Companions by Cat Corcilius painting copyright
http://www.firstpeople.us/native-american-art-for-sale/Cat-Corcilius/Cat-Corcilius-Companions.html

 

Blue Corn Woman showed up
a day early.

Every year at this time, she
comes from Arizona to help
Stone Creek Woman dismantle
camp for the season.

These two women can't ask
for a better way to make a
living.  Blue Corn Woman
owns and operates a trading
post in the Superstition
Mountains of Arizona.

She sells pawn to feed herself
and her two wolf dogs.  Her
personal, polished kettles
hang on the wall and her
desert mattress, a cozy
featherbed, hangs across a
rope in the daytime, flanked
with a large Navajo blanket
that has a sacred blue-corn
plant weaved into the center
for the reason to section off
her spiritual living space from
her pawn.

Her Corn Mother, a Hopi
squaw who gave birth to her
forty-five years ago, named
her Blue Corn, a Native American
expression that ears of corn
take on as they ripen.

In legend, Blue Corn Woman
Near to Summer was responsible
for the summer people who planted
and White Corn Maiden Near to
Ice took charge of the winter
people who hunted.

From the footpath leading to the tinaja, she can see silver kissing silver lying on the same rock she found the thunderbird concho.  Now why would a cowgirl leave her prized one-of-a-kind Chilean spurs on a game-board rock in the desert?

Blue Corn Woman's real-life version of Desert Monopoly has nine tokens; thunderbird concho, spur, Tequila bottle, watermelon, ear of corn, peyote button, wolfdog, cactus, and a javelina.  The most desired property is the Blue Corn Trading Post and she deleted Go To Jail and added Go To Peyote Tent.  In her peyote vision, she rolls the ivory dice incised with blue dots, giving her a sexy total of number nine, and she lands on Harmony Place, a hot property!

With the wooden bows for braces under the peyote tent, they have a chuck wagon, bunkhouse, and prayer altar all in one.

At dawn, the cowgirls take up the ashes and sweep up the sand floor, unconcerned with modern settlement.  "Saddled up an' lookin' pretty," Favor, the only black cowgirl says, tipping her Lady Stetson to Blue Corn Woman.  "You are my sister."

"Played dominoes under the stars, kissed the cowgirls in the sand, and wrote poetry in peyote.  I never had it so good, Blue," Widow says.

"Time for the Kachina seasons and the harvest, Blue.  You won't miss 'em this year," Belle says.

"We love your earth medicine, Blue.  Most prescriptions are hard to read, but the bills are clear.  Yours does some real healing," Dulcie says.

"My religious life is here in this peyote tent and that's where I like it to stay," Kitty says.

"Blue Corn Woman lives beneath a turquoise sky and lives by a sacred calendar.  That would be the first sentence I would write about you," Cassidy says.

"Our dramas, our songs, our poetry belong to you.  You are inspiration to a cowgirl's code," Matti Silk says.

" We cannot duplicate our life here back at the ranch.  We can only take back with us the wisdom of the healer who has her shingle and horseshoe hung at the Blue Corn Trading Post, a spiritual place only a desert lesbian would understand," Harlow says.

The cowgirls ride off into the copper sunrise shadowing the purple mountain cliffs, but they will be back, many times.

Copyright 2006 Sage Sweetwater, firebrand lesbian novelist, brainchild of Sage Sweetwater Creative Properties, flagship of Stone Creek Woman