From the Kenyon Review, New Series, Summer-Autumn 1995, Vol. XVII, No. 3/4
When the world wearies
And society ceases to satisfy
There is always the garden
—Nineteenth-century homily, cross-stitched, framed and hung on a bedroom wall in the late years of the twentieth century
I made off from the landscape of my grown-up life in the middle of the night, when I was forty-three.
Early July, and a moat of fog was rising chest-high in pastures all around the house; cricket call went ratch-ritch as usual, volleying back and forth across the yard; under the long porch roof I met the scent of my tall Enchantment lilies, condensed in mist beaded on the bellied screen; and all of these familiars were tethers of a web I had to breast and tear, in walking out.
I drove off in a tunnel of headlights down one country lane after another, on a path with many turnings, like a branching intuition, leaving little Henry County. My hands, legs, and chest got me along the thirty miles, first to the Interstate and then to the city, where there were bottle rockets popping on the street and the muffled booms of a big show at the river.
It wasn’t like me—to veer off, to be abrupt, to be keen for once in the body’s sufficient prudence. For years I’d stayed in place, subdued, bent to various intentions. Reading to the children from our illustrated book of myths, I saw my inner station reflected back to me by the picture of poor Psyche, head in hands, in the cell where Aphrodite set her to the task of sorting out the heap of jumbled beans and seeds. Perseverance Furthers,[1] I read and read, tutoring myself from the book of ancient oracles. And for years until the woodstove’s heat dried it and the summer damp unglued it, a fortune-cookie slip was taped to the lamp on the little desk in a musty room I called my study and others called the parlor: “Patience is the cure for every ill.”
It wasn’t like me: I moved as if outside myself, wondering what I’d do next. So who was this, stone-deaf to conciliation and decorum, hardly dressed, and running barefoot from the house lit in only two windows? Who was this, with my own big hands, bare legs in shorts, wide neck—this ungovernable mare, prickling with new constellations of adrenaline and kicking off the traces? I recognized her anyway, and my diplomatic, skeptical, and matronly self—who had scrupulously kept her own counsel and disciplined her smallest impulse—surrendered to the plain ambitions of her body, and allowed herself to be delivered by this bolder being with her name.
I made off from a fortress, my retreat, my Edwardian novel of a house: the big white farmhouse, arrived in pieces from Sears, Roebuck at the river landing in 1907, and brought up to the ridge by wagons on an ox-cart road. In later years the house had suffered, during the decline of sons of sons of farmers, been kicked around, its gardens let to grow up in buckbush and motorcycle husks, until at last Miss Mena, a remnant in-law widow in the evaporating line of landowners, rescued it at auction, where her offer was delivered secondhand by a wily old country-courthouse lawyer in a trenchcoat and a porkpie hat.
Miss Mena sailed the neighborhood in her big boat of a car, in overalls and garden gloves, bidding the drawing of wagons into the yard to haul away rats’ nests and trash, bidding the bushhogging of weeds, the scouring of dismay, and then the sale of the reborn house and three and one-half acres to the new family I was wife and mother in.
It was an old idea, this house, and also more (or less) than an idea: a loose tent conversant with the weather, where chimney swifts sometimes darted in the hallways, and plaster walls never finished making maps of fine cracks through winter, summer, winter.
I left my patched-on kitchen at the back—its caned rockers, goblets, antique platters, braided rugs, and bookshelves—where I was rooted at the sink, keeping my eye turned resolutely outward, toward worthy things in season: the long hill and water tower, the pasture creek rushing beyond its groove after heavy rain. The oak grove, which rattled oracularly in the fall, and was so deathly quiet and bare bones in the snow. The yellow horns of columbine against the black woodshed wall. Rain sweeping down in cloaks, thrown first across Miss Mena’s neighboring fields and over Mister Harold’s woodlot and black cattle, and then onto my gardens.
