California Bay Laurel

It needed something.

Daphne stirred the pot again, took a sip from the spoon. Salt, pepper, thyme, a splash of red wine, the lamb stew was good. She wanted it outstanding. Tonight, her guests would feast on hummus, the stew, couscous, with harsh retsina to drink, thick coffee and baklava for dessert. Back in California now, after spending the summer on a dig sponsored by the University of California at Berkeley.

For five years she packed up in early June, sub-let her house in California’s west Marin County for three months and removed herself and basic belongings to a scrub-filled mountainside in Greece, where she lived in a tent dormitory with fifteen other women. Across the dig’s compound, which held a dining tent, collection tent, cooking tent, was another dormitory with beds for some twenty men. The actual archeologists stayed in four individual rough huts at the edge of the compound.

The professionals greeted their workers and volunteers every year with the same kind of meal and she deemed it fitting that she prepare this in recognition of her farewell, a good-bye to Greece, the dig, and ultimately Kostas, the Greek archeologist assigned by the antiquities officials to make sure none of the artifacts walked off.

Halfway through this summer, her body warned her that the long days of crouching over a small patch of earth, patiently picking and brushing away the accumulation of centuries of dirt, ashes, scree were coming to an end.

Her small patch of dirt was at the downhill end of the dig, the collection of tents, huts, people and occasional cars that descended on this sacred place annually. Almost three thousand years ago, another group of people gathered here to build a small temple to Artemis, in a copse of laurel trees next to a swift stream. The temple lay forgotten over the centuries while that of her brother, Apollo, higher up the slope of the mountain, grew in wealth and stature as the seat of the Oracle of Delphi

A bare trace, a shallow depression, marked where that stream flowed, now gone. Maybe diverted by an earthquake deep under the mountain. Maybe the same earthquake destroyed the temple. Whatever happened, the spot lay under the hot Greek sun for centuries, subsequent earth movements and hillside slippages burying the stones and columns under feet of soil and dust, until only the sky-circling hawks marked or knew that once the gods and goddesses walked here.

Now, the people came to find and remember the ancestors, to reconstruct the rituals and feel the awe this sacred ground instilled.

For Daphne, it would be no more. Her fortieth birthday loomed next month, and her joints sent messages of “enough.” She could still climb the hills, still squat while wielding a soft brush, still kneel at the edge of a trench watching in wonder as a three-inch tall bronze of a goddess saw daylight again. Movements were just a shade slower, she found herself putting a hand on the ground to steady herself, massaged laurel-infused oil into her hands and wrist joints at night.

She closed her eyes at the whiff of memory then jerked them open. Laurel. Here called California bay laurel. That’s what the stew needed.

She slammed out her kitchen door in the fading twilight and almost ran to the two laurel trees at the edge of her garden. They were there, as always; there when she bought the house, growing, surviving with no thought or care on her part, part of the dry summer landscape. The pungent scent came on a warm Greek-like breeze that lifted the laurel leaves she reached for. As she pulled off a handful, the branches shook. She jerked back. Had she hurt it? Disturbed its peace?

“Daphne, Daphne. There you are.”

Daphne turned with a squeak.

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to make you jump.” Eloise stood in the soft twilight, white summer dress luminescent, bare toes curling into the fine dust. “I knocked, the kitchen door was open but no you. Are you watching the sunset?”

“No. No, I realized the stew needed bay. Fresh is best, so I came to ask the tree for some.” Daphne smiled, holding up the leaves. “The tree shivered and I wondered if I’d injured it.”

“You? You couldn’t hurt a thing. I brought a bottle of wine. Is everyone coming?” As Eloise turned, Daphne saw her legs and hips through the gauzy, white fabric silhouetted against the dying light.

“Everyone” comprised ten women who met in graduate school more than a decade ago. After marriages, divorces, children, they coalesced again as Woman/Song, a group that taught and edited women’s writings. They’d finally committed themselves to writing and publishing a book, tentatively titled When Women Speak, an overview of the root differences in women’s conversations in groups, with and without men.

