natural beauty

What would I have looked like if I lived in the 1800's...before the invention of contact lenses, professional hair straightening, eyebrow waxing, anti-aging cosmetics?  I would have been not so cute, me thinks.

I suppose by age 33 I'd already have nearly grown kids...I could even be a grandma....so I'm attractive for an early elderly woman. I'm an 8 out of 10 in the Gold Rush Grandma circuit.

If I think about how I looked at age 15, which is sort of a poor-girl married age for the early 1800's (I'm thinking Jane Austen's times, maybe), I would not have married with any land holding aristocrat. I'd be Charlotte Lucas, begging the weird guy to take me off my parents' hands. Ouch! Maybe not so bad. I'd probably be the governess falling in love with all the mysterious, emo older men. I'd end up in unmarried, spinster disgrace, selling apples to sailors on the wharf and coughing. Or maybe I'd be the clever, non conformist political suffragette type. It wouldn't be a bad life.

I don't mean to berate my looks. I'm just saying that much of my cuteness is strictly 21st century. In the future, will everyone be very cute, making cute...well...ordinary?

It's all relative. I mean, obviously beauty standards are constructed by the times (ie, no one is Jane Austen's England tweezed their brows even if they looked like chubby inchworms; my ridiculous hair was perhaps made for the ten thousand hairpins required for a Victorian pompadour thing.)

I can't shake the notion that it just plain sucked for women before the invention of modern beauty products like clever razors with shaving soap stuck to it. I know, I know: they had much more important things to do then worry about their legs and hairy legs probably were just as natural as unpainted toes.  Their lives were an endless rotation of labor and children and keeping the house together and pleasing their husbands and, most likely, had few pleasures besides needlepoint, reading, and family. When they washed their hair on Saturday nights in preparation for church the next day, did they think, "aaaaaah, finally some 'me' time!" or did they simply not think of themselves at all? 

Their world was small, but it's not like they thought of it like that. Did they?

Into the Garden, Out of Africa

Stanley Kunitz writes in one of my favorite poems, "the longing for the dance stirs the buried life/one season only, and it's gone." He's standing in his garden staking down plants, admiring the intricate world of crickets.  He's thinking about getting old and how fast time goes: the first lines are summer is late/ my heart. 

Simple ideas stated with such magnificence.  As we tie down delicate things for the certainty of storms, it's hard not to think on the metaphor of the garden and the life.  My husband noted the timid blooms of our flowers this week in the unseasonable warmth; he had to say it three times because my head was a jumble of details like calls I needed to return and things I needed to buy at the store. And those pesky birds are back, poking, talking, foraging in the dawn outside my bedroom window, waking me up a bit too early.

Here comes another settled season. What stirs in the buried life?

I'm laid up this weekend with a neck sprain. Trying not to be crabby about it.  It was at least a good opportunity to curl up with a heating pack and painkillers and Out of Africa, a movie I never saw until today.

It's an epic tome, totally in my wheelhouse. Loosely based on the life and stories of Isak Dineson (Karen Blixen, played by Meryl Streep),  it's all sweeping landscapes of Africa. Mountains, veldts, waterfalls, picnics with camp chairs and wine and marauding lions, Masai warriors. Rugged, poetry-reciting Hemingway hunter Robert Redford sensuously washes Meryl Streep's hair with river water and a jug. Love found. Love lost. The inevitable destiny of colonialization ruining everyone's fun. The protagonist learns that her deep passion for free spirited Robert Redford and desire to claim him is, predictably, about as easy as taming Africa herself. 

Of course movies, like books and poetry, stir that buried life. I find myself thinking, why can't I have a coffee plantation in Africa and go hunting with Robert Redford?  Where's my safari picnic?  I find myself Googling "teacher trips to Africa" and "scholarships for teachers, international travel." Uh-oh. I'm supposed to be saving money for a new kitchen. Because, you know, my kitchen is old and creepy.

Feeling the same sort of ennui, Dan has been scouring the internet looking for reasonable ways to road trip out west.

Kunitz asks, What is it that makes the engine go?  He answers it:
Desire, desire, desire. 


 
 

hoarders

I listened to a surprisingly touching radio interview with one of the guys who works for the show Hoarders, Matt Paxton. He heads a special clean-up crew who go into those horror show homes and rake through nests of rats to find things like dead cats and pristine newspapers lamenting JFK's death.  I was struck by his rather kindhearted desire to help people by mucking out their homes.

What was especially fascinating was his revelation that doing this work suited him nicely, since he's a recovering addict and perhaps isn't easy to shock and unlikely  to judge anyone. Even more interesting: he prefers to work with recovering addicts and people fresh from jail, out on parole. He said some of his crew are convicted murderers.

It makes sense, what they have in common: people on the fringes, people who've hit near-bottom, etc., have strong stomachs and are hard to disturb (more practically, hard to employ in other professions perhaps). Also, as these guys stand in these terrible houses and fill up trash bags with moldy dishes and roach-eaten pillowcases, they seem close to a sense of redemption. In that one specific space of their rebuilt lives, they are practically saintly. 

 

little things

Little Things 

Little things in my coat pocket. detached purple button from the Union Square farmer's market where it popped off. How I wanted to buy flowers but couldn't. They will wilt on the train, lose their remarkable ballet necks, shed petals underfoot.

Some little things make me nervous.  I can't swallow sometimes. Driving alone on a road with no shoulder. Crying babies, long awkward silences at dinner parties when everyone looks at me for help.

Little things, such quick happiness, like flickering rainbows gone before you can call someone to say you saw a rainbow. How it lit up the sky and no one saw it except you and some guy at the softball field who barely cared. 

A little foolish thing: a blouse from Anthropologie that costs $128.  If I buy this blouse I will look so thin, so put together. Everything will fall into place like fingers flying through stacks of paper.

A stone is a little thing. Everyone knows women who fill up glass jars with shells and things. They seem to say, "I'm putting a stone in here, for no reason, just because it's so lovely and quirky." If only it was that easy, a stone in a jar.