A few weeks after our girls left home, I met a psychotic chicken. Scrawny and balding, she trembled at the slightest touch, her feathers falling from her threadbare frame like leaves in the fall. My friend Pamula said she tried everything she could think of, even Saltine crackers, to get her to eat but nothing worked. Instead of eating the cracker, the chicken sat upon it, as if willing it to hatch into healthy little Saltine chicks.
I recognize that chicken; I am that chicken. My chicks have flown the coop and my nest is empty, save the cracked shells of my former life. Trembling and threadbare, I sit upon random projects—Will this fill my nest? Will that fill my nest?
My husband and I raised our chicks in a big old nest in a small town in upstate New York near Song Mountain—an area as musical as its name—where spring thaws to the high-pitched whistle of peepers and phoebes; summer buzzes bumble bees, hummingbirds, and mosquitoes; fall grinds with the sounds of the harvest; and winter cracks and crunches salt upon ice. Our family had its seasonal songs too: the giggly spring, the splashing pool, the juicy bite of the apple festival, and the endless cabin fever squabbles, all played out against a backdrop of piano practice, Rug Rats, Harry Potter, Lion King, Shrek, Titanic, Spice Girls, Avril Levine, Weird Al, and Mystery Science Theater.
When our girls left—just as I turned a monstrous malevolent menopausal fifty—they took that noise with them and the old house settled back into the songs of nature and Leonard Cohen (me—for no one else can pick at the scabs of misery so well) and America’s Funniest Home Videos (my husband—that was a shock … for all those years I thought we were watching for the girls).
I was expecting the house to stay more or less tidy but I soon realized an old house requires as much medical care as an old person. I dry heaved as I removed the carcasses of dead shoes from the mud room. Unlike the moving finger having writ moving on, the rotting shoe having stunk, stays stunk, and neither tears nor massive amounts of bleach shall wash out the stench of it. We had used our house well and heartily, spending our busy lives enjoying rather than fixing and maintaining, and so by then our pool had turned into a plastic pond filled with sickly mutated frogs, a croak of frogs, as I liked to call them.
The fifties are an end of life crisis that likes to think of itself as “midlife.” Fifty may be the new forty but it still includes the same old menopause and the lonely empty nest. I have friends who after years of marriage are suddenly divorced or suddenly sober. My parents and older friends have died of natural and unnatural causes, and those my age have been lost to car accidents, heart attacks, cancer and brain aneurysms, and amid the grief, I hear an internal whisper, Am I next?
In Wiccan and New Age circles, the crone stage of life is celebrated as a time of deep wisdom and reflection. New Age ceremonies have become intricate with, well, age. They incorporate circle dances and incense paraphernalia and renaming ceremonies for those who demand the right to choose their own names, dammit, above the common zeitgeist name our parents chose for us. The renaming ceremony has particularly taken off with the “Debbie Boomers,” those of us cursed with a name as aging as wrinkles. Now that our leader, Debbie Reynolds, has died, no one wants to be a Debbie anymore. And what a tragic death for Debbie Reynolds—she died of a broken heart. Yes, that could easily be my fate.
I try to own the stage of the crone, to turn it into a feminist statement, but I find the folklore picture is more apt than the New Age one. In folktales, the old woman is symbolized as Baba Yaga, a used-up mother who lives in a chicken coop that spins on chicken feet; who captures young children, throws them into her bath, and then eats them. Baba Yaga is a woman bent and buckled over a broom, sweeping clean the dark cobwebs. Her lips are cracked and sunken; her eyes bloodshot—veins overflowing with tears like the Nile River soaked by the tears of the Goddess Isis. Baba Yaga cackles instead of laughs; she squawks instead of speaks. When her children call, she is harsh and brisk to hide the gruff tears and swollen throat; to push them away still further if they must be gone. She attempts to offer her wisdom with amulets and old wives tales to the indifferent and deriding and is scorned until she cries out, “It will be thus, mark my words” and when the truth is found, she is blamed as having cursed it into being.
Baba Yaga is the opposite of all that is good and abundant; she is the sharp crack of winter. Instead of creating life, she consumes it. The message she receives loud and clear is: your purpose is done; hurry up; make space for the babies.
And that broom, that is no ordinary broom—it is a symbol of some use for the poor woman; she cannot create life but don’t dispense of her just yet, she pleas. For she can still be of some service. She can keep the house clean. It is appropriate that after my mother suffered a grand mal seizure after surgery, the first thing she did as we were leaving the hospital was to accuse someone of stealing her broom. It was not the deluded mumblings of an old woman, I now realize, it was the desperate ache of someone still wanting to be of use. And what use would she be without a broom? Not to fly, her high flying days were over, but to clean.
A while after I first met the psychotic chicken, Pamula asked me to look after her animals while she and her family went on vacation. My husband and I drove up to Pamula’s beautiful hand-hewn home overlooking the valley where the trees bleed maple syrup and the garden is voluptuous and easily plucked. While Scott made a BBQ near the house, I went to feed the chickens, goats, rabbits, and sheep. Some foxes had gotten into the chicken coop a few weeks earlier and there were only three chickens remaining from the original dozens, but my chicken was still going strong. She was eating again and was jolly and fat. I soon realized why. She had adopted a litter of bunnies and with a cluck and a swagger, she proudly showed me her grandkids. I cackled my jealous admiration along with her until I realized the gate to the coop had closed and I could not get out of the newly secured area. I was trapped. “Scott,” I shouted. “Sccoott!” No answer. “SKKOTT!” I screamed. The chickens scattered in panic as my voice echoed back through the air as a loud squawk. I looked around, the shouting had made me lightheaded and it felt as if the coop was spinning around me. I knew then that my transformation was complete—there was no need for a Wiccan ceremony. This was my ceremony; I have even given myself a new name—just call me Baba Yaga.
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