Spring Equinox Story (Nonnewaug)

For Wendell, my "Twin Brother"

  After showing a drawing of a sunset over some possible stone cultural features, a Schaghticoke elder who worked at a local museum had asked me, many years ago, “Well, what does Wendell think about this?” She knew that Wendell DeerWithHorns, who was born either seven days after I was (or possibly a week less than a year before) on the Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota, and I had become friends and she was genuinely interested.

   I was able to answer her very quickly.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

   So I guess that is how it came to be that on the next vernal equinox, Wendell and I were walking over to a sort of triangle made of stones and boulder, in a seemingly abandoned and neglected apple orchard. We crossed some hayfields, following a stone wall, had to cross a ditch and then another little stream as well, walking on fallen tree trunks that the roses and barberries were trying their best to cover up, just then sprouting the first green of the new year.  

   We talked about the local history and I told him about bringing a Paugussett war chief we both knew over to look at the twisted trees of great age and the boulders that seemed to point out where the sun set on the equinoxes and maybe the summer solstice. We talked about Medicine Wheels...

  I don’t have photos but somewhere there’s a drawing of the two of us as stick figures along with a diagram and compass points of two sunsets, documenting the time we witnessed this springtime event. We watched the sun go down and decided to stay because Venus was becoming more visible as the sun when behind the hill over the stones. It looked as if it was following the same path and we were curious to see if the planet would also set on the same spot on the hillside marked by the boulders.

  Well, you know Venus surely did set over the stones – which shouldn’t have been a surprise since the moon and all the planets follow this ecliptic path in the sky.

  Getting darker by the minute, we started back toward that tangle of trees and thorns over the swampy little stream, a darker spot in the distance.

   That was when we both realized that neither of us had thought to bring along a flashlight...

Nancy and Wendell DeerwithHorns