Many Happy Returns

The toad returned to the greenhouse last Friday—Earth Day—as she does every spring at this time. But this year she brought a baby toad with her, so small I almost missed it squatting on the wooden walkway that crosses the lily pond in the greenhouse.

The baby toad is lighter than its mother, almost translucent, with smoother, lightly speckled skin. Mommy and baby like to sit together in the potted iris we call the “toad throne” of the lily pond. Even when they’re off exploring, we can see their imprints in the mud, the baby’s a miniature version of its mother’s.

I’m always relieved when the toad comes back in the spring because it means the cycles of nature are in balance and proceeding as they should, despite whatever crazy things are going on in the rest of the world. I believe the toads’ return brings luck to the season, and since this will be our 20^th as a CSA, we’ve obviously been benefitting from toad luck for quite some time.

But wait! I just ran out to the greenhouse to get yet another picture of the toads and found the baby on the board we place in the pond as a toad ramp. The baby looked smaller than I remembered and was darker but maybe it was just sitting in a different position or in different light. I took its picture with my telephoto lens so that I didn’t have to get too close—looked pretty good with the green lily pad beneath.

And then as I turned to put my camera away, something else caught my eye. The first baby was sitting in the greenery at the edge of the pond. Two baby toads! What luck we shall have this season!

I like to mark cycles and returns and anniversaries because it reminds me that life continues from day to day, season to season, year to year without my doing anything to make this process happen. In fact, my actions are usually irrelevant to any of it, with a few exceptions, like this blog.

Today is the first anniversary of pearlmoonplenty and I’m proud of that. I started this blog to give myself a dedicated space for writing practice but it’s become more than that. Even when I was busy teaching this past semester, I looked forward to sharing my experiences and reflections with my readers, some whom I know and others whom I don’t. A blog is wonderful in that regard: what you send out, you get back in often surprising ways.

With pearlmoonplenty, I’ve been able to develop ideas that have been brewing for a while, as well as to jaunt off in new directions as my whims and circumstances dictate. One of those directions has been work on a genre I call “ecobiography,” which I define as a lifewriting text that places the writer’s identity and experiences within the context of the natural world, whether in a wilderness, rural, or even urban setting. Ecobiographies reflect on questions like where do our individual ideas about nature originate? How might nature be a guide for conducting our lives? What other living beings are with us in this world? How are we connected and what do we learn or gain from each other?

For my readers in the Lyons/Boulder area, I’ll be teaching an ecobiography workshop on Friday, May 20, here at Stonebridge Farm (see our website link to the right). I’m also working on a writing guide to ecobiography, something I hope to finish this year. Pearlmoonplenty has been an inspiration to my writing in this genre and I look forward to sharing more ecobiography—along with more stories, book chats, and photographs–in the coming year.

So thank you to my readers for keeping me going. Like the toads returning each spring, your support of pearlmoonplenty makes me feel lucky. I’m excited to see what the next year brings!

 

For Other Virginias

Today is the 70^th anniversary of Virginia Woolf’s death. Woolf was 59 when she drowned herself in a river near Monk’s House, the country home where she and Leonard then lived.

In 1941, the threat of Hitler invading England was very real; Woolf’s London houses had already been destroyed by bombs and the countryside around Monk’s House had been shelled as well. Woolf suffered most of her life with depression and mental breakdowns; her writing brought stability, despite the anguish it often caused her. Yet even writing failed to provide solace as the war came closer. Amidst the possibility of England’s fall and her own fears of returning madness, Woolf’s despair was evident in the note she left for Leonard before she walked into the river: “Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness.”

As a writer and critic, Woolf expanded the boundaries of literature. Her novels experimented with point-of-view, time, and structure, bringing a unique and feminist voice to a patriarchal literary world.  I first read To the Lighthouse as an undergraduate thirty-some years ago and it is still one of my favorite novels. Following its shifting viewpoints is like watching a shell game: despite how closely we observe each movement, we still can’t understand how everything ends exactly as it should.

In my first pearlmoonplenty post, I mentioned that the night before I started graduate school for my PhD, I dreamed that Woolf invited me for tea, which I took as reassurance toward my new endeavor. Woolf was, in fact, a mentor for many young writers, including May Sarton, who had tea with Woolf when Sarton was starting out as a novelist.

Virginia Woolf kept a diary for much of her adult life; after her death, Leonard anthologized the entries about writing into A Writer’s Diary. For the last couple years, I’ve kept this book by my bed, opening it at random every few nights to read a few pages as inspiration for my own writing life. Or maybe less inspiration than support, for Woolf was clear about the difficulties of writing: “Writing is not in the least an easy art. Thinking what to write, it seems easy; but the thought evaporates, runs hither and thither” (May 13, 1933).