Down the road at F & F Feed and Coal, it was said that a Miss Velma, another eldress, long departed, had spent her last days bedfast in this house, locked by her son in a room upstairs, too old and sweet to stop him from taking down and selling the now-valuable domestic fittings of 1907: nickel-plated chandelier, crystal doorknobs, wrought-iron grate. She was said to have kept terrific gardens once, when her son was still a boy, and in my day I rediscovered her ambitions. In flowerbeds I dug, intending them to drape decorously like an embroidered hem beneath stoops and porches all around the house, I unearthed the wan surviving shoots of perennials she’d planted, this Miss Velma’s old ideas of yarrow just here and peonies just there, cozied in against the white wall of the house. When I spaded up a border to define with bricks, I found her bricks half-crumbled five inches under sod, making just the subtle turn I’d planned myself, around the lilies of the valley. What I thought were my new brainstorms, lily starts mail ordered from Connecticut, went in beside her old original ones, and together they rose, staked to bamboo.
Miss Mena and I strolled satisfied among these revivals, praising the conspiring energies of Miss Velma and ourselves, and this too was company I left.
I left my half-acre vegetable garden (weedless, mulched, companion-planted), ringed with a hedge of honeysuckle and trumpet vine, ferny dillheads towering in the cucumbers. The expensive blue-perennial flowerbed in the shade, the asparagus patch, the purple clematis burgeoning over a white trellis, Moonbeam coreopsis, currant bushes, oakleaf hydrangea, jewelweed volunteers in the sawdust of the woodpile bed, borage, and rue.
I left the grapevines, golden raspberries, heirloom apple trees I planted; the bleeding heart, white daffodils, rhubarb. The dwarf cherry tree, the mint bog at the creek, porch swing, pickle crocks, the murmuring of clean white bantam hens foraging in the shade of redbud trees. The contemplation of tin roof, cold chimney, and clouds trailing away, through the stroking fronds of a walnut tree. The rope swing hung from a ragged limb, where a big rat snake periodically rubbed off its papery skin, and left it flying like a banner.
I left behind the landmarks of my walks off the county road, where in untended places the country reel of change and return was danced for me, a city girl. I left a large investment of attention, a steady work to root and make familiar knowledge, living in one peaceful place for a long time. A speechless time, still it was the heyday of my eyes: the laying open by winter of the thicket at the river, the reconcealment of stacks of stranded trash and driftwood by midsummer vines, the crosshatched windstrokes on the cold pond. The appearance of yellow plums on a tree I’d once driven home from the nursery, with its leafless head out the window and its rootball seatbelted in. I’d seen that tree through drought; I’d prayed against the borer.
I left behind the locations of my earnest labor: big black tobacco barns I helped to fill to the rafters, handing up the gummy skirts of plants I helped to cut and spear in long, hot patches. Wringer washer on the back porch, laundry line between two trees, ten stooped steps uphill on a slope you could almost call a cliff. The cairn of flagstones where I did my walnut work.
Those walnuts were prodigious, everybody said so, the green hulls as big as hedge apples or cannonballs, and one winter I achieved a worm-free feedsack full and perched there in the afternoons, in an overcoat and workboots, crushing stony walnuts with a brick, picking out with a nail two wing-shaped meats from each shell, nutmeats so large it took only half a dozen to make a teacake. Which teacake I surely did make. Until Easter of that year my fingers were walnut-black in every crease.
Now I keep sensations of that time, archived in the body—the thundering of walnut hulls landing on the tin roof in the fall; the sharp limey smell of their rinds crumbling in the grass; the Holy-Land fans of leaves—and laid among them is the history of my disappointed innocence, now named humbly, but not simply, only Walnut.
I left my books: my Christian apologetics, my annotated Milton, my Jane Austens, my sacred geometries, my autographed copies, and forty-six gold-embossed volumes of The Great Books, full of silverfish, in a bookcase on the open landing.
I left my clothes, my silk shirtwaists and calico sundresses. I left my smooth tables, my chintz-covered chairs, the long fringed muslin curtains, the six-foot lilies at the sitting room window.
I left my root cellar, with its villages of green beans, gooseberry jam, homemade marinara sauce, sauerkraut, and its wilderness corners where potatoes grew long snarls of tangled white sprouts trying to root in the dust.
