elvis Presley Boulevard. Gail drank four margaritas and sang at a small casino and made $123 in tips. She also took a trip with her mother to Paris, where they reconciled, and where she convinced her mother to buy a condo near her so they could spend more time together.

Susan had her abortion. Alice, of course, went with her, and then helped for several weeks while Susan filed for divorce, put her house on the market, and applied for a new job in administration at Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance, with more pay. Susan also enrolled in graduate school at Marquette University, where she finished her master's degree and then took another job at Wilkins Memorial Hospital. She is now in charge of the newly formed Women's Health Center, where nontraditional forms of medicine, including meditation, yoga, acupuncture and herbal treatments are offered. She is also in the midst of a glorious affair with a wealthy, good-looking, single orthopedic surgeon who will do anything in the world for her. The surgeon is a woman, and she is not married to anyone else.

Mary was so inspired by her friends' ability to pick up and do whatever they wanted that she quickly ordered her husband Boyce to obtain a conditional-use permit for the craft store she had always wanted to build on the edge of her property. Much to Boyce's dismay, she called the store The Menstrual Hut. Within just a few weeks, women crafters from a six-state area discovered her unique candles, needlework, and the pottery that she was creating on her old wheel that had been in the storage shed since two weeks following her high school graduation. Oprah Winfrey, whose mother lives in Wisconsin, actually brought her mother to the store, and then had Mary on a show featuring women who do their own thing and don't give a damn what anyone else thinks.

Janice immersed herself in learning all she could about herbal remedies and preventative medicine after she came back from the walking adventure. She became an expert in the use of phytochemicals as a way to better mental and physical health. With a loan from her husband Paul and from Chris, she opened a spa and health center in a Milwaukee suburb that includes a small tea store that showcases Chinese teas. In particular, The Elegant Gathering of White Snows. Within six months, the spa became so popular that Paul built an addition, and is planning to retire early from his trucking job in order to help manage the new business.