“Yep, they should be on their way. C’mon let’s open some wine. Dinner’s ready, I’ll drop these,” she waved the leaves, “in the stew, let it simmer.”

Two hours later the women lolled back on couches, chairs, making sounds of repletion and ready for talk.

“Was this honestly going to be your last summer?” Tamara was an immigrant from the Czech Republic and her voice still held an exotic tinge. “You’ve said that before. Was there something different this year?”

Daphne saved up small stories, funny or interesting anecdotes to share at their annual reunion in the fall.

“I said it before, I know.” Daphne closed her eyes. How to tell this the right way, the correct way. “You’ve all seen pictures, know what the site and the land look like. This year was different somehow. The old streambed has been dry for centuries, but water found a way down the mountain and carved a new path.

“They’d had a lot of rain and snow over the winter and the creek was running high. You could hear it from the site…”

The creek behaved more like a small river. Its sounds underlay all the others of the camp, becoming white noise until a branch or boulder dislodged upstream. Then the water sounded angry, banging into rocks and tree roots before it brought them under control, smoothed over them again. It was a soothing sound to sleep by, to dream by, and after two weeks I didn’t consciously hear it.

One night it waked me. Something changed. I lay in the narrow bed, quietly so as not to wake the others. There it was again. Calling for me? I felt the words, “Daphne, Daphne, come to me.” The water tumbled down the mountainside, tuning its pitch as it swirled into eddies, rumbled when it raced over rocks. In the slower parts, the litany came again. “Daphne, Daphne, come to me.”

I noiselessly slid out of bed, hugged my sheet around me, eased out of the tent barefoot, and carefully stepped along the rocky trail to the creek. “Daphne, Daphne, come it me,” it sang.

The night hung still, with a bare trace of air that gently moved the laurel leaves. Full moon, Artemis’s hunting moon, rode high, washing the earth in a pale white light, painting the tops of the creek’s small rapids. I picked my way down the stony slope, my sheet trailing and kicking up faint puffs of dust.

“Daphne, Daphne, come to me,” the stream beckoned, sounding like a lover’s call. The bleached light mesmerized me, the water’s babbling taking on a darker tone luring me closer. At the edge, the voice became insistent, “Come to me, come to me.” I closed my eyes and felt both dread and pull, as though I tottered on a high cliff, terrified of the drop but trying to resist the relentless tug to step into air.

Eyes still closed, I slid one foot onto the small pebbles lining the water’s edge and started in shock at the icy water, plunging from the snow-covered peak of Mt. Parnassus. Awake, the voice no longer called, was now only the creek’s song as it ran to the sea.

I shook myself, the dream’s—if it was a dream—hold loosening as reality set in. There was no man, or god, calling me. I was a 21st century woman, secure in my place, content with my life among women, happy I helped excavate the millennia of history at this small spot on the lip of the mountain.

There was something here, here on this now-barren hillside. In the moon-washed night the almost-memories seeped into my mind, tugging at thoughts, feelings from a time before. “Daphne, Daphne.” The voice knew my name, the name I’d hated as a child. I railed at my mother for using such an old-fashioned name, a name the kids shortened to “Daff” and then to “Daffy Duck.” Here in Greece, it became lilting, lovely, sensuous, a name to be proud of.

“Daphne…Daphne, are you alright?”

No godlike voice. Kostas. Had he followed me? He stood behind me, his presence both attracting and repelling me. He was knowledgeable about the past, attractive, but had an air of entitlement, as though he believed any woman would be his.

“Kostas, you frightened me.” I’d been aware of him every summer. Dark hair, dark eyes, a golden body that I noticed when the camp called a halt to the workday and migrated down to the sea for a swim and a barbecue. Over the years I realized a scattering of grey hair and tiny wrinkles from being in bright sun had taken root. He didn’t look old, exactly, more mature.