Woolf was also honest about the financial aspects of writing, delighting when her books start to make money so she can afford a WC at Monk’s House. It’s Woolf’s blend of practicality and “you go girl!” spirit that draws me to A Writer’s Diary again and again.

In memory of Woolf today, I want to share some of my favorite passages from A Writer’s Diary for all of us who love literature and rejoice in the imaginative life of the mind:

May 11, 1920: It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything. I’m a little anxious. How am I to bring off this conception? Directly one gets to work one is like a person walking, who has seen the country stretching out before. I want to write nothing in this book that I don’t enjoy writing. Yes, writing is always difficult.

May 1, 1925: This is a note for future reference, as they say. The Common Reader [Woolf’s collection of literary criticism] came out 8 days ago and so far not a single review has appeared, and nobody has written to me or spoken to me about it, or in any way acknowledged the fact of its existence; save Maynard, Lydia, and Duncan. . . I have just come through the hoping fearing stage and now see my disappointment floating like an old bottle in my wake and am off on fresh adventures.

March 20^, 1026: But what is to become of all these diaries, I asked myself yesterday. If I died, what would Leo make of them? He would be disinclined to burn them; he could not publish them. Well, he should make up a book from them, I think; and then burn the body. I daresay there is a little book in them; if the scraps and scratching were straightened out a little. God knows. This is dictated by a slight melancholia, which comes upon me sometimes now and makes me think I am old; I am ugly. I am repeating things. Yet, as far as I know, as a writer I am only now writing out my mind.

August 12, 1928: We had tea from bright blue cups under the pink light of the giant hollyhock. We were all a little drugged with the country; a little bucolic I thought. It was lovely enough–made me envious of its country peace; the trees all standing securely—why did my eye catch the trees? The look of things has a great power over me. Even now, I have to watch the rooks beating up against the wind, which is high, and still I say to myself instinctively “What’s the phrase for that?” and try to make more and more vivid the roughness of the air current and the tremor of the rook’s wing slicing as if the air were full of ridges and ripples and roughnesses. They rise and sink, up and down, as if the exercise rubbed and braced them like swimmers in rough water. But what a little I can get down into my pen of what is so vivid to my eyes, and not only to my eyes; also to some nervous fibre, or fanlike membrane in my species.

October 11, 1929: And I snatch at the idea of writing here in order not to write Waves or Moths or whatever it is to be called. One thinks one has learnt to write quickly; and one hasn’t. And what is odd, I’m not writing with gusto or pleasure: because of the concentration. I am not reeling it off; but sticking it down. Also, never in my life, did I attack such a vague yet elaborate design; whenever I make a mark I have to think of its relation to a dozen others. And though I could go on ahead easily enough, I am always stopping to consider the whole effect. In particular is there some radical fault in my scheme? [Leonard Woolf considered The Waves “a great work of art, far and away the greatest of her books.”]

November 16, 1931: Oh yes, between 50 and 60 I think I shall write out some very singular books, if I live. I mean I think I am about to embody at least the exact shapes my brain holds. What a long toil to reach this beginning—if The Waves is my first work in my own style!

October 29, 1933: Yesterday the Granta said I was now defunct. Orlando, Waves, Flush, represent the death of a potentially great writer. This is only a rain drop, I mean the snub some little pimpled undergraduate likes to administer, just as he would put a frog in one’s bed. . . . But let me remember that fashion in literature is an inevitable thing; also that one must grow and change. . . . I will not be “famous,” “great.” I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one’s self; to let it find its dimensions, not to be impeded.

August 2, 1934: I’m worried too with my last chapters [of The Years]. Is it all too shrill and voluble? And then the immense length, and the perpetual ebbs and flows of invention. So divinely happy one day; so jaded the next.

November 14, 1934: A note: despair at the book [The Years]: can’t think how I ever could write such stuff—and with such excitement: that’s yesterday: today I think it good again. A note, by way of advising other Virginias with other books that this is the way of the thing: up down up down—and Lord knows the truth.

August 21, 1935: Up in London yesterday. And I saw this about myself in a book at The Times—the most patient and conscientious of artists—which I think is true, considering how I slave at every word of that book.

March 24, 1936: A very good weekend. Trees coming out: hyacinths; crocuses. Hot. The first spring weekend. Then we walked up to Rat Farm—looked for violets. Still spring here. Am tinkering—in a drowsy state. And I’m so absorbed in Two Guineas—that’s what I’m going to call it [later Three Guineas]. I must very nearly verge on insanity I think, I get so deep in this book I don’t know what I’m doing. Find myself walking along the Strand talking aloud.

