Vesta is the Roman goddess of the household, so I guess it's appropriate that she manifested herself in my first apartment a few weeks after I moved into it. I'd started an earlier version of Vesta before the move, but it didn't seem to ring true once I'd left my parents house.

There are actually a lot of anxieties tied up in Vesta and in the symbolism surrounding her. After the move I started having bad dreams and new fears about people lurking inside or outside my door. The apartment I'd moved into had been recently renovated so it itself was new and clean and bright and felt like home, but the stairways, front and back, had not been renovated or even updated for several decades at least and they looked it. The stairs sloped away from the walls at a slight angle and were a little bit taller than a normal step. The studs holding up the walls, which consist of plywood and siding, were crooked and warped and everything was covered in a cake of flat industrial paint so old that it was chipped off in places like layers of sediment at an archeological excavation. In one of my dreams the city of Chicago was built as skyscrapers made out of this wood- rotting and warping and swaying in the wind with windows and rooms pasted onto the side like wasps nests and the people in the building were widely varied and in some ways frightening. But in the same dream there was a small kitten with white and gold fur that I could hold onto and that was comforting. The cat on Vesta's lap is this cat from my dream and the feeling of comfort and warmth even in a dark and precarious world is where I think Vesta is the strongest.

Vesta is pretty heavy into symbols- the little images from my life that I've been saving up in the back of my mind that have been struggling to be let out. Some of them are more relevant to Vesta's traditional mythology than others.

Vesta has 5 Turtles