Winter — and I buy a Christmas tree

Joanna Boyce Wells (1831-61, Pre-Raphaelite painter I mean to include in my women artists series), A Sibyl (doubtless bringing light out of the darkness)

Dear friends and readers,

Colder now — the cold comes in so slowly this autumn. I heard as I lay in bed with my cats snuggled against in in quilt too, the wind high, strong, the sound of leaves moving, sighing, soughing this morning, some deeper sound which tells of deep cold somewhere, rattling of cans. I see the sway of bare trees. My room outside my blanket is chill. It’s dark too – though well past 6:30 am. The dark comes early again too, by 5.

So winter. My third without my husband, my admiral, Jim. I’ve bought a small tabletop tree for this year, the first time in years, will decorate it, weave lights and such in. It sits it on a credenza Laura and I carried out of a Salvation Army used furniture shop when she was about 6: this white wood bureau for glasses and dishes faces a wide window that the cats look out of too.

On Saturday Izzy and I will have a sort of ritual, even on such a small tree; the things crowded about it (a photo of jim, a crystal cut glass jug to hold wine; very salty pita chips for me, bananas for Izzy) make it hard for the cats to come sit directly by it. When she came home this evening, the first thing she did was water it. Among Yvette’s very first words after she was in her school for three months (for learning disabled, abused [yes], simply ill and “displaced” [they were called] foster children) occurred in December when we put a tree up: “pitty tee” — I heard the soft words so distinctly. She was 3. That school was a free public school, paid for by Alexandria taxpayers; it did much good for about 20 years. It is now closed because of the new conservative dispensation, which when not issuing in shoot-outs, and direct misery is here a form of quiet crime. Education ought to be a human right.

My teaching is almost over for this season, no papers to begin yet; one review so overdue I go slow — on how disability presented and regarded through 19th century novels and memoirs. I have begun for spring teaching by listening to moving dramatic reading aloud of Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters by Nadia May (in my car, via 2 MP3s), but otherwise not. So just sheer pleasure. And I’ve begun in a similar way a paper I proposed on the “Tudor Matter” (breaking of stereotypes for males through this era as presented to us by its literature and as we channel it) for “an anthology on BBC Costume Drama after 2000” (title not decided upon): reading good books on early modern women — queens mostly, Tudor (Linda Porter especially felicitous in style and intelligent, teaching me a lot), but also Jenny Diski’s highly original (because of the way she subjectively tells it) historical fiction of Marie le Jars de Gournay and Montaigne. An interlude. I’m reading 18th century women’s letters, books on women who who didn’t marry or had long periods where they were not married.

I need to go out everyday and so am again a regular early morning at Jewish Community Center for Dance Fusion, to which I’ve added a “Body Strengthening Level II” class. Coming up for the week after this Piaf at the Smithsonian, Pericles at the Folger, and West Side Story at Signature Theater.

Samantha Bond fighting for the continuation of the WI over the war

For evenings I’ve finished the first season of Home-Fires (6 hour BBC mini-series): it’s about the people left behind when most of the men in a village go off to fight in WW2, mostly women. It’s exploitatively over-emotional, characters idealized, stereotypes, no bombs falling even (as yet), but I fall for it, bond with women whose lives and relationships remind me of what mine was with Jim’s. It has unexpected truths: one abused woman (who I get distressed over as I watch) is relieved when her cruel pettily mean and small husband goes off; I was glad for her. As in Calendar Girls a provincial town where the WI (Women’s Institute) provides central place for women as a community to meet, get to know one another, have meaningful relationships, bond, enjoy, gain esteem, do good work:

The sort of thing they do — justified as raising money which it does

To be fair, they set up a bomb shelter and the first Nazi planes begin to cross the channel as the series closes

How I miss him is unspeakable, my thoughts now less bearable as I let more reality in of what was, I find I speak casually of him to others now, of what he and I did in casual conversation more. Contrary to all that is asserted about widowhood, as each year comes by, the grief is not less; as I do more, it hurts more, spreads more as I grow less inured, have less of a carapace. It’s part of being more alive as time without him moves on.

From The Widow’s Handbook (an anthology of poetry)

After he died she started letting the dog
sleep on his side of the bed they had shared
for fifty-one years. A large discreet dog, he stayed
on his side but the tags on his collar jingled as he sighed
and especially when he scratched so she took his collar off
and then his smooth tawny bulk close to her but not
touching eased her through the next night and the next.

One morning, a chipmunk and his wife somehow slipped in
through the screen door when neither of them was looking.
She got up screaming from her coffee and whacked at them
with a broom. Dog pounced and pounced but they were faster
than he was and dove under the refrigerator. After a while
stopped crashing into chairs and skidding around corners
in fruitless pursuit and then they came and went untroubled
even drinking out of his water dish, their tails at right angles.

That summer it just seemed simpler to leave the window …

Autumn fell on them [not] a joyous rush. The first
needles of hard frost, the newly sharp wind, the final
sweep and swirl of leaves, a swash of all-day rain
were not unwelcome …

… Dog in his dumb allegiance dozed on the hearth,
sometimes he ran so fiercely in his dreams that he bared his teeth.
Reclusive comfortable Widow scribbled in her journal …

— Maxine Kumin (whose husband, Victor, killed himself in 1985, she died a year ago)

Miss Drake