December 19, 1938: On the whole the art [of writing] becomes absorbing—more? no, I think it’s been absorbing ever since I was a little creature, scribbling a story in the manner of Hawthorne on the green plush sofa at St. Ives while the grown ups dined.

In memoriam: Virginia Woolf, 1882-1941

 

The Girl Who Tells

“There she goes again! Why does she always have to be telling everything?” You probably know one of these girls, the kind who not only has opinions but feels compelled to share them. Maybe not even all the time, but when it matters most, this girl is brave enough—or angry enough—to speak up about the injustices she observes around her.

Young adult author Margaret Willey* calls this character the “Girl Who Tells”: “In both adult and young adult fiction, an adolescent daughter is often presented to the reader as the guide most willing and able to travel beneath the surface and into the deeper layers of her household.” Girls Who Tell play a “truth-telling function” in literature because “[i]f there is a weak seam in the family fabric, she is the one most likely to put her finger through it and make it a full-blown hole.” A GWT can’t stand hypocrisy or mendacity, even when she’s told that telling the truth isn’t nice or could hurt someone. She’s self-absorbed, true, but from that narcissism comes the ability to see more than the adults around her are willing to see themselves.

As protagonists, Girls Who Tell initially function as observers from the sideline of the story in what I call the “liminal space” between childhood and adulthood. When I teach this concept, I stand in the actual doorway of the classroom and put my hands on the sides of the doorframe to illustrate this “in-between” place. (The word “lintel” is related to the Latin word limen, meaning “threshold.) Neither still a child nor completely an adult, a GWT has a foot in both worlds, a limbo of ultrasensitivity that leads to impulsive responses, if not downright overreaction.

From this liminal space, a GWT can observe the inadequacies and inconsistencies of the world around her, which leads to a second GWT characteristic: asking questions, particularly about truth and authority. “Why?” is a GWT’s favorite word.

But when a GWT finds her questions ignored or the answers vague or even false, she must speak up and tell the truth from her special—and sometimes limited—perspective. She may not always be right in her analysis but her speaking is always a catalyst for change.

Observer, questioner, and truth-teller, the GWT is the perfect protagonist for literature that attempts to reveal the injustices of family and society. In classics like Little Women, A Wrinkle in Time, The Color Purple, and Anne of Green Gables, GWT characters face consequences for their outspokenness but are still guaranteed happy endings. Reality must be faced, wrongs righted, and truthfulness rewarded.

And in movies like Rachel Getting Married or Girls Town or Real Women Have Curves (based on the play by Josefina López) or Precious (originally published as the novel PUSH by Sapphire), we cheer for Girls Who Tell because even when they’re arrogant, obnoxious, or ill-equipped to handle life’s problems, we know they’ve gotten a raw deal.

In real life, however, Girls Who Tell may face parental anger, peer ostracism, social harassment, or even or judicial punishment or mental institutionalization. Memoirs, diaries, and letters like Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi, Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted, Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face and the Rachel Corrie’s My Name is Rachel Corrie recount the pain, punishment, and sometimes triumphs of young women overcoming prejudices that limit their lives. In real life, we may not always appreciate girls who tell it like they see it and, because of their youth and gender, their voices are easily ignored. They’re just teen girls, after all, what could they know?

But if we listened to the real voices of GWT as carefully as we listen to their voices in literature, we’d learn something astounding: their truth-telling depends on ours.

I’ll write in future blogs about GWT in works that I’ll be teaching this semester, but I’d love to hear from you. What GWT characters—fictional or real—have inspired you?

*“The Girl-Who-Tells.” Margaret Willey. Hungry Mind Review (Summer 1995): 46 & 48.

 

Girls Wear Pants

“Stingray! Stingray!” the girls screamed as sand and gravel pricked across our bare legs in the wind. The playground of our new school had not been planted yet with grass (nor would it ever fully be), so every windy day brought recess misery. We’d huddle together, legs pulled under cotton dresses, until the gusts died down and we could return to our play. We were girls, after all, so we couldn’t wear pants to school.

Gathering itself across the Colorado prairie, the unrelenting wind blew gravel off the playground and straight into our PE area, an asphalt dome circled by fiberglass curtains that were usually left open. Years later the asphalt was covered with fake grass, but until then, running and jumping on blacktop was treacherous. I still have a small, round scar just under my right knee from a large pea of gravel that embedded itself when I fell, bare-legged, one day. My mother had to remove it with tweezers, exposing the white fatty tissue under my rough skin in a perfect little hole.

