A Christmas Blizzard by Garrison Keillor Page B

a waterfall trickling into a plastic pond with several rather lethargic goldfish. A tea-kettle whistled in the kitchen and she went to make them a pot of tea. Her hair had an ethereal, see-through red color. He noticed when she turned her back that she’d put on weight. She wore a big white frilly dress and it was broad in the beam. Interconnected or not, the woman was eating like a horse. On the walls were large color photographs—three feet by four—landscapes—corn stubble, a snowy field, a creekbed with three big cottonwood trees rising from it, an abandoned farm site, another abandoned farm site, and then a full frontal view of a naked woman of advanced years, in black-and-white. He didn’t want to look at it but it was hard not to. “That’s a self-portrait,” she said. He had guessed as much. “It took me forty years to get up the courage to do that,” she said. He thought it might’ve been better if she hadn’t waited so long but he didn’t say anything.
    “I have so much I want to share with you,” she said. A crystal chandelier hung from the ceiling. A low ceiling and an enormous chandelier, so you had to walk around it. She had glued various clay figures to the chandelier, horses and bears, some Indian figures, a couple of coyote. “I bought that in Tucson,” she said. “And then when Floyd died, I moved back here because his spirit is here and my work is here.” She was storytelling in schools and doing some life-coaching and trying to earn extra money by selling Greenspring organic skin cleanser, moisturizer, eye liner, mascara, and blush, and her sister Liz was boycotting her because some of the products were made in Communist China, so she and Liz were not speaking, but they had often not spoken in the past so it was no hardship.
    “How’s your Christmas?” he said.
    “Oh Jimmy,” she said. “Don’t you feel it? Christmas is the force field of heightened possibility. It’s not about religion, those myths we were brought up with are only tools to direct us toward the mystery of the under self. It’s about the ecstatic visualization of psychic metaphor. The psychic world is calling us toward balanced consciousness. Don’t you feel that? There is a lightness and spontaneity that is struggling to get through all the commercial static and lead us out of our linear consciousness into a global wholeness. You know about global wholeness, don’t you? ”
    He nodded. Yes, of course. “I feel so connected to you right now,” she said. He sensed a hug coming on and he edged away.
    She collected spoons and cups. Spoons, she explained, represented the generosity of life. So did cups. Hundreds of them hung on hooks on the wall. Wooden spoons, steel spoons, shallow spoons, deep spoons. “I want this to be good for you spiritually, coming back to Looseleaf, I know you came to see Daddy but really I think you’ve come here to find yourself, and I want to help you if I can. I’ve become a bard, Jimmy. A visionary conversationalist.
    “My roots are here. Like yours, Jimmy. And I went away, as you did, because I felt a polarization between myself and my family. I had to live away until I was ready to come back. And when I was, then I was ready to find the road to spiritual growth in the beautiful motherness of the North Dakota prairie. My consciousness simply had to evolve from a reliance on mountain wisdom to a trust in prairie wisdom. There are visionary mother spirits here who want to guide us, but we need to be open to dialogue and the goal of transforming consciousness and opening the winter veil to evolutionary experience that nurtures the diversity of the heart that can make us whole.”
    She wanted to tell him the story of how she got started telling Ojibway tales and he got up from the table. “Back in a minute,” he said, and headed for the door.
    “It’s cold out there!”
    “I know. Gotta start the car.”
    “Scooter’s going to come and start it.”
    He pretended not to hear