I left behind the single grave of stillborn twin daughters, in a small-town cemetery on a hillside four rural counties north. Their names are marked there on a small flat stone in coarse grass shaded by black walnut trees.
I left my little country church, its muted sisterhood of tough old women and mothers of the very young; the iron belltower in a weedy lot; the goats brought in to crop the antique graveyard clean, and the bad boys who let them out at midnight to clatter down the road to town. The whirring of fans and crickets in summer. The trembling hymns. The coal stove in winter. The succession of baffled seminarian pastors. The four farmer-deacons on tiptoes, whispering, pouring grape juice so carefully into fifty glass thimbles in the damp basement kitchen.
I left my marriage of twenty years.
I left my companions—the women I read books with, gossiped on the phone with, deplored the modern world with, organized bazaars and birthday parties with, jitterbugged at New Year’s with, the armchairs piled with our little girls in smocked dresses, watching us good mothers reel each other out and in. To see us dance amazed them; it didn’t happen often. But if it was my house where the party was (and if there was a party, that was where it was), and if the men self-selected their own society and took up all the chairs (and if the men were there, they did), then we women would drift aside, backing into the hallway, and dance, one night a year.
In the nine thousand other hours of the year, we good mothers had closed our own childhoods tight, and our adulthoods we meant to set as sober good examples, especially to our husbands. Flanked by toddler bodyguards, we stood restless in hallways and on porches, engrossed in the protective disciplines.
I brought with me—certainly, I brought my children with me. I lifted my longlegged son from his bed in a room full of flags, and carried him through the darkened farmhouse and across the porch, settled him in the passenger seat, closed the car doors methodically and silently. Like a single towhee singing in a tree that night, he made cheerful small talk about the setting moon, asking me no questions. My daughter was sleeping in a tent in the pine woods two hundred miles away at Girl Scout camp, but she too was my company; in spirit I caught her up.
And at last I left behind a certain custom of my grown-up mind, a fastidious, ironic timbre. For a long time it had mastered me, going straight to work on native feeling, pecking away its patterns of holes where the wine leaked out.
In the regime of a persnickety voice, a body finds counsel otherwise, and I found mine in trees I knew as interceding deities or mistresses, inviting my familiarity.
Hungry for enactments of transformation outside my window, for the yielding of narrow forms to an irresistible ripening, I sent my unexpressed ardor into theirs, across mown fields.
Off duty, I studied their erotic model, admired for dear life the venture-some passions of newly knuckled twigs, of roots groping the rock shelf, nosing for the door to deeper earth. I was consoled by their large bodies, by their various tempestuous expressions in confinement: the thrashing of sugar maple branches in the dry gusts before a storm; the bone-white bark of bare sycamores grouped along the frozen creek. The broken old pear tree at the far end of the orchard, which threw to the ground in her last summer bushel after bushel, a wild finale of perfect fruit. The stately threesome of shagbark hickories outside the bedroom windows, especially on those days in spring when the tight pods of their leafbuds split, and from each dropped furled leaves, like clenched hands blooming into fingers.
Householders complained about a mess of windfall apples, drawing wasps and tracked inside, or of sycamore leaves, big and brown as tattered grocery sacks, littering a clipped yard; I turned away, incensed.
In the county park, under a young ash tree by the side of a muddy lake where my children were running to the shallows and back again to me with news of floppy handstands and mud castles, I used to sit alone, stiffnecked, on the lookout for malicious currents or bees in the clover grass. But for just a minute I lay down, one hand on an ankle-like knob of root, content to be explored by ants, looking up through stairstep branches, and let my body feel its own haphazard gist of glee. I whispered reckless scraps of French; English was too scrupulous.
Copine, ma vieille . . . , I made it up, lovetalk to a tree or to the supple spirit it embodied, before the supervising voice took note, and I sat bolt upright, peering out to the green, deep, middle of the lake, recalled again to vigilance. Precisely folding up the picnic sacks, I reburied what seemed the taproot of unrighteousness, this mischief muscling up in me.