An earthen schoolyard did offer a couple attractions. Leave it to children to make the best of what they have. We girls spent hours drawing lines in the sand to mark the borders of imaginary houses, then brushing away a palm’s width for a wall, leaving unswept openings for doors.  These dream houses would be blown away before the next recess, or, at best, left in faint sweepings we could excavate the next day. Busy little homemakers, we would start again, enlarging the living room or adding an extra bedroom for guests.

We could play hopscotch too, drawing boxes with our fingers right on the sandy ground. We’d hop on one foot to the box with our stone, making sure we held our skirts down as we bent to retrieve it. Even on the playground, we had to be ladies.

My first day of kindergarten, properly attired

When the weather turned cold, we were allowed to wear pants or snowpants over our knitted tights on our way to school, but we had to take them off in the coatroom. Even there, modesty reigned: we couldn’t bend over too far or we would show too much, so we quickly shuffled out of our pants and stuffed them in our cubbies for the day.

Constant vigilance was essential to our female integrity. Hard to imagine today, when undergarments are meant to be seen, but back then, all underwear was supposed to be hidden. Bra straps were especially policed since they implied puberty, and hence, sex. Should the boys catch a glimpse of some unsuspecting girl’s panties (even the word was illicit), they’d break into the familiar taunt: “I see London, I see France, I see someone’s underpants!” Then the embarrassed girl would cry, while the other girls huddled around to comfort her, yelling “Shut up” across the schoolyard at the teasing boys.

Maybe parents complained, because the school eventually allowed us to wear shorts under our dresses. This made swinging on the monkey bars much easier because we didn’t have to worry about a nearby boy’s straying eyes or somehow hold onto our skirts as we somersaulted around the high bar. We had special shorts for under our dresses, very short and stretchy in those early polyester days. Still, shorts weren’t pants.

 

The fall of 1970, we sixth-graders were bussed to a larger elementary for our last year before junior high because our own school, built less than ten years earlier, was now too small for six grades. The new school too had a no-pants-for-girls policy, but it also had school spirit and pep rally days where students could wear their Mustang mascot sweatshirts. But who wanted to wear them with a skirt? Not to mention we were tired of cold legs while waiting for the bus. The showdown began.

By 1970, women’s liberation had begun to infiltrate even our little western town. Lots of female “firsts” had occurred by then, and the local newspaper was required to integrate job ads—no more “jobs for women” and (higher paid) “jobs for men.” Although I don’t remember watching the news reports, the 1968 protest of the Miss America pageant in which a live sheep was crowned Miss America and bras were reputedly burned in a trashcan would have made a splash, even where I was growing up.

Somehow these “women’s lib” ideas filtered down to our sixth grade class and inflamed our sense of youthful righteousness at the bare-kneed indignity we’d been suffering all these years. I wouldn’t call it full-fledged feminism—that wouldn’t come for me until 1973 when Bobbie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs in three straight sets—but at least we recognized that our second-class sartorial status was based on our femalehood. Even though the words “feminism” and “gender discrimination” wouldn’t become part of our vocabularies until junior high, high school, or even college, we knew the words “no fair,” and that became our rallying cry as we demanded pants at school for girls.

The administration, however, refused to change the policy until they’d used it as an example of civic engagement. They would reconsider the no-pants rule only if it could be put to a non-binding vote at a school assembly. The principal would run the show and students could testify by raising their hands, standing up, and offering reasons to revise the policy. The assembly would be orderly, they implied, not like those women’s libbers who demanded change in unladylike ways.

The girls thought this whole charade was another discriminatory tactic. Had we voted on boys wearing pants? We also had years of gender conditioning to overcome. We girls weren’t used to speaking up for ourselves. It was kind of embarrassing, really, to have to talk about the whole situation. What could we say? Our legs are cold? We don’t want boys looking up our dresses anymore?  We think pants are cute? Nor did we have much of a feminist analysis to make our case. Calling down the patriarchy just wasn’t in our consciousness then. Still, we knew this was our chance; we had to do the best we could.

The day of the assembly, we poured into the gym in neat lines and sat in the folding chairs laid out in precise rows. Only the upper grades would participate, perhaps because the administration feared we’d taint the lower grades with our radical demands. The principal stood at the monitor, waiting for us to take our seats quietly so the debate could begin.

“We’re here to discuss changing a school policy that may no longer reflect the fashions and activities of our times.” No feminist analysis here: he didn’t mention that the rule discriminated against women’s rights, that it had been created out of sexist ideas regarding female decorum, or that the administration itself should have changed it years ago. Looking back, I hope the school regrets not taking more of a stand for girls’ freedom and independence or realized that it had failed to send a message to young people about equality. Mirroring much of national sentiment, maybe they hoped that we’d fail to offer any effective reasons, that the vote would go against us, or that we’d just forget about the whole thing.

