of demeter and persephone

Behind my parent’s house is a small natural area, a small copse of trees that leads to a forested area with a brook running through it. The city government recently tore down an old cedar frame structure that served as a small educational center, in preparation to build something more modern.

The absence of a man-made barrier has made the animals bolder, and the deer especially are more comfortable in their surroundings. During one late night of my visit I was walking the dog, urging her to hurry up and pee, and a spotted fawn darted across the field not ten feet in front of us. The dog was oblivious, casually munching grass and sniffing the night air. The deer was so quiet and still after its initial sprint; it presented no jarring movement to raise a dog’s hackles or produce a low growl. Under the amber glow of a streetlight, the faun’s eyes glowed as it stared at me, instinctively observing my actions, waiting for its internal signal of when to look away or leap back into the forest.

On the major highways and smaller state routes that cut through Ohio’s fields, one often sees deer only in the form of roadkill. Their eyes are glassy, their bellies bloated, their insides glistening and exposed. The corpses are not removed from the highway, which is what they do with dead moose in Alaska, who are actually the largest member of the deer family. Up there, the carcasses are harvested, cleaned, turned into cuts of meat and donated to families who are grateful for the sustenance. Though venison is consumed in many homes across Ohio, and there are many families with little to eat, the dead deer are not salvaged but instead left to rot, growing more putrid and disgusting and sad by the day. When Gary and I were first married, we lived in a rural area, and during my morning commute I regularly saw deer in various forms of decay. Their faces were usually sad and recognizable as something sentient at first, but by week’s end the crows and turkey vultures had rendered them unrecognizable.

It’s one of the things I had placed in the back of my mind, because in Tennessee I don’t usually see deer either roaming the streets or the highways; maybe there is enough natural area here, they don’t need to travel into our developed world much.

I don’t know why I wrote about this. I sat down, for the first time in a number of days (my first real opportunity to write), and intended to talk about Persephone. I saw an image of a sculpture by Bernini, where a bearded, muscular and handsome Hades (or Pluto, Bernini was Italian) is holding a youthful, plump Persephone in his arms. His strong hands hold the soft flesh of her thighs and ass, pressing firmly into her skin possessively. Her head is thrown back, and in her eyes is a mixture of longing, lust, and fear. He stole her from above, ripped her away from her mother Demeter. He bent her over and fucked her, chasing away the light in her eyes and replacing it with darkness and fire of the underworld.

But Persephone pouted. She allowed herself to be ravished, and maybe she even ravished him back, but she wanted to see the stars and the golden fields of wheat and her mother again. He gave her a bit of pomegranate (a seed, wasn’t it?) and she was allowed to push up from below the earth, escaping the glittering caves and dripping lakes of groundwater for a few months out of the year. In her happiness to be above-ground, she turned the cold winter to spring, and covered the fields with flowers and a wholesome, life-nourishing crop of wheat. She worked by her mother’s side again, fresh and new and pure.

I wonder though, did she relish the autumn with a pull between her legs and a bit of heat in her chest? Did the dark, possessive call of Hades’ passion bring her to her knees? Was she always quite ready to forego the light and the love of her mother for the promise of Hades’ obsessive brand of love?

That’s what I intended to write about, at least.

more dictators and astronauts

We had more dictators and astronauts, and our secret infatuations were allowed to steep in their own mystery. The world was mobile on its feet, and the stars were allowed to be dissected and analyzed one at a time. In those days I sat and read books, both chosen and assigned. I auditioned for plays and was given parts to perform.

I knew a girl named Raegan, which I thought was such a lovely name. She, her brother, and her parents lived in the center of the village where a small playhouse was, and their house was close enough that she could walk to rehearsals. The house was limestone, the playhouse was brick, and the sidewalks were cobblestone.

On Friday nights, after we’d taken off our headscarves and prayer shawls (we were performing in The Fiddler on the Roof), I would walk home with her. She had a pool that was surrounded by redbud trees, and the water was as warm as a bath. We floated on our backs, looked at the stars, and sang in a confidently quiet harmony, without other friends or cast-mates around to join in or judge our musical ability. Little grey moths and glowing green fireflies flew above us, close to the pool’s surface, and the moonlight turned our skin the same shade of whitish blue.

As we floated, when we weren’t singing or staring off into the night sky above our floating bodies, Raegan and I would talk, like teenage girls do.  I told her about the crush I had on the twenty-one year old man who played Mendel, the Rabbi’s son. She told me about the crush she had on one of the high school seniors who played a Russian. Raegan and I were both fifteen, but we  had long legs and liked to think we passed for at least five years older.

Once the night grew too cool to swim, we would wrap ourselves in stiff old beach towels and clamor up the back steps to Raegan’s attic room. Once there we’d peel off our wet swimsuits, compare tan lines, and put on thin cotton t-shirts and underwear. I always kind of wished I had brought different clothes in my backpack, always felt what I wore was inadequate and plain. Maybe that’s why I buy too many articles of clothing now. I’m making up for those years when all of the things I wore  seemed to me so wrong, so out of character, so scratchy on my skin.