“I didn’t mean to. What are you doing? Why are you dragging your sheet?”

Why? A good question. “The sound of the river woke me. It seemed to be calling my name, saying ‘Come to me.’ So, I got up to investigate.”

“You Americans. Your imaginations. It probably was calling you, in its own way. Do you think you’re the only Daphne to spend time on this ground? There have hundreds of Daphnes here. You should go back to bed. I’ll walk with you.”

“It only happened once?” Eloise’s voice broke through the silence at the end of the tale and brought Daphne back—back to California, back to her time and place.

She nodded. “I clearly heard the voice that one night. I had feelings of trepidation, of being watched, of unease for the rest of the summer. And the laurel trees, the branches, moved a lot. At first, I thought it was the wind, although the air seemed calm as ever. A gentle breeze that only the laurel trees felt.” She smiled at the memory then glanced around the room, centered herself and gave a shake.

“Maybe that’s another sign of aging, more occasions of déjà vu, more remembrances of things past.” She grimaced at using the phrase. “Anyone else have a summer of uncanny events?”

A bubble of laughter rose around the room and Patrice, the practical, the conventional, the editor, said, “Nope. You’re the only one of us who spends months in the dusty, dirty laps of the gods.”

The group began gathering up sweaters, purses, bowls and bags of food brought to share.

Calls of “Good night,” “Take care” “Drive safely” echoed in the darkness as friends hugged, cars started and the gravel of the driveway popped against moving tires.

Daphne began the final nighttime chores of checking doors and windows, turning off lights, calling Circe in from her evening hunt.

Her life here, away from neighbors, cities, bustle, reached a stasis of work and rest, calm autumns and fierce winter storms, time spent in solitude and days with friends. Teaching classes on myth, folklore, women’s studies at the local community college paid for her annual splurges to Greece as well as her expenses. The work with Woman/Song nourished her soul and the members hoped for a decent publishing return on When Women Talk.

Did she need something?

Times when she sat in the sun reading, or watched the moon rise, she felt a presence, a pull. To what? Not concrete, not a destination, but a longing of being one with the unknown. She had friends who were Catholics, Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, Quakers. Even one who was the Chief Druid for a group of pagans in Southern California. It wasn’t the oneness with God that she missed, all of the religions she’d looked at, gone to their services, read their holy books, demanded a belief, an adherence. Some were more rigid, some encompassing, but all had rituals, acts that set “them” off from “other.”

This fall she felt adrift, knowing she wouldn’t go back to Greece, back to the dig. She charted and watched the moon, relishing the crisp, clear nights around winter solstice, understanding why this had been a time of celebration from the beginning. This was the turning, the days would slowly grow longer, warmth would return to the sky and the earth, new life would take hold and Artemis would watch over the wildlands, the births, the bounty of the woodlands.

As the winter holidays approached, Daphne took part in rituals that predated Christianity— back to the Zoroastrians, Romans, pagans—and felt a piece of a flowing river of beliefs and cultures. This gave her an impression of ease, of belonging. She celebrated Solstice with friends, Christmas with another set of friends and began the new year with a niggling sense of loss. Her rational mind analyzed this and told her it was because she wouldn’t go to Greece for the coming summer.

With approaching spring, she began dreaming again. She was walking down a path to a building in the company of other women. Their sandaled feet loosened a drift of pale dust that circled low in the hot air and coated the hem of her ankle-length white clothing. They were singing or chanting and she knew the Greek words. Closer, the building evolved as an open-air temple and as she neared the columns she heard the voice.

“Daphne, Daphne, come to me.”

She jerked awake. She lay under her duvet in the cool March air in California and pined for the loss of the Greek sun. It was just a dream, she told herself. My mind wants to go back, even though my body finds it too hard. To prove the dream state to herself, she went out her kitchen door as the pre-dawn sun rinsed away the moon’s last light. Early morning fog twined through the upper branches of eucalyptus and laurel trees, hiding then revealing. One wisp dissolved, giving her a glimpse of the laurel leaves dancing in an unseen breeze.

