My Goodness, Is that?

I come huffing and puffing the last little bit into the gypsy camp. The camp which until now I'd only watched from the hilltop. Somehow I've just been to tired to face too many people all at once. Today I am determined to take myself all the way to the bottom of the hill and look into the Sunday market.

There in the middle of a open area of grass just behind one of the few permanent houses sat an old woman. Not old really, more like weathered, as if there were several lifetimes carved into her knowing face. Her eyes looked through and beyond everything, or so it would seem. Maybe she was daydreaming off in some distant world. Her life might seem to her as mine now does to me, like nesting dolls, one life inside another. I don't know about the gysy but I cannot know if I am in the inner life, the outer one or one in between?

She seems oblivious to the goings on, ladies dancing, pied pipers piping, giggling girls putting up laundry and a lively kitten swiping away at butterfilies. My donkey is trotting off to meet with other donkeys at the other side of the camp, they too are making quite the commotion.

I think I'll just sit here and rest a while. I'll think if I really should tie the old gypsy scarf around my head and read cards as my aunt Anna taught me. Perhaps I might see what teas the guides suggest I prescribe for the betterment of the customer's health, all in the spirit of the market to profit the overall karma and barter back and forth for what we earnestly need.

My fingers nervously knot the scarf around my head. I shuffle my Marseille Tarot deck. I don't need the cards, they are a prop, a lovely prop once given to me by a dear friend, for seeing babies in her future, when her twins were born, she gave me this deck. These cards have been with me for thirty years. Twenty years since I last used them..

I slipped the deck in my volumenous skirt pocket, and slowly descended the hillside, stepping gingerly sideways hoping to not be noticed just yet. Baba looked up and smiled. "Good, you're here".