Daughters of Salt and Spice: Zipporah and Lydia

Zipporah carved lightning into bone.

She was not wife, not prophetess, not owned.

The desert called her godless—

She called it home.

She touched blood and blade with equal grace,

Circumcised the night,

And bled stories into the dawn

when Moses forgot the old ways.

Zipporah came cloaked in thunder—

midwife to blood and covenant,

spitting stars into the silence of men.

Her voice was a wind the men mistook for sand.

But it shaped everything.

She saved the Exodus before it began—

and was left out of the hymn.

Lydia—hands stained with indigo—

sang to coins and ghosts in the marketplace,

eyes rimmed with dusk and baptized salt.

A merchant of cloth and kindness,

who baptized power in her own name.

She housed apostles, yes—

but also ghosts.

And the whispers of other women

whose prayers weren't canonized.

She stitched solace into cloaks,

wrapped shame like a child.

When Zipporah's fingers ached from memory,

Lydia washed them in violet dye

and told her: You are not forgotten.

They met by a river that had no name,

only music

and the memory of migration.

"You are the storm I was warned about,"

Lydia murmured.

"And you," Zipporah said,

"are the harbor I never believed in.

"Neither were queens.

Neither were saints.

They were the women who outlasted fire.

Their names—salt and spice, silence and song—

taught the earth to remember softness

as strength.

They didn't ask for altars—

but still, I light candles.

Not to worship.

To remember.

-Miss Maria Lancelot