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By Root 865 0

sent to the guillotine Catholics who refused to pledge allegiance to the government’s control over the church. Before that, the plague swept through the village. If ever there were a house predisposed to ghosts, theirs would be it. However, we all agree somewhat noncommittally that of course there must be a plausible explanation for the voices, not wanting to sound irrational or prone to flights of fancy. “I think I was just over-tired, hallucinating,” says Elizabeth. Yet I see in her eyes that she is not fully convinced, and I find myself entertaining the possibility of ghosts, in the spirit of the folklore upon which this village was built. So I talk to the faeries just in case, and ask them to please take it easy on me, and when I pass the cemetery on my walks, I stop at the gates and call in to the centuries worth of bones buried there. “Rest easy, spirits of Serécourt. I am your friend!”

Initially, I sleep a lot and spend my days indoors, reading, crying, feeding log after log into the wood stove, and drinking wine. I am in my late thirties, and I try to figure out where my life veered off the tracks. I had imagined I would have a fulfilling career by now. I had imagined my life with a partner who stayed, who would be next to me drinking wine and asking me for crossword puzzle help. I always imagined I would have a child, have children. My future children had become so real to me that their perceived loss stings almost as much, if not more, than the loss of love. When I first got to France, I cocooned myself in the safety of the house, extracting myself from a world I no longer felt like playing with. I loved intensely, I was loyal, I did my job, but those didn’t seem to be the rules of the game after all. So I don’t want to play anymore. But I eventually run out of wine, notice the rapidity with which I am burning through logs during the day, and so begin to venture out, taking walks and visiting nearby towns. And as I immerse myself in the history of Lorraine, I find more than quiche. I find other women. I find strong women, women pushed out by society, following their own paths, thumbing their noses at convention. Women who found their way in this landscape. I find Joan of Arc, who I learn grew up in a village nearby. I find hundreds of women who were unjustly burned at the stake as witches, one of the highest concentrations in Europe, thanks to the leading demonologist’s residence here in the sixteenth century. I find goddesses worshipped in a culture of Celtic, Roman, and Catholic tradition in this area, melting together in this muddy, rain soaked ground. Damona, the Roman goddess, has her name carved in many of the stones recovered from the Gallo-Roman ruins here. Epona, Rosmerta, and Nantosuelta, goddesses of fertility, also feature prominently in the artifacts they dig up here and take their place alongside the Catholic Virgin Mary. I find a long line of women who wove their way into this landscape. There are very few weak women in this culture.

This is a region famous for water, the source of several large rivers, the site of hot springs which have fostered a spa culture famous in all of Europe for centuries, millennia even. In the fifth century B.C., a tribe of female Celtic druids settled here, at the source of the Saône River, in worship of the river goddess Sagona who brings forth the springs from the earth. I am living in the middle of a triangle of three large spa towns: Bourbonne les Bains, Vittel, and Contrexeville. These spa town clocks seem to have been set permanently on 1890 while the rest of us moved on to Pilates and Power Yoga, acupuncture and chiropractors. Sunday afternoons, the spas even put on civilized “tea dances” in the ballroom. I find myself suddenly plunged into a Jane Austin novel when I go to these towns to visit their farmers’ markets. Amazed, I wander through groomed rose gardens where “curists” sit in antiquated Pavilions and on benches along the promenade, in between their water cures for rheumatism or perhaps, one begins to wonder, for their tuberculosis or polio, quaintly