See, it’s here and now, not Greece and then, her practical mind said, pushing aside the pull of the voice. Still, she stood, taking in the spicy scent of the eucalyptus, the sweetish summery smell of the laurel while the breeze in the leaves echoed her name.

Another night she dreamt she was at the small river. She’d pulled her long skirt up, tucked it under a belt so she could wade, carefully, as the water babbled and pebbles rolled under her feet.

“Daphne, Daphne, come to me.”

She whirled around expecting to see Kostas but only saw a shaft of sun coming through the boughs of a pine.

“Daphne, Daphne, come to me.”

She woke to rain gurgling down the gutters with an occasional spatter against her window like pebbles into a stream.

In late spring, Eloise asked, “Are you missing getting ready for Greece? You haven’t packed, looked for a tenant—it must throw your internal clock off.”

“It does. It has.” Daphne straightened an already straight pile of papers. “I feel torn, kind of floaty, rootless.” This wasn’t the time to tell the dreams, though.

Summer Solstice, when Apollo drove his chariot slowly across the sky, affirming his Godhood to all below, the women of Woman/Song gathered for a picnic in the field behind Daphne’s house to celebrate midsummer. A holdover from the pagan rites of Stonehenge and other sacred sites in Europe. After moonrise, Eloise and Daphne sat beside the dying fire, only their white summer dresses visible in the thin glow of the new moon.

“Are you sure you’re alright?” Eloise’s voice sounded like a slight frown. “You’ve seemed distracted this spring.”

Daphne looked toward her friend. “Have I?” She picked up a small stick and pushed it in the fire. “I guess I have. I don’t know what’s wrong, part of it is that I miss the dig, miss Greece.”

“Why don’t you go, then?” Eloise held up a hand to stop Daphne’s protestations. “Not for the dig, for a vacation. You could visit the dig for a few days, rent a car and travel to parts you’ve never seen.”

“I can’t afford a couple of months without leasing my house and it’s too late in the summer to do that.”

“I’m not talking long-term. Just ten days, two weeks. Patrice and I would be happy to take care of anything here, come over and feed Circe.”

It was then that Daphne talked about the dreams, told Eloise that a voice lured her as she walked toward a temple, as she waded in the stream. “I even woke up and went outside to make sure they were dreams, that I hadn’t been transported to some other time and place. The laurel trees moved in a slight breeze but everything else was the same. Normal, just plain old California.”

Eloise stood, and the dying flames turned her dress into a column of reflected fire. “You have unfinished business there. I don’t mean paranormal, but something is in your subconscious and it’s stuck. You’re in a loop. You may never get it out until you face it—and it seems to be in Greece.”

Daphne nodded at the sense of Eloise’s words. “You may be right, that’s been dancing around in my head as well.”

In bed, with Eloise gone and Circe curled up at her feet, Daphne pulled memories out. The camaraderie of the volunteers, the high spirits and good nature of the other women, the laughter when misunderstandings rose through the different languages. The sense they were all here for the same goal; deeper knowledge of the past, the feeling of nearing the gods and goddesses, the joy of discovering objects not seen in almost three thousand years, the awe at what their ancestors accomplished.

The heat, the dust, the exotic setting, the otherness of the food, the language, even the alphabet—seeing contemporary people use letters developed millennia past.

And Kostas. And the voice. And the pull of the temple, the feeling of belonging.

She lay there in the California dark, tasting the narrative of past lives beyond the five summers she’d spent. How many thousands of people, how many young women, came down the path to the temple? How many of them sang a hymn to Artemis? Brought offerings? How many pledged themselves to her, vowing chastity?

