kethrai's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Voudoun Disco Queen We have a second floor porch that I go out to smoke cigarettes on, now that we have a no-smoking-in-the-house rule, and as a result I spend rather a lot of time watching neighbors in three to four minute increments, and quietly speculating about their lives and situations. I've also been watching with great interest as the top (under the roof) floor of the house across the back fence has been renovated, because when I first started going out on the porch to smoke it was a dusty space with some piled two-by-fours visible through the one window I could see, and now it seems to be a finished space, with a chunk of nicely-finished wall and a bit of skylight just visible through the window. The house there is, I believe, like this one-- a multi-apartment house, an old house chopped into various odd living arrangements. And since the Roof Room has been completed about a month or so ago, I have been watching to see if there are new tenants who might seem interesting to think about for the four minutes I spend out there every other evening. Goddess is kind. Because now, to add to the roster of Odd Neigbors right next to the Redneck Alchemist, I do believe we have ourselves a Voudoun Disco Queen right across my back fence. So I'm sitting out with a cigarette one evening, and I'm glancing over the back fence and I glance up to the window, and hear some soft chanting. It could be a radio, it could be just about anything, really, and I can't quite make it out. There are candles on the windowsill, and there are lights flickering in the room. Fine, I think...probably a tv. Then I realize the lights are in colors. They have a colored light flasher. Like a disco club. Ok, it's thin evidence, I realize. Maybe they were simply having hot monkey sex and liked to do it to candles and multicolored lights and wierd chanting music. But given that my neighborhood is already given to some little wee oddities, I'm betting that we have a Disco Voudoun Queen, and every time I'm out there with a cig, I'm listening hard when the candles are burning, wondering what Baron Samedi and Papa Legba think of New England, and if Ezili has to wear warmer clothes up here. I watch the window hoping that I either do or don't see Ogu Balanjo ready to take my cuts and bumps served up by life and take notice. I hope that Yemanja likes the tidal inlets hereabouts and doesn't decide to make the little river that runs through the center of town flood again this year. Proper gods should travel with their adherents, and go wherever they do. Even in the Gospel of St. Thomas, there are references to the Kingom of Heaven being everywhere, being here, being now, if you know how to look properly. I put out milk for my house pixies and usually thereafter can find my car keys...the owner of the Roof Room I hope has put out a little rum and some pound cake and a couple cigars to that the loa don't find New England too inhospitable. The contract is that if you invite folks, you should probably make provision for your guests. I rather wonder where one would find all the proper preparations for the hosting of such guests--music can be found, as can their favorite foods, but one should still wonder if inviting them this far north would displace them from their normal baliwick badly enough to discomfit them. It would do no good to have Baron Samedi stalking the streets of this little New England town, searching for gumbo and boiled peanuts. So each evening I will step out onto my porch and quietly speculate, and watch for the candles and the lights, and hope that no veves turn up on my car or my back step....and hope that loas like New England boiled dinner and chowder, and maybe tonight I'll make a bit of pound cake...just in case. 8:26 p.m. - 2005-09-19 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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