And Another Thing: Fairies in the Woods

By Carole Taylor
(originally published May 2001)


My mother had a stroke last month and I have come home to the wilds of Tennessee to take care of her, to the extent that she’ll let me do that. This means that I’ve had to move work and home 500 miles from my lover and my house, but I planned my life so I could do this if necessary, and one day at a time, as they say, my lover and I will get through this. It’s not how I would have designed it, but it’s a promise I made my mother a decade ago, that I’d take care of her.

The point is that I am not getting to come home the way I had hoped I would, when I retire to build a home on the bluff with my lover, both of us way too old for who we love to matter. Or so I thought. At any rate, the plan was to build the house, invite everybody I ever knew to an open house, and whoever showed up would find out about me with some sort of prominent display of my book. If any of them came back on their own, it would pretty much tell us who was an idiot and who was sane. Now the timetable is all off.

This weekend I will have lunch with some old high school friends, and without fail there will be discussions of the faeries out in the woods. The high pitched keening you may hear off to the east and south come Saturday will be me trying to drag two women my age kicking and screaming into the 21st Century. Now I’m not possitive, but I have a feeling that true to Southern womanhood, they won’t just come right out and ask me impolite questions. But this is a really interesting situation to find myself in, after all these years, having written for so long about coming out. Because as we all know, there’s coming out and then there’s coming out in the woods. We’re talking serious woods here, children, far into the madding crowd.

Just as an example, last week out in front of Mama’s hospital sat a mostly and previously white muscle car, with various colors of fenders applied thither and yon, and Bondo yon and thither with occasional paint applied not with an air brush but with a wallpaper brush, it appeared. In the back window was a dog that nodded whenever the driver might hit the ubiquitous chuck hole and an Elvis license plate with little lights that chased one another around the tag border. And just in case anyone missed the point of all this, in the back window in four-inch high letters was a sticker that said REDNECK. Oh, really?

So coming out here is not like coming out in the city. Which I already knew, but now all this theory will be put to the test. And I can’t decide exactly how I’m going to do this. It’s one thing to just refrain from lying to people my mother’s age and talk about my partner this and my partner that and Bridget and the woman I live with. (That would be one and the same person, in case you just got confused.) These women would just go on with their lives and think what they wanted or not think at all. If my being a lesbian crossed their minds, they’d immediately have some kind of snowplow 18-wheeler thought whose job it is to runs it down errant ideas if one crosses the yellow line.

But I’m having lunch with two girls-now-women from high school, and somehow I’m not sure either of them has ever met a real live lesbian, much less one they slept with years ago. No, not that way. Slumber parties. Innocent stuff. I didn’t even come out till I was out of graduate school, so everyone in the county was safe. But you know they’ll be thinking about even the innocent stuff.

Coming out is brand new every single time you do it. It gets a little easier only because you have an idea what the questions are going to be, and with luck, you might know an answer or two.

But more dangerous than coming out to my old high school friends, there is the fact that I’m out here in the middle of the woods with all these people who think Dubyuh is actually a smart guy, a guy who is somehow the savior of the known universe simply because his grammar and rampant non-sequiturs and runon sentences are consumately understandable to them.

I’ll have to report back to you on all this next time, but somehow I think my coming out is going to be a lot kinder and gentler than their flushing me out of the woods as a flaming Democrat.

Booga booga . . .

Carole Taylor holds a masters degree and most of a doctorate, which she used as a university administrator for much too long by all accounts. She has been a commercial artist, a journalist, a grants writer, a house cleaner and a Renaissance woman. She also wrote a fantastic must-read novel, called
"A Third Story". You can email her here.