You might have visited me there in the country, on your way to California or Manhattan. You might have been curious about the local culture. If you had come to visit, to sit on the porch with a glass of wine and watch the purple martins gather in their house on a high pole in the middle of the garden, you would have seen a woman apparently cured of her passions and skeptical about yours, comfortable in an old-fashioned order, serving a prodigious lunch at a long table with a centerpiece of nodding local wildflowers and zinnias. There would have been authoritative conversation among the men, and their lounging satisfied. I would have avoided your eye, and snatched away the salad plates. You might have wondered about that, later, in the car on the way to the airport, in the same hour that I finished cleaning up from lunch, and walked down a mown path to pick apples in the orchard and reconsider in private the mane of your hair.
I worried that I might be like the worshippers of Baal or Sappho’s acolytes. I put on weight, and drew protective circles of Lenten silence around my babies. Stooping to tuck potato parings under leaves of transplants, I was devoted to a cloistered order, to the perfect plumb of clothespins on a line, while I entertained a tower-chamber full of suspicious examiners in the mind.
Their register is certain, male, rich with erudition, style. Harried by the private noise of them, I flopped clumsily, between extremes of grandiosity and shame.
(“And just who do we think we are?” asked a sharp voice, the master of novices, a stringent one. “H. D. Thoreau?”)
(With drawling irony: “Generally, when persons . . . quote find themselves unquote . . . it is to everyone else’s eternal regret.”)
These voices jealously administer the treasury of all ambitious nouns (Nature, Virtue, History). They take the high road in both lanes, assigning governed postures at the crossways, splitting hairs to set me straight.
They supervise feeling, that unruly slattern, and direct my attention to something graver and less impolitic: to a succession of stiff silhouettes, the saturnine stewards of civilization, my patrons and gallants, the holders of the reins of syntax, the rattlers of ice cubes in tumblers of good scotch, the brayers and by-Godders, the last few friends of reason, by whose thoughts we are saved from ourselves. For them the body is low housing.
I left behind, on a shelf below the antique butter churn, my collection of old gardening books. Dark green or navy blue, with titles in gold curlicues embossed along the spines, they contained quaint concoctions for antidotes to blights on roses, plans for arbors, or the espaliering of quince. Among these manuals was a less practical old book. Found at a farm sale for a dollar, along with a mattock and a sieve, it was an anonymous contemplative diary, entitled “The Solitary Summer,” its publication undatable except by the inscription of a one-time reader, on the flyleaf in faded ornate penmanship: Mrs. Joshua P. Honeycutt, Louisa, Kentucky, Christmas, 1901.
The unnamed author was a gentlewoman, describing country life in a summer she began daringly, by announcing her desire to spend time entirely alone. It was a wish her husband (whom she calls throughout “The Man of Wrath”) grudgingly half-granted: much of the three months was spent as usual, in his cautionary purview, though he was also apt on rainy afternoons to mistake her for a cushion in the darkened parlor.
She performed her customary duties—doling out sausages from the larder, presiding over lunch and dinner, declining to fire the unsatisfactory cook just yet, enduring lengthy visits by dour Lutheran ministers and by young officers barracked in the village, persisting in her wake from room to room, going on about the histories of their regiments—but she also took her own pleasure, by firm intention, in snatches when she could. She writes about stealing out at three in the morning to walk in her meandering gardens, and creeping back to bed relieved to have found among white rocket-flowers her “real and natural self’; about going alone with a book into patches of lupines, or to an unhygienic frogpond, with a picnic of radishes and her little girls, whom she plucked away from the catechizing business of their schoolmaster.
She practiced unconventional gardening, forgiving and experimental, most ambitious in wild groves at the far back of the house: she was disdainful of grand fronts, with ubiquitous “carpet-bedding and glass balls on pedestals.”
