......She calls herself a "crone," but it's hard to think of Billie Barbara Masten like that, even if she is 66 years old with a full head of gray hair.
......For one thing, there's her billion-kilowatt smile don't crones just scowl? And she talks, nonstop, for hours, telling stories and quoting her favorite authors (her husband and Ralph Waldo Emerson among them) and reading her own poems out loud. Don't crones just mutter?
......But there it is, under the eaves of the little studio near her home above Palo Colorado Canyon in Big Sur, California: a sign identifying the place as "Crone Zone."
......"I looked it up in dictionaries," she says, "It just means an old woman. It's a way of celebrating aging, being an elder. It's your time to know who you are."
Who she is: a project still under development, though her life lately has included being full-time grandmother to two grandsons, whom she has helped raise up there in the mountains.
......She's published two books of poetry, and one of her poems is included in an award-winning 1995 anthology, "I Am Becoming the Woman I've Wanted," published by Papier-Mache Press. She reads before audiences large and small, and sometimes the audience cries while listening.
......Her wooden carvings of faces whispering, wind-blown, astonished are snapped up immediately whenever she allows them to go on sale someplace, which she doesn't often do because "it's hard to let go of them they're like my babies."
......She has four grown children, each an artist or musician or writer also. And she has a husband, Ric Masten, with whom she has been together for 46 years he's a poet, artist and musician who for six years wrote and illustrated a very popular weekly column in The Herald.
......Ric encouraged her, years ago, to keep a journal; he encouraged her to turn it into poetry; and now he's jealous, she says, because she earned $600 for the anthologized poem.
......Named "Billie" because her parents were expecting a boy, she moved with her family to Carmel, California at age 7. Her father worked as a carpenter and contractor. She and her two sisters grew up in Carmel and Del Rey Oaks.
......At Monterey High School she helped start the first drama club, and at Monterey Peninsula College she met Ric, like her father a carpenter, but also a printer and cement finisher and truck driver who was already writing songs and selling them. They married and settled in Palo Colorado, where they've lived ever since.
......Except when they're on the road. Ric Masten became an ordained Unitarian minister and began traveling all over the country, playing his guitar and singing his songs, and she goes with him sometimes and sometimes doesn't.
Until they figured out how to make it work, Ric's traveling was hard on their relationship. After 20 years, in fact, they split apart.
......They took sometime to deal with that, and finally, she says, "we decided we liked each other the most." So they re-married although technically, they hadn't divorced, because divorce required irreconcilable differences and they couldn't reconcile to that.
......They've re-married every year since 26 times now. Each year, on their wedding anniversary, they re-pledge themselves to each other, and they sign a contract, formally agreeing that they want to stay together for another year.
Ric would neglect the annual ceremony if allowed to, she says, but she firmly insists on it. "I don't like it if he says we don't need to do it, because the thing that makes relationships die is taking them for granted."
......It was Morgan Christopher, owner of Morgan's Coffee House in Monterey, where she and Ric and their children had performed, who saw her wood carvings and "seduced me into selling," she says. "I sold everything I took in there, and then regretted it I hadn't carved them to sell."
......When a grandson needed a place to stay and grow, she and Ric took him in. And when another one needed the same they welcomed him, too, though raising the two was "quite a process," she says.
......"When our children were young, I was young, too. With our first grandson, I thought of going crazy I'd been 10 years out of the nest, traveling with Ric and enjoying it." And all of a sudden, here were these boys, and she didn't think she had the strength to give them what they needed whatever that was.
In a poem she wrote:
......"I read about a woman
......"Small in stature
......"Lifting a car off her trapped baby
......"I wanted some of that"
......(From "To Be Able," by Billie Barbara Masten. The entire poem found below.).
......So she took as many classes about parenting as she could find, learning such techniques as "coaching" the boys to do their homework rather than commanding it. And the two boys and their grandmother seem to be doing fine.
......"It's probably been the greatest growing experience of my life," she says...But her poetry and art are growing, too. She has plans for readers' theater performances, and she is thinking about a "word and wood images" presentation, with a carving to accompany every poem she reads.
......Her studio, the "Crone Zone," has another name. She also calls the place "North Dakota." When someone calls for her and she's working in her studio, Ric can say, quite honestly, that she's not available because she's in North Dakota.
......"Old age is not so terrible," she says. And there, again, is that totally un-cronelike smile.