A Blog of One's Own

My husband is teaching A Room of One’s Own this week.    It’s the kind of week where I can’t imagine a better time to be a college student: leaves changing, rainy mornings and crisp air.  Is there anything more relaxing than a pumpkin muffin and coffee with a good book and uninterrupted hours of reading? 

I was an English major too once.  I rented a room in an antebellum house that had been split into apartments. I remember sitting in a rocking chair on the porch and reading The Grapes of Wrath for Dr. Eichelberger’s class until my legs were numb and it got too dark to read. Time just passed by peacefully. So much of that time was perfect.  Even still, I wouldn’t want to go back. I was even more uncertain then than I am now. Sure, I had fewer responsibilities, but  also I was unmoored and drifting. 

There are places we go for lunch sometimes where I see college students. They call me mam. They call me for legal advice.  It’s okay with me. I try not to mother them.

I see the lines growing beside my eyes and above my lip.  They are wrinkles. I admit it.  I’m a tiny bit proud of them.  I’m glad my face remembered to take notes.

There’s a great poem by Sylvia Plath called Face Lift that has this amazing line:

 “...Skin doesn't have roots, it peels away easy as paper.
When I grin, the stitches tauten. I grow backward. I'm twenty,
Broody and in long skirts on my first husband's sofa, my fingers
Buried in the lambswool of the dead poodle;
I hadn't a cat yet...”

A friend of mine is painfully watching her mother “grow backward” in Alzheimers.  I pray for both of them a lot. It is interesting to me that society encourages us all to keep our faces looking the same, while our minds are only supposed to move forward.  My grandfather had Alzheimers too.  There were days that he was like a time traveler, visiting other years. If only memory were always kind to us.

I’ve always liked the Plath poem, in part because I was a broody 20 year-old in long skirts, and also because it underscores that even if the face can be stretched back into a place of perfection, the mind cannot. 

I wonder if Sylvia and Virginia would have had such similar ends if they had a group of women to write with and share.  A Room of One’s Own sort of touches on the need for that.  How amazing that here we have a place to tell our stories in real time, in long Skirts! or otherwise.

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