She checked her finances, booked a flight to Athens in mid-August, arranged for a car, messaged her friends at the dig. “Planning to arrive for a three-night stay. Can you accommodate me?” The flight from San Francisco was long but uneventful, she stepped off into the blazing whiteness of heat and light in Athens, picked up the car and headed for the Peloponnese.

Mycenae beckoned, home of so much passion and bloodshed. Where Agamemnon warred and Helen walked, a bowl of burning blue sky trapped the land in a haze of heat. Only the lizards darted across the fallen marble of the palace, the steps, the agora.

She took the ferry across to Nafpaktos, stopped to climb to a Venetian castle from the 12th century, a time too late for her interest. Insects ruled now, whirring in the heat and silence.

Then drove east along the seacoast to Itea before heading up the hills to Delphi.

There were nine women from previous years and another group who’d come for only one summer. In Daphne’s honor, the veteran volunteers and the dig’s archeologists, including Kostas, prepared a meal of souvlaki, couscous, grilled vegetables, washed down with retsina. As she fell into the narrow bed, exhausted with sun, talk, wine, friendship, peace enfolded her.

Her last day at the dig, Kostas took her and four other volunteers to the sea at Itea where they swam and lounged on the rocky beach, telling stories of their homes and the months away from Greece. After dinner, Kostas asked her to walk with him to a small grove of ancient olives, the silvery-grey leaves etched against the growing dark. He took her hand.

“When I heard you wouldn’t be here this year, I was sad.” He reached above her head and pulled hard, green olives off, pitching them at a nearby stump. “I’m very, hmmm, fond of you. I was hoping we could get together this year, just you and I.”

Daphne smiled. The attraction and the pulling away. She had learned and wouldn’t let the pull of Greece, the tug of the past, fool her. What she had to do, she’d do herself and not implore the gods for help. “If things were different, that might work. I’m fond of you as well. But I have a life away from here and I think you have one as well. Didn’t I hear that you have a wife? Children? A job in Athens during the winter?”

“I do,” he said. “But that’s not here and now.”

“Perhaps not.” Daphne kicked at the ground, raising dust. “For me, though, the year, my life, is a whole. I seek serenity, friends, a peace with the world. I don’t disturb it with flings.”

Asleep that night the river called again and again she rose and walked the path.

“Daphne, Daphne, you’ve come to me,” it sang. “I’ve waited for you. Now you’re here, come to me.”

She turned as the moon lit a path along the stream to the two temple columns excavated over the past years and began to follow it.

“Daphne, Daphne, don’t leave me,” the voice called in a lower register, sounding threatening.

Eloise picked her up at the San Francisco airport. “Was it good? Did you find what you were looking for?”

“I think so, maybe. There was a bittersweet quality. Kostas, the Greek archeologist professed his love to me—well, at least his lust. He was interested in a summer romance every year before he went home to his wife in Athens. There was a finality, too. Enough of the temple has been excavated that you can see its size and shape and there’s a path leading to it that countless women must have walked. I have a sense of a complete circle. Thanks for pushing me to go.”

Once home, she hugged Circe who took off to hunt. “A true daughter of Artemis,” she laughed after her cat.

Unpacked, a simple meal of salad and bread, she curled up in bed with a new novel, content. She had her life.

What wakened her? A mouse rustling? A wind sloughing in the trees?

No. A voice.

“Daphne, Daphne, come to me.” No stream, no water.

She went out the kitchen door and the voice was clearer, louder.

“Daphne, Daphne, come to me.”

The laurel tree called, a slight wind rustling the leaves.

“I searched for you for eternity. Then you came to me by my sister’s temple. At last, at last, but you left me again. I had to find you again and I have. Come to me, come to me.”

Now she spoke to the god. “You followed me in vain. I chose Artemis in Greece and I choose her here. Go, go back to your temples and your worshipers. Your wealth and your esteem and your treasures. My pleasures are quieter. Go. Go.”

The laurel leaves stilled.