Tamara L. Siuda, unplugged
wide unclasp the tables of their thoughts
these same thoughts people this little world
These words stretch across a pair of stained glass windows at the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California, a house I wandered during the time when I lived a few blocks away. The significance and context of these two phrases — quotes from two different Shakespeare plays and the only words to be found inside the house — remain an enigma whose meaning went to the grave with Sarah Pardee Winchester.
Unlike Mrs. Winchester, I am very much alive, and my sojourn in San Jose only lasted two years. My name is Tamara (rhymes with camera, three syllables), and my surname, Siuda, has a silent i. I am no rich hermitess plotting unending construction out of grief or a canny desire to keep my fortune from the unworthy. Instead, I live in a modest space in the Inland Empire five hours to the south of Mrs. Winchester’s folly, with a polydactyl cat named Seamus and far too many books.
You could call me a hermitess. It isn’t difficult to want to be alone in the midst of a pandemic that doesn’t want to end and a wider world that seems hellbent on its own demise. But my privation is less Mrs. Winchester and more in the mold of the Coptic martyrs I studied for the Ph.D. dissertation I completed in 2018.
Few things miss my interest if they have a story attached. Luckily, the world is filled with stories, and I’m out to read them all and write a few in the process.