When the principal called for testimony, the boys’ hands predictably went up first. Boy after boy stood up to testify to the power of pants—pants were cool, they argued. With pants, you could run fast and jump high. Pants let you move around. They gave you the freedom to be all that you could be. Without pants, you’d be—well, you’d be a girl. In other words, they felt sorry for girls because girls couldn’t be boys.

This was hardly the line of reasoning for which the girls had hoped. I rolled my eyes at these arguments, but since I was in my “I’m not going to dignify this with a response” phase, I didn’t say anything. Instead, I sat with my arms crossed, waiting to see what the administrators would do next. But I should have stood up and said something. I was learning my first feminist lesson: “That’s stupid” can start all kinds of challenges to the status quo.

Finally, a tall, pale girl with nearly white hair who would later become a lawyer stood up and reasoned, “Girls should get to wear pants because it’s not fair to let boys wear them and not let girls if they want to.” Bingo! Exactly! The double standard denied us our civil liberties. All the girls cheered! We didn’t want to be boys, but neither did we want to be second-class citizens.

On a show of hands, the vote passed overwhelmingly and the administration relented, at least in part: girls could wear pants, but not jeans. By next year in junior high, that question would be moot anyway, so we celebrated our first feminist victory with pants of all colors.

Two years later, my eighth grade social studies teacher wore a T-shirt that proclaimed, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” I wanted one of those shirts. The obnoxious boy who sat behind me in class bet me that Bobby Riggs would beat Billie Jean King. I wouldn’t bet him because my parents didn’t allow betting, but I was also still a little hesitant about the possibility of King winning. I didn’t follow tennis or I would have realized her certain victory, but I wanted her to win more than anything. She did win and I should have bet that boy. That was my second feminist lesson: stand up for what you believe in.

While older women were fighting for women’s rights on the streets and in the courts to win public sentiment and shape public policy, my first battles were fought on the playground and in the classroom. Today, my students, like me at the time, think those no-pants-for-girls rules were stupid, and they find those struggles quaint. When I tell them I’m an ancient authority on second-wave feminism, they laugh. But I’m glad they can take wearing pants for granted. Such a small victory, but one that opened worlds.

Young Feminists Celebrate their Pants-For-Girls Victory

To my readers: I’d love for you to share this posting with younger people especially so they can see that small struggles add up to large changes! Thanks!

 

Keeping Home

I had that dream again last night, the one where I suddenly discover a room in my house that I had forgotten or hadn’t realized was there. The first time I had this dream was the night after I turned in my dissertation: I opened a door in my hallway that I’d never noticed before and inside found everything I’d had to put metaphorically in storage while I finished my Ph.D.

Lately these dreams are less about reunion than about finding more space in my life for things that are important, like creative endeavors or spending more time in contemplation than in motion.

The essential feature of all these dreams, though, is that these rooms are already in my house, just waiting for me, like Dorothy finding she’s always had the power to go home.

I’ve always been pulled to the idea of home, of inhabiting a place where I feel rooted. Home for me is both inside and outside a physical structure; without a garden around it, a house wouldn’t feel like a home.

In the novels Housekeeping and Home, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Marilynne Robinson creates opposing ideas of home. In the earlier novel Housekeeping, the old house in the western (Idaho?) town of Fingerbone must be abandoned when the novel’s young narrator Ruthie and her aunt Sylvie can’t meet the domestic and social expectations of their neighbors, who suspect that leaves blown into corners and the remnants of swallows and sparrows on the parlor floor do not make a proper home for an adolescent girl:

So they had reason to feel that my social graces were eroding away, and that soon I would feel ill at ease in a cleanly house with glass in its windows—I would be lost to ordinary society.

Because Sylvie and Ruthie can’t make their house a home—and in fact can’t stay home because they are both drawn to the natural world—they are “cast out to wander, and there was an end to housekeeping.”

In Home, published 28 years later, a middle-aged brother and sister return home to care for their ailing father, a former minister in a small Iowa town, amidst the background of the civil rights movement that the son defends and the father resents. Younger sister Glory is escaping a failed love affair; her older brother Jack, their father’s favorite, is returning 20 years after the disgrace that drove him away.

