Page 46 - The Woven Tale Press Vol. Iv #8

Starlight (continued)
I’ve made it up to the muddy little path about a block from Mt. Tabor Park. While I wasn’t look- ing, the clouds had burned off, and the sky
had popped out, fashionably blue. My heart knocks again and I’m fighting hard not to cry. The depression and anxiety I suffer from seems worth it now, for these moments when I can feel intensely about nothing at all. After the abor- tion, I read Journal of a Solitude, in which Sarton reveals the joy and sorrow of her own solitary days, the life of a woman who is a writer, and I started to feel less alone.
There is a rhythm to walking that’s like running a pen across the page. This is one reason the two are such good remedies for sorting out a bout with the blues. I carry on little conversations in my head, passing houses and gardens, several old churches, a park and an elementary school, and keep noticing this little burst of happiness at the smallest things. If Sarton were here, I might ask
if this was the experience she’d had, coming back into herself after sinking down. I would want to know if she thought something important had occurred, some necessary emotional cleansing during the dark time, and that’s why afterwards she felt a sense of being reborn.
I hear a bird chirp as I watch the light graze a maple tree whose outer leaves have begun to redden, as the air cools toward Fall. I’m thinking about my house in winter, a pot of squash soup simmering on the stove. And I begin to under- stand that loss and disappointment, fear and pain, the weight of a thousand unspoken sor- rows, can pile up on a person, especially when there’s little time to go inside.
I read Sarton the first time in the days after I learned that I was pregnant. On hearing my news, a friend gave me the slim volume of Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing. As soon as I started reading, I knew why my friend had chosen the book. Like Sarton’s more well-known nonfiction, such as the classic Journal of a Solitude, Mrs. Ste- vens is about a woman writer.
Then one day, a window opens, and a wide view of the garden suddenly appears. It’s then that a writer pulls out her pen and sits down to de- scribe the way sunlight shimmers in one single drop of water at a leaf’s tip and makes her think of starlight.
As I write this, you might want to imagine me sit- ting in front of the window, in a wooden rocking chair. Isn’t that what pregnant women do? Like other women in that state, I was waiting. Only my wait wasn’t a joyous one. I was waiting to abort a child–waiting until the tiny thing had grown large enough so the doctor could be sure the dismal procedure of snuffing out a budding life had been properly done. A fact many of you may not know.
At this point, some of you may wish you’d never started reading this piece and figure I deserve ev- ery dark moment I suffer. And maybe you’re right. But I was a single woman, a writer barely able to support herself, and not in the least bit capable of raising a child. That said, I suppose in that deci- sion not to keep my child I was choosing to write, instead of becoming a mother. Waiting there in the rocking chair, I wasn’t sure the decision was right. I had cried and cried, and in between I read Sarton who seemed to say to me that, yes, being a woman and a writer is hard, but in the end, some of us have no choice.
Excerpted and adapted from forthcoming Even when Trapped Behind Clouds: A Memoir of Quiet Grace.
Solmo is a recipient of four Pushcart Prize nominations. Her work has appeared in over 100 print and online literary journals, including the Los Angeles Review, The Santa Clara Review, WomenArts Quarterly, Guernica,Gravel, among others, and in numerous an- thologies, including Solace in So Many Words, which won the Next Generation Indie Book Award for Anthology.
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