My lover and I are in Crawfordville, Fla, where the sun burns down on the Spanish moss, and the alligators mosey from sinkhole to sinkhole. Right next door is Tallahassee, the town where my lover came out. This is where she started smoking a pipe, wearing cowboy boots, and kissing girls. (She´s given up the first two habits, but the third stuck.) I have to thank Tallahassee for ushering Marisol into a life of sterling dykedom.

We cycle back here almost every year, because Marisol has good friends here from college days, and because her brother lives in Tallahassee. We call him the Venezuelan Bubba, since he always has a car up on blocks. After a few days in Florida, Marisol acquires a slight Southern twang as well.

During our summers, Marisol and I move from place to place, and each community represents some part of our identities. We see people that we knew at certain points in our lives, and recapture those years and the rich experiences that those years gave us. As we get older, this process becomes ever more dense and layered. We still have a few years to go before we can call ourselves old women, but we are seeing something of the pleasures of that state.

We´re staying with Ann, celebrating her 60th birthday, and Liv has joined us. These are women we know from Caracas, who have moved to Florida like so many other Latinas. As I call them Latinas, I flash briefly on their pale skin, but then I reconsider their souls, and I know the word applies. They wave their arms with broad gestures, and sprinkle their conversation with uniquely Venezuelan expressions, ("no joda, chama!" "el peo y la vaina", "coño, que ladilla!"). Being here, my lover connects both to her home-town of Caracas, and to her college years in this area.

We fuss over Ann for her birthday. We tell her that she´s beautiful, get her high, and give her presents from Ecuador. Tonight Marisol will concoct a 5-course Chinese dinner.

I love the way that women carry their years. We don't tend to become pompous and self-important, but retain the ability to laugh at ourselves. Ann loses her car keys, and then later does a raucously funny imitation of her search for them, the way she wildly tossed objects in every direction, the way she muttered and snarled.

Here in Crawfordville, the summer stretches around us. Every afternoon, thunder grumbles in the sky, and lightning stabs into the humid air. Every night, we talk about where we´ve been, and where we´re going. We soak our experiences in words, make them malleable, before adding them to our memories.

As I write this, on the last new moon of July, everything is in Leo - the sun, moon, Mercury, Venus and Jupiter. During August, one by one, everything will move into the quiet earth sign Virgo. Leo is playful and rambunctious, the sign of immediate experience. Virgo is measured and analytical, the sign of considered experience.

By the first day of August, the moon and Mercury will be in Virgo. The moon will hurry onward with its cycle, but Mercury will stay in Virgo throughout August, going retrograde as the month ends. On the 22nd and 23rd, the sun and Venus enter Virgo, and on the 27th, Jupiter enters it. Jupiter will be in Virgo for the next year.

Virgo is the time of reckoning. While Leo can get away with being flamboyant and bombastic, Virgo focuses on the facts and figures. Jupiter in Leo loves a good show, but Jupiter in Virgo is more interested in truth and the practical applications of truth. This is the motto of Virgo: Whenever there´s a problem, there´s a sane and natural solution. It´s the sign of ecology and herbal lore.

So during this last month of Leo, there may still be a lot of flowery language. Bush will make speeches in which he confidently rewrites history. But more and more, the details will begin to emerge. Small persistent questions will be asked over and over, on many different levels. As Mercury in Virgo slows down during August, the pace slows, and there´s a tendency to linger over these questions. As pundits debate the meaning of everything, a few inconvenient facts will continually present themselves.

So, do I think Bush is in trouble? Yes. One interesting thing about the planetary movement into Virgo is that there also exists a planetary focus in the opposite sign, Pisces. The Virgo/Pisces axis is about the tension between belief and truth, between trust and skepticism. Pisces is also the sign of the scapegoat, and I have a feeling that Bush will now be scapegoated by those with more power than he.

Will the whole truth come out? I think that the carefully orchestrated hype of the Bush administration will collapse, but I also believe that there are many layers to the truth. And I think it will be decades before we see the true shape of the powers that move our society.

But for now, it would be satisfying to see this administration collapse. I´ll settle for that. And during the last half of August, Mars moves retrograde, back towards the planet of surprises, Uranus. So I wouldn´t be surprised if some mighty structures started to slide.

On the 28th, Mercury goes retrograde in Virgo, and this is an excellent time to delve into the past, and to figure out what really happened. All of us women, old and young, will take the time to do this as well. We´ll use our investigative powers to analyze the past - and simultaneously, we´ll welcome Jupiter in Virgo, harbinger of a more pragmatic and sensible future.

Yes, as August ends, we´ll examine our experiences. Some of us will do this with charts and graphs and five-year-plans, but most of us will do it while gazing out the window, studying the sky for signs of rain, and remembering something we´ve forgotten. Bits of our experiences return unexpectedly, called up by a glimpse of a certain flower, or by a change in the weather. We reel these experiences in, think them through, and let them change us.

When we value our lives and our experiences, we are taking a radical stance. To claim age is to claim our own histories. We are everyone we´ve ever been, and we have all been so many different women through the years. Sometimes we´ve adapted, sometimes we´ve claimed space, and we know how to do both. We come to age with an awareness of nuances, a welcoming of our own complexities.

We speak, and we listen, and we recognize the truth.

Index of Jenny Yates' Writings on Lesbian.com