The weekend was grand; the kind of weekend that makes its ending almost unbearable. We left early Saturday morning and headed to Sonoma. We ate blunch (more lunch than breakfast) and then ventured deeper into Sonoma County, onward and upward toward the Russian River. The weather was impeccable and the drive provided stunning vistas, all in bloom with rustic splendor. For us, the road became a river, and we sailed swiftly on it in our metal landshark, preying on beauty, devouring it with our eyes.
We arrived at the hotel and were greeted by Teddy, the innkeeper, who was wrangling a pack of fun-loving dogs. He was warm and evinced a genuine hospitality that was cool and avuncular. The grounds were lovely, equipped with a saline pool and hot tub, a garden, chickens, community bicycles, a hiking trail and a national forest within throwing distance. Our room was a refinished cabin from the 1950's, refurnished and modernized, with a fireplace and private back porch.
We explored our room and marked our territory, by pissing on it liberally. As we swallowed some powdered wonder on the back porch, under an orange canopy colored like a monk's robe, we heard the hungry squeaks of baby birds while their mother fed them in the nest above us. The sky was an auspicious blue and hawks hovered overhead like fighter jets, ready to annihilate any threat of danger or discomfort. We frolicked through the courtyard and hiked up a trail on the side of a mountain that led to nowhere. We returned to our room and stretched out on the bed languorously, like sleepy cats, until the rising moon pulled at our night-time curiosities. Wearing robes, we ventured out into the hot tub, where two women were fanning the flames of a fire.
We slipped into the pool like a pair of suicidal lobsters, the water bubbling and boiling around us, gurgling and lapping at us with its calming currents. Soon I felt more like a rabbit than a crustacean as I felt my muscles loosen on my bones, and the four of us were transformed into a human stew, simmering beneath the starlight. To our right, a palm tree leaned toward us, hanging on high, wafting up our amorous aroma and fanning out our pheromones. To our left, the crescent moon cut the sky like a sickle, dispelling the thin evening fog that glowed around it like gossamer.
We all began chatting, the four of us waxing philosophic, as a another woman, from Portland, joined us in the tub. The water had a mysterious way of linking our energies, tying them together in pretty red bows and smoothing them over, accelerating our conversation, percolating it. Soon, the powdered wonder I'd washed down with some Champagne was opening my chakras, busting them off their hinges. I was making poetic remarks, stressing the importance of understanding, of beauty. I won over the hearts of my mermaid mistresses and we floated in our cauldron contentedly. Then I ran to the room and grabbed a bottle of champagne, raspberries, and chocolates; I was savagely unbridled. The flames from the fire burning beside us had begun to dwindle and it billowed a light smoke that stretched across the leaves of tress like spiderwebs, and cloaked the stars in a milky kind of way.
At the witching hour, JK summoned her inner cat and climbed onto a roof, screaming: "I am a golden god!" I joined her up there, above the fog, and we lay looking at the twinkling sky, the warm water from our wet skin turning to steam. Soon we left our waterlogged wayfarers and headed back to our bungalow.
We fell asleep mumbling the words to songs in hushed, sleepy whispers, hallucinating, having half-imagined conversations with projections on the back of our eyelids. *
*Before we fell asleep she broke the screen door to the back porch - ripped it clean off the frame. She knocked over objects that groaned and rolled around loudly when they hit the floor. We got caught naked on the balcony. We woke up a pregnant woman in an adjacent room. Pot was smoked, in a no smoking zone. We let the good times roll.
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