By caring for the neglected house and garden in their father’s final days, they invent a temporary refuge from the painful pasts they’re trying to leave behind:

The old prairie came back the minute a spot of ground fell into neglect. Suddenly there would be weeds head high, gaunt shafts of plants with masses of tiny flowers on them, dusty lavender, droning with bees. And there would be black-eyed Susan, and nettles and milkweed and jewelweed and brambles and some avid vine that wilted in sunlight and broke at the slightest touch, leaving tiny whiskers of thorn in the hand that touched it. The roots they put down were deep and tough. It was miserable work to get them up. And here was Jack in the new morning light wrestling weeds out of the ground for all the world as if something depended on it.

In the 28 years between these novels’ publications, Robinson’s idea of home seems to have shifted from domesticity as prison to home as the continuation of family from one generation to the next. Yet in both works, it’s the outside forces of society that threaten the safety and sanctity of home.

When women or people of color or anyone considered “different” don’t or won’t follow the rules for “proper” social behavior, they are denied the possibility of home by the very structures of power that prescribe propriety in the first place.

In both novels, the characters must choose between limiting their lives or leaving home. Neither choice is ultimately fulfilling, but both novels end with the fantasy of return, Ruthie to the sister she’s left behind, and Glory to the dream of Jack’s son finding the old house—and his aunt—waiting for him.

We dream of home as a piece of ourselves that exists even in our absence or outside our awareness. Home contains us in both the best and worst sense of the word, for from home, we long for release even as we are rescued by it. Home is what we most fear losing but most want changing. Never perfect, always yearning, we keep our home so that we can keep ourselves.

 

Marking Her Days with Grace

Recently I took out the few diaries I have from my Grandma Smith and re-read her sparse entries. A true farmer, she always noted the weather, both the high and low temperatures and noteworthy conditions like sheer wind or a blinding snowstorm. Some days in July she would just write “Hot.” My favorite weather entry reads:  Sat, Jan 29, 1966: This morning it’s 40 below so won’t be very warm today. Even in a North Dakota winter, that could be considered an understatement.

Another series of weather entries in 1966 reads like a poem:

Wed, March 9: 45 degrees above

snow melting

just like spring

Thurs, March 10: No need for a weather report.

Fri, March 11: Weather is fine.

Re-reading her diaries this time, I looked for clues about how she spent her days. She sewed a lot and she baked a lot of bread—six or seven loaves at a time. She kept her flour in a deep pull-out bin in the kitchen cabinet that held a 50-lb bag. She would bake once a week, making enough for morning toast, noon sandwiches, and evening bread and butter. Covered by thin cotton dishtowels embroidered with vegetable people or sunbonnet girls, her loaves rose high in their pans.

Sometimes she would make cinnamon rolls along with the bread, letting my siblings and cousins and me roll out the rectangle of dough and spread it with real butter from our uncle’s creamery. Then we would spoon on brown sugar and sprinkle the dough with cinnamon, roll it up tight, pinch the seam, slice into a dozen thick rounds, and pack them carefully in the cake pan to rise. Fresh and hot from the oven, the sugar and butter-filled rolls melted on our fingers and tongues. No “store-boughten” cinnamon rolls could ever taste as good.

Grandma Smith worked hard on the farm, even after she and my grandfather weren’t raising animals and crops anymore. A typical entry of her busy life reads:

Tues, Feb 11, 1966: I baked 2 apple pies/ put in freezer/scrubbed the kitchen floor/fed the cats at the barn/burned the papers/this pm I’m going out visiting.

I remember my grandmother down on her hands and knees scrubbing the floor in case someone stopped by. I marveled that she wore dresses around the house with her old pantyhose, not wanting to waste a brand new pair. When I would ask her why she didn’t just go bare-legged, she would exclaim in disapproval, “No, I can’t do THAT!” She was fashionable her entire life, even when scrubbing the floor.

Because the Smith farm was on the highway into Williston, the county seat, many of my grandparents’ farming friends and relatives would stop by unannounced for coffee on their way to or from town. In her diaries, Grandma Smith noted who had visited that day and what she had baked, like lemon meringue pie, angel food cake, or a kind of cookie she called “Matrimonial Chews.” Visitors were so common at the farm that one entry comments on not receiving guests:  Sat, March 9, 1985: I was home all day. Baked a pie but no company.

My grandmother rarely noted her feelings or reflections about her life, but one of the few reflective passages she wrote makes me laugh: Tues, Jan 25, 1966: I’m cleaning the basement—and it sure looks better. That “sure” sounds just like her, a mix of practicality and positive thinking. If you’re going to do something, it seems to say, do it right—and be happy you’ve done it.