Once dressed (half-dressed, really), we’d run back downstairs, tear apart her parent’s refrigerator looking for cookie dough and pop, and run back upstairs with our arms full.

Raegan had two different colored eyes. That is one thing I remember. I remember how round and beautiful they were, appearing larger because of her wet hair curling around her face. She told me that she had been ill with leukemia as a four year old, and that the radiation and chemotherapy had turned her blonde straight hair brown and curly, and her right eye from brown to blue.

Her attic room had low eaves, and dormer windows. Her comforter was white, and the carpeted floor was plush, and soft.

***

I haven’t thought about her in nearly twenty years, the memory of our friendship was buried that deep. The other night I was thinking about how much I like to swim at night and the memory of her house with the warm, tucked-away pool in downtown Centerville, Ohio came flooding and swirling back to me in a blue-green sort of way.

(If I was feeling very modern I would look her up on facebook. But I’m tired of that. I’m tired of robbing everyone’s mystery.)

I think as writers and artists, we stockpile our memories, as if we’re preparing for the bomb to drop. Part of why I write down my memories is to form a sort of reference library, if the time comes when I’m older that I can’t remember what my favorite color is, or that my middle name is Marie.

I’ve heard that those living with Alzheimer’s can remember their ancient history clearly and with glorious detail. It’s their recent history that eludes. At any rate, writing lets me live the favorite parts of my life all over again, so I continue.

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”  –

Anaïs Nin

***

I loved the book The Night Swimmers, by Betsy Byars. One of my favorite books from when I was a girl.

Villette

It’s with a sort of quiet confidence that I announce my intentions to return to school at the University of Tennessee this fall, to pursue a degree in creative writing. I was accepted a couple of weeks ago, and will attend the adult orientation in three weeks.

When I attended college the first time, I was a theatre major. Back then my skin was smoother, my hips were narrower, my breasts were smaller, and I usually drank myself to oblivion at least four times a week. Miami University was like most schools in the midwest: lovely rolling hills, ivy growing on the hundred year old buildings, beer and wine flowing freely from invisible faucets. An active drinker since high school, I settled into my addiction with a new zeal there, and after a semester and a half (or less?), the print in my textbooks began to swim in front of my eyes, my chest constricted in illness and fatigue, and a whispered phone call was made to my parents: Take me home. 

They did. A few days later I sat in a booth at Bill’s Donut Shop, which was an illustrious, legendary, open 24 hours, smoking-allowed (back then) establishment near my parent’s house. Beneath my trembling hands was a composition notebook, half-filled with notes from one of the honors English classes that I had withdrawn from. We had been reading Charlotte Bronte’s Villette at the time of my departure. The professor had cotton-white hair and wore lilac toned suits, even at 8 a.m. One morning after class she pulled me aside (she smelled like her suits looked…like lilacs) and put a small hand on my arm. You’re an excellent writer, she said. Why aren’t you a writing major? 

I don’t remember what I answered. The rest of my days there, and they weren’t many, were spent in a curling grey cloud. I remember smoking a lot of pot, drinking a lot of wine, sleeping until noon and missing that 8:00 honors English course, and feeling the heavy guilt that started to settle deep in my stomach. Villette lay on my nightstand, unread, covered in cigarette ashes and coffee rings.

Sitting at Bill’ s Donuts, smoking and writing, I was taking the advice of my parents. After watching me slowly return to life after picking me and my belongings up from my dorm room, they suggested that I sit down and write what I wanted to do with my life for the next few months. I remember writing something about eventually moving to back to Knoxville (we had moved back to Ohio when I was twelve), studying writing at UT, and falling in love.

Well. I did a few things out of order, didn’t I? Six months after dropping out of Miami I met the  man who became my husband. I fell in love. We moved around, from Ohio to Tennessee to Alaska and back to Tennessee again. We have a son. And now I am going to be attending the Unviersity of Tennessee to study writing. Fifteen years after writing down my intentions to do just that in a composition notebook.

I hope one of the professors assigns Villette. 

here, quickly

The cold came back, because of course it would. Even though the sun was warming our skin through our thin sweaters for most of the past month or so the calendar, and the tilt of the earth in relation to the sun can’t be fooled.

So the heat is turned higher and the blankets are unearthed from cupboards and chests and hot chocolate is purchased in bulk.

Frost. I’ve missed frost. I’ve missed the way it bends the leaves.

My words aren’t that pretty today. The truth is I’m locked inside my office at work on my lunch break, and am trying to enforce a new writing routine into the questionable content of my new day-to-day. I have no crisp words of indelicate wisdom to impart, no knives to cut into flesh. Just me. Just this. Just the quiet of this small room and the soft glow of this plain lamp and the hum and roar of the furnace. Outside the door things are starting to churn again.

My grandfather’s funeral is today and I cannot go. My family lives in Ohio and I couldn’t get away from Tennessee. I am trying to be stoic like my father, but also remind myself that it’s okay to show my tears on the outside like my mother. Our grandparent’s deaths are dress rehearsals for our parent’s inevitable departures, and that’s what’s on my mind.