The loveliest garden I know is spoilt to my thinking by the impossibility of getting out of sight of the house, which stares down at you, Argus-eyed and unblinking, into whatever comer you may shuffle. . . . [T]he borders [are] exquisite examples of taste, the turf so faultless that you hardly like to walk on it for fear of making it dusty, and the whole quite uninhabitable for people of my solitary tendencies, because, go where you will, you are overlooked.
“Go where you will, you are overlooked.” I lingered there, musing at the double entendre. To be continually “overlooked”—spied upon from up above; or mistaken for a cushion.
She was a furtive ecstatic, my anonymous diarist, carried away by the plantation of Madonna lilies, “so chaste in their appearance, so voluptuous in their smell.” A bunch of cowslips she “kissed and kissed again . . . because of all the kisses in the world there is none other so exquisite.”
She was afraid she might be taken for “a person who rhapsodizes.” Though in the mornings alone she felt “almost a poet and . . . wholly a joyous animal,” she trudged back reluctantly at luncheon time to the order of the house, to “cutlets and . . . revengeful sweet things,” where she kept her sensory adventures to herself.
I generally succeed in keeping quiet; but sometimes even now, after years of study in the art of holding my tongue, some stray fragment of what I feel does occasionally come out, and then I am at once pulled up and brought back to my senses by the well-known cold stare of utter incomprehension.
Long ago she gave up the hope of sympathetic company. “How is it that you should feel so vastly superior?” she asked unnamed persons in her thought.
She went to pains to conceal the precise region of her home. She scolded herself in a sly voice for her unauthorized private opinions of Goethe and Thoreau. She sidled in the nick of time from contention into irony, or some new winsome observation; from lapses into melancholy, she purposefully uprighted herself, bedazzling herself back into a teetering contentment by means of a silver birch growing in a bank of wild azaleas, at the isolated far end of a walk.
She was a clever woman of her time, in short, her track well camouflaged, and thereby something of a mystery—but maybe much more mysterious, I thought, to those she lived among, than to Mrs. J. P. Honeycutt, 1901, perhaps, and me.
We women at the sink conspired with ineffable smiles, news of our old disappointments. A man’s voice broke in, and we suddenly ungrouped, surprised, our faces falsely clearing.
Then, overheard, we talked round and round: half-draped judgments, worryworry over others’ error, daily matter-of-facts in prospect and retrospect and back again, talk of what we thawed and what we baked, for whom, and took it when. In this atmosphere, the lords of household smiled, comfortable and comforted while we were talking all at once—like birdsong, an impersonal and uninflected line, a perseverance to warble, around the well-defined edges of men’s stories, illuminating, but not alighting.
Or we hushed, and each kept her own sublime counsel. Our gazes fell away, incurious, unreadable. We might have looked almost beatified, like portrait subjects of great men—shawled women silent in the early evening, cutting roses on a garden path or stacking apples in our aprons.
We did not reach into the company of feasters. We declined to take up room in the rooms whose comforts we sustained. A woman living here did not lean in with her singular peculiar person, with her elbows on the common table, betraying an intent purpose of narration, and by narration, connection. She did not begin with, “This is what I know. . . . ”
And if, helplessly inspired, we did (a time or two) begin like that, something in the atmosphere would set upon the story from the start: the opening cadence would sound somehow hapless and contrary, landing across the grain in conversation; a civil silence would sift over what we’d said, and the men would look away forebearingly, out the window or at their plates.
Better not to impose, to stride, or speak, though we half-knew what we meant to say. The voice was firm: This ambition does not become you. This is not important, direct speech of the body.
To step out is abandonment. In an eighteenth-century engraving, a woman (somber face, hair coiled in a pearled snood) lifts the heavy housing of her brocade skirt with both hands, and imposes one small black-booted foot deliberately into a stream. Reading her assuredly, the museum placard translates a dire iconography: here we see depicted female debauch, betrayal of the moral to the sensual.
The tumbling stream teems with rank contagion; experts have so warned us.
The intricately folded fields I left, the morning glories on stone fences, were no enemies of mine, but that night I spumed them just the same. The turning of the key in the ignition of the car was an outright reply, a creaturely roar, and with it I turned too, baring my eyeteeth.