Why weren’t her diaries more personal, more revealing of her thoughts and feelings? I don’t think she worried about someone discovering them. After her death, we found these few diaries stuck in an old cabinet in the basement, more tucked away for safe keeping than hidden.  I think instead that she didn’t feel a need to express personal feelings in diary form. What was important was recording the everyday events of her life, keeping track of the weather and the visitors, the comings and goings of a farm on the edge of town.

In a few entries, though, I catch a glimpse of a more private side of my grandmother, moments of the solace she found in the natural world. In her diaries, she would note signs of the seasons changing, especially when a long, cold winter was turning away for spring:

Wed, April 6, 1983: We walked to the creek and found mayflowers and heard a meadowlark sing.

Tues, April 12, 1983: No snow yet. Cleaned house. Saw a meadowlark today. Gophers are running around and also saw a pheasant and two rabbits.

In entries like these, I can imagine her looking out the window over the prairie, although “prairie” is my word, not hers. She would say “pasture,” since the long grass is where my grandparents grazed their cattle. I can imagine her walking to the creek to look for mayflowers, grateful for a sign that spring had finally made its way to the north. She paid attention to the creatures around her because they inhabited the same piece of land. She marked her days by the weather and the seasons because they formed the backdrop of her life on the farm, determining each day’s possibilities. These diary entries reveal an intimacy with nature that seems a private part of my grandmother’s life, quiet moments of grace in the midst of her busy days.

 

Giving a Horse

Growing up, I was a bit of a horse girl. I was one of those girls who cried over Black Beauty and Misty of Chincoteague. My favorite book in first grade was Brighty of the Grand Canyon, about a sweet little burro, which was close enough to a horse for me. Around fifth grade or so I received The Girl Scout Book of Horse Stories as a gift, stories combining Girl Scout resourcefulness and courage with the wild independence of horses. Like horses, Girl Scouts have a mind of their own.

I collected Breyer toy horses too and but I never had as many as my older cousin did. She had a whole cabinet for hers while mine fit on a shelf. I didn’t have any of the showy appaloosas or pintos or paints like hers; instead, my horses were classic breeds, making up in elegance what they lacked in variety: the white Arabians, the golden Palominos, and the dark brown Thoroughbreds. I collected my horses in families of mother, father, and foal, with a cousin pony sometimes keeping them company. I still have those horses.

I love the beauty of horses but not so much riding them. They’re alarmingly large to me and unpredictable. I’ve been on a horse a dozen times and always just manage to ride comfortably enough, the horse paying less attention to who’s on their back than to finding dinner back at the stable.  I may not be a rider, but I’m always thrilled to come upon a herd of multi-hued horses pasturing in the foothills along my drive to town.

And I’m still happy to chance upon a good horse story, like The Hearts of Horses by Molly Gloss, a novel of an unusual young woman, Martha Lessen, who “gentles” horses for a living. Inspired by the oral history of a “rancher’s daughter” whose words introduce the story, the novel is set during WWI in eastern Oregon and the plot device—she travels a circuit of several ranches to train each family’s horses—allows Gloss to examine the rural situations and prejudices of the times. I’m not sure what interested me more—young Martha’s avoidance of gender restrictions with her “man’s trousers” and self-reliant ways or Gloss’s descriptions of the horses Martha handles. Despite her bashfulness, Martha never shies away from doing what’s right, whether it’s rescuing a horse from a foreman’s whip or helping a family in need.

Gloss’s authorial point of view is particularly adept at capturing the innermost thoughts of characters so that by the end of the novel, we’ve intimately experienced the sensibilities found in the rural West of the time. I didn’t want the novel to end, but it did, beautifully.  Leaving Martha as a young woman, newly married to a man who can love a woman who “doesn’t want to stay in the house like women usually do,” the novel flashes forward to an older Martha at a time far removed from the West of her young adulthood: “She said to her granddaughter, without planning to say it, ‘You know, honey, I guess we brought about the end of our cowboy dreams ourselves.’ It was a startling thing to hear herself say, but then she thought: Here I am in my old age and just at the beginning of figuring out what it that means, or what to do about it.”

I have that feeling myself; even though I’m not yet facing old age, I am trying to figure out at fifty what to do with the next part of my life. As a young girl dreaming of horses, this jumping off feeling was breathless with possibilities of what I might be when I grew up. Now that I’m grown, I’m more cautious about the choices I may make, or more certain of the criteria they must fulfill. Still, at any age, we must choose how far we’ll go without knowing exactly where we’re going. Do we give the horse we’re riding its head or hold the reins even tighter?

 

Saving the Orchard

I’m waiting for the fire to take. May 13^th and we’re still lighting the woodstove for heat. We had snow two nights ago and last night dipped to 30. The question is, will the apples freeze tonight if the cloud cover lifts?

