5 AM

It’s nearly 5 a.m., and I’m amazed how quiet it is. It’s blackness with no streetlights, soundless with no trains or trucks. The air is not stirring with my truelove’s snoring because he is in the wilderness with friends.

At times it feels perfect to be alone with my thoughts floating along in the predawn Ozarks. It reminds me of the earliest experience of this peace that I can recall.

For a brief time my father, mother, and I lived in the Maverick House, an old structure with newspaper stuffed into the cracks. We were part of the Woodstock NY artists’ community. It must have been 1948 or so. I was 4 or 5 years old.

I had a cat named Sir J. Michael and Joseph Campbell lived up the road. I could take off and walk along paths in the woods on my own. Everyone knew my father, the blind pianist-composer Forrest Goodenough, and my Roma-like mother, Chia. She was compared to a gypsy because she would take off for days or months whenever the urge hit her with no plans or date of return.

Home for me was wherever I was. At the White Horse Inn drinking girl-hattens, talking with Raul Hague about sculpture and drinking Turkish coffee, or visiting Aunt Fritzi and Uncle John Striebel… watching him draw Dixie Dugan in his little studio at their home which was later owned by Al Grossman and frequented by BobDylan.

I feared in later years that I would never belong anywhere or with anyone.

On this Fall predawn, I am truly home in two senses. I have lived with my true love for 40 years, yet solitude feels like a warm blanket. Endless possibilities spin in the darkness, and I am at peace.

I wish this feeling at some time in your lives—for all of you.

Auntie Crow

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