I left to step out of an old topiary way, and let my native being be.
It was late, but not too late, to embrace my lover and meet my match, in a woman.
I left in order to ripen willy-nilly as I am, not rearranged like an espaliered bough.
I’ve admired the erect walk of women carrying full baskets on their heads, who never stumble and spill, and I’ve thought to walk it too, but now was time to drive like mad, thinking not a thing but left, right, left, with fog shredding in the low-beams and mending behind me. The Superior Man[2] makes no such precipitous moves as I did, sweeping detail aside, spraying dust. The Superior Man moves with a sturdy step across thresholds when and as they come. From his youth he stands up straight and counsels with the company of peers.
In nature the Superior Man reads ideograms that dignify an arrangement in which he has authority, freedom of movement, and no reason to make unseemly haste, or mutiny.
On these and other plainer grounds, I was not the Superior Man.
The voice, a linguist in its spare time, reminds me of kindred words: perverse, perversion. The Latin root vers means a turning; the Latinate prefix per, thoroughly. To be perverse is to turn thoroughly against fundamental law. Perversions are the domestic consequence—lamentable indulgences by persons who go to swim against the current: against Nature.
Or against what we will call Nature. (In this dominion, Nature’s productions are read selectively.) “Your yearning shall be for your husband,” Jehovah curses Eve, hallowing the peculiar way our characters would be honed against a grindstone, “yet he will lord it over you.”[3]
But I mean to tell my own true perverse adventures. Among the conscientious words in the treasury of the voice, this one—true—to my surprise came out tactile, mine to bring from my pocket homely as a buckeye, a skate key, a locust bean, like the lowly object at the bottom of the wayfarer’s pack in a fairy tale.
(“Truth!” huffs the voice. Like Pilate, incredulous of philosophy in the hands of colonials: “What is ‘truth‘? “)
Just the same, I can be plain. The impressive voice is tireless and withering, but a body can turn thoroughly, and walk away beyond its ken, into numinous gritty worlds, into sound perches of solitude. A mind can put aside imperious evaluations of the green text; a mind can defer to the body, the disheveled stranger surprising the assembly of feasters, and allow the body its ranging story.
In that story, an unstudied gist remains intact, a problematical bliss, kept somehow competent and hardy. The story’s original landscapes lie behind the nutlike monosyllables of common nouns—milk, rain, stream, plum—and are preserved in the senses in mysterious concentrations, by the way a ferocious fume of memory will rise from the bruising of a warted leaf. Left to its own mere lore, the body locates its task and honor of participation, in the dark room behind the breastbone, where we keep the plainest old appetite for touch.
Now I’m working in a screened second-story porch at the back of a house in a new leafy neighborhood, in a small city on a big river, in a state still governed jealously by sons of sons. This house where I landed looks onto an avenue shaded by tall maples. At one end of the street, three blocks away, is a bronze town-father on a pacing horse in boxwood and impatiens. Four blocks the other way is an old landscaped cemetery for Confederate dead and the first families of the city. I walk there, for the muscular chestnut trees, the peonies, the weathered lambs and angels of nineteenth-century children’s graves.
I use the back-alley entrance to this city house, past the manna-fall of styrofoam in pokebushes and tansyweed, between the rows of chainlink fence fuzzied with mimosa sprouts, up the covered stairwell to the high back porch.
From the porch, an old saucer magnolia in the neighbor’s yard is eye level with me. In spring before it leafs, it flowers, gigantically erotic with pink cones falling open. From the windows I salute it often. I look down also on a snarled mock orange bush, too tall, hilarious, akimbo. There is no sublime form to prune it to.
(“Ah. How convenient,” says the supervising voice. “Yes. Now, this has been known as the Pathetic Fallacy. One ascribes to the natural world some little human feeling. One presumes a sentimental association with the primrose. . . . “)
I storm across the slanted floor of my perch (“—an error pathetic in both senses of the word—”) to the bookshelf, and yank out Margaret Drabble’s Oxford Companion to English Literature: the Pathetic Fallacy, Ruskin’s term, bawling out Wordsworth. Same old boys’ brawl about the perimeters of virtue. Ah yourself, I say.