The cool, moist spring has brought a beautiful show of blossoms but one frigid night will nip them in the bud. Good to know what that old saying really means: if the cold enters the tiny fruit at the center of the blossom, the emerging apple will freeze and blacken. Cold this late in the season means potential devastation for our vulnerable old trees. Until the weather turns, we’re living on the edge.

It’s not like our livelihood depends on apples, not like a commercial orchard would, or like growers during the Depression who needed every piece of fruit to survive. Until I read The Orchard by Adele Crockett Robertson, I didn’t realize that apple rustlers of that time would sneak into orchards to steal fruit.

In Robertson’s memoir, she writes of trying to save her family’s land in Massachusetts by saving the apple orchard. Robertson was in her early 30s, college-educated and unmarried, when she convinced her doubtful family that she could manage an apple business after her doctor father’s death and Depression-era debt reverses the family’s fortunes.

Like farmers today, Kitty, as she was known, faced challenges both human and natural—growing debt, cutthroat competition, broken machinery, insect infestation, and unpredictable weather. She even faced down rustlers with a pistol—unloaded, but they didn’t take the chance of finding out. Robertson paid her small crew of immigrant laborers above-average wages, earning their loyalty and respect when they saw how hard she worked. But was her persistence and courage enough to save the orchard? I won’t give the answer away except to say that it’s sexism, not her own failings, that determine the story’s ending.

What’s most remarkable is that Robertson wrote her memoir and then stuck it away at the bottom of a bookcase, never published. Her daughter found it after Robertson’s death and fortunately realized what a treasure it was. Whenever I worry about our apples, I can’t help but think of Kitty Robertson, a daughter of privilege, skin brown from the sun, climbing ladders, peddling apples, and trying her level best to save a piece of land from Depression developers exploiting the misfortunes of a family and a nation.

 

What Shall This Be?

What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking through them.

                                                                                Easter Sunday, April 20, 1919

Virginia Woolf again? Don’t worry—I’m not pulling a “Julie and Julia” and my name doesn’t start with “V.”  In wondering what this blog will contain, though, I can’t help but include this quote because, in her inimitable style, Woolf has encompassed so much about personal writing in so few words.

Woolf imagined her diary as “loose knit” but not “slovenly.” By “slovenly” did Woolf mean “written in haste without sufficient editing” or perhaps “written without proper attention to detail, without providing enough depth to create a coherent meaning”? Both of these shortcomings are found in journalism today, yet when information comes in such short forms, like blogs, such problems are hard to avoid.

I’m blogging in part because I want to experience what blogging can be as a form and a genre. Unlike blogs, most diaries aren’t written for someone else to read (see Louise Erdrich’s latest novel Shadow Tag for a plot that hinges on deceptive diary keeping and peeping). I’ve been journaling simultaneously in multiple journals for years but never for pubic consumption. How will (hopefully) having readers change how and about what topics I write?

         “Capacious hold-all” is my favorite phrase for personal writing like journals, diaries, and blogs that are consecutively and consistently written. I see this blog as a  “hold-all” for my ideas about women’s writing and my experiences as a women in her 50s who writes, reads, farms, teaches, cooks, knits, and organizes community in various ways, a woman who is transitioning from one career to many interesting and satisfying occupations, as in “things that occupy my time,” including pearlmoonplenty.

 

The First Post

Odd how coming back [to London] upsets my writing mood. Odder still how possessed I am with the feeling that now, aged 50, I’m just poised to shoot forth quite free straight and undeflected my bolts whatever they are. . . . I don’t believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun.

                                          Virginia Woolf’s diary, Sunday, October 2, 1932

Where to begin is always the question, so today I start this blog with Virginia Woolf, the writer to whom I turn most often for insight into a woman’s writing life.

Since reaching 50 last year, I’ve kept Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary by my bed, reading entries randomly for insight into her genius and “determination not to give in.” Facing 50, she wrote, “Oh yes, between 50 and 60 I think I shall write some very singular books, if I live. I mean I think I am about to embody at last the exact shape my brain holds.”

Woolf is one of my many mentors; the night before I started graduate school, I dreamed that she invited me for tea. Tea with Virginia Woolf! What better way to assure myself that I was ready to realize my own intellectual voice?

Now, as I alter my aspect toward the sun of less certain but newly imagined years, I turn to Woolf again and find that at 50, she too was poised to follow her own mind wherever it might lead. “Shoot forth quite free straight and undeflected my bolts whatever they are.” Let that be my motto as I round the fullness of 50 like a pearl moon embracing the plenitude of its shine.