My sisters and I have just inherited an old English farm. We come there to live, and find a bewildering maze of sheds and house-wings at the heart of it. It's a convoluted story too, like a modern Dickens. The farm is ours, but we're children, and the farm managers, a whole clan speaking a thick county dialect, are hiding secrets from us. Do they mistrust us as outsiders, or fear we're unready to handle the truth emotionally? Or to decide maturely...

Or do they just want to keep their power?

It may be some murky mixture of all these, which even they couldn't unsort.

As I get hints of the depths involved, I also start to see just how much these folk (supposedly explaining it all to us) have hidden. Layers of manipulation. Two girls who we assumed have grew up here in the main compound were really MOVED here by the general manager of the farm to distract us from a dark Gypsy girl, who has a strong accent or speaks another tongue, but has pieces of the puzzle--if we knew what to ask. Indeed every surface element of the farm's life is orchestrated to hide secrets, or reveal facets the managers choose, at a pace they decide--unilaterally.

In the afternoon, we tour our uplands, beyond the cultivated fields. My sisters and I are in a horse-drawn cart. I like our mare, and wonder why she has blinders on, here in the country. She clops sedately enough up muddy paths. High moors, low marshes. The pale sea beyond.

It's Easter, and following the ancient country tradition, a line of women straggles across the marsh, in birdlike bonnets like Gauguin's Breton peasants (or the Flying Nun). They dance and chase the giant eggs of Easter. Living eggs? They scurry about like drunken chickens. No, too big--but they move birdly. Aha. Turkeys in drag!

One scurries up from behind us and up along our curving mud track. Trailing it, a mad horde of lean red hounds baying. They boil up from behind our mare, pouring recklessly under her hooves. I worry she'll panic.

Now a bird-bonnet woman runs past, wild as Diana, directing the hounds with calls like heron-cries. She ignores us utterly, seems in a frenzy. All her soul's bent toward catching that living egg! She doesn't care if the hunt spooks our mare--and on this hill-road, if she bolts, our cart will overturn, and we'll fall under the hounds. In their mood now, they'll tear us to death. I shiver--but not just with personal fear. A fierce hot current rushes through us, tugging the blood. This is no rustic exercise, but the Wild Hunt itself! Disguised, but showing through its tattered cloak.

But our mare, our flighty, nervous mare, stands fast, wide-eyed and shivering--and at last, the Wild Hunt fades, and passes.

Leaving us alive.

• The secretive farm = my own brain. I'm in therapy, but some side of me wants to keep the truth hidden. Distracts me to keep the revelations gradual. But I'm no longer sure this is good faith. Looks manipulative!
• Easter rite, pagan roots = I just read that modern Greece has two big holidays, both with pagan roots: Easter, and one in August, for the Virgin Mary? Or harvest time?
• Blinders = Clinton's press secretary is leaving. He asked Clinton not to tell him about anything improper and referred all scandal-related questions to Clinton's lawyers; so, kept a reputation for honesty about policy matters. Sounds sleazy and disengenuous to me. He knew to ask NOT to know...
• Mare = Silky, my anima. She and I ARE both jumpy, yet she does manage not to panic as she faces...
• THE WILD HUNT = an ancient rite, but it has another meaning here. I was a school outcast, a target, and the hunt pouring by me is an eruption of memories of being attacked, chased, beaten, kicked, of bones broken... Of being prey.

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