(“You shall have no gods except me.” You shall not pray to bushes.)
(I might pray to bushes: Mimosa, buckeye, redwood-shagbark, laurel, maple, and ash.)
On this sloping porch, I have other indispensable works of reference: a shopping bag full of family photographs, an oval watercolor of my childhood home (maples, rhododendrons, mimosa with a summer show of tufted pink cockades; many gabled shuttered windows, like blindered eyes), and the big tree presently inclining her head toward me.
I have a teetering stack of my own journals, where I find titanic garden plans, sketches of quilt designs, notes on the needs of difficult plants and difficult people, menus for High Teas, thoughtful elaborations of various scriptures. The superintending voice has left a dense record of its good works, with its avuncular suggestions, its henceforths and forthwiths—but here and there, there are these resounding lapses: dreams to shock a body awake, blunt monologues suspended in mid-sentence, and the names of women I’ve desired in secret, encoding in imagination what I declined on earth.
Like a crumb path suddenly plain in a clearing, I find these names and presences. I can speak of them now, my companions in imagined exodus to ragged woods or sunstruck rooms, where our vocabulary is tolerant of what is lax, and we are kindred serenities, limb on limb.
With one lifetime all askew in folders, I can go back now, to look into what I had thought to put aside. A photograph of myself at ten, at the garden gate, chin in hand. I see even there and then the wayward way I’ve taken now, stubborn like a whorl in wood. And earlier, in this one: the sharp elbows of a five-year-old, plunked down on a little desktop, are parts of me I would come to be obliged to use abruptly, to clear a path. And surely here is an eccentric creature, standing at the fenced Potomac River at seventeen, self-concealing, metal-mouthed, precocious studier of Milton and Marvell, in the least defiant of costumes, trying not to grin or scowl, but braced against the breeze in a certain sturdy way. I can see determination here, and the gathering of a “flood that can’t be folded / And put inside a drawer.”[4] I can see mutiny coming up—not soon, but soon enough.
From girlhood we aspired, informed in our bones for the dance we rarely danced, a long intrepid unwrapping of the treasure of creaturehood. But another voice broke in, calling us to take its higher road, to admire its arranging zeal with regard to nature and spirit, weed and flower, sheep and goat, genre and form. Indeed some of us took refuge when and where we were allowed to range, in silent retreat and alone, in woods and gardens we didn’t own, in mornings and evenings beyond the tall schoolmaster’s eye.
But now we make outright for the door, and for wholesome company—for light and air, like tendrils in a cellar. Who cares which strand is form and which is genre? One is teeth, and one is tongue, and together they collaborate to speak, they shout and sing.
My son is now fourteen. For reasons of his own, his hair is dyed a mossy green. Along the city boulevard of smoothie-stands and Twelve-Step bookstores and neo-Christian coffeehouses which come and go, he runs the bristling gauntlet of the world, in shade of big embattled maples. My daughter, sixteen, collects herself and all she sees, mysteriously behind the veil of her hair. Grown very tall, she experiments with a variety of bold, enormous hats, flowing robes in fire colors, big patchwork wingtip shoes; she writes.
We drive in the country, my lover and I, with the windows rolled down. The Ohio River, in flood, tumbles downstream as we go up. Bridged, riprapped, bobbing hapless drift (Clorox bottles, rags, knots of wire fence), the river is roaring with authority, heaving up an iron breast where no little lives can safely make their own ways. But on this road native dogwood and mimosa reach out from the edge of the woods through low brambles, and emerge in waving layers, never still, and by no means hostile to what we will call our natures.
[1] “Perseverance Furthers” is a piece of advice frequently repeated in the I Ching, the book of Taoist oracles.
[2] The Superior Man is the model of stewardship and leadership in the I Ching.
[3] These words of Yahweh are quoted from the New Jerusalem translation of the Bible (1966 ed.).
[4] The quoted lines are Emily Dickinson’s.
