Words from The Crone

It happens every year at this time.  A parade of costumes-past float behind my eyes as I try to fit the 8-year old princess costume on my 70 year old expanded form.  It’s funny, but I barely remember any of my Halloween costumes.  Why is that I wonder?  I do recall that I never wanted to be anything ugly or monstrous.  My costume desires ran to the princess, bride, or Hollywood actress genre.  I left the uglies to the boys.

 I am better at remembering my children’s Halloweens.  My daughter and I always recall the year I took her father’s motorcycle helmet and made it into Darth Vader’s head gear and draped her 8-year old body with a heavy woolen cape found in grandma’s attic.  Shirt cardboards (remember them?) were used to craft a very smart sword and off she went, victorious in the best costume on the block.  And, yet, another year she was Princess Leia – go figure. 

Another year my other daughter was Charlie Chaplin, she crafted her own costume from beginning to end, and it was spectacular.  She fell in love with the little fellow that year after seeing one of his films in school and spent every Saturday for months going to a museum that showed his films each week.  I also recall that she was the “Little Tramp,” one year, but she too had her “Princess” Halloweens.

There were two times as an adult that I recall not only my costume, but the costume of my then current husband as well.  I remember because each time we won first prize for best costume.  The first time I dressed up as a pregnant angel and my first husband was the devil.  The second time I and my second husband each donned white albs, gelled our hair into spikes, wore weird make-up and multiple crosses around our necks and presented as “Punk Priests.” 

But the Halloween I remember most is the time I threw a sheet over my head to be a ghost as I answered the door and handed out candy.  All was going well until I opened the door, let out my ghostly ghastly moan and sent a little girl screaming in fright back to her mom waiting at the curb!  I took off the costume and never did that again.  After all, Halloween is supposed to be fun, not scary, isn’t it?

We have returned to our little corner of ITMON (In the Middle of Nowhere) after a 3-day sojourn to Washington, DC to celebrate my daughter’s birthday.  It was only after we crossed the District line into Maryland that I realized how tense I had been for those three days.  A sense of calm and rest descended upon my tied-in-knots body and I was at peace for the first time since we entered the District.

 Generally stress builds up through relationships or by situations in which human beings are involved.  An argument with your spouse or child.  A deadline set by your boss.  Some cranky person who doesn’t see things your way.  Pushing yourself to achieve some unheard of perfection.  Stress.  Lots of stress.

 But, the stress I felt in DC was not deliberately caused by human beings.  Unless, of course, you count the fact that Henry Ford invented the assembly line and a car for every family.  You see, it was the traffic that drove me (no pun intended) up the wall – or over the asphalt.  If there was two feet of space between any two cars in the District it was because there had been a mistake made or an accident.  Bumper to bumper traffic, horns honking, no parking spaces, one way streets, two way streets with green arrows, red arrows, no arrows.  Cars cutting in front of you.  Cars coming out of nowhere.  At one intersection a police car came screaming in from out of nowhere and turned into the divided highway against traffic and left a host of amazed and puzzled drivers simply shaking heads.  It was, to be perfectly honest, a nightmare.

I loved the museums, I loved the fabulous meals, I loved the trip down memory lane to long forgotten places.  I loved the perfect parking place provided by my parking spirit.  I loved walking my seminary campus and soaking in the peace and spirituality of the “Holy Hill.”  I loved celebrating my daughter’s birthday with her.  I hated the cars and the traffic and the congestion and the pollution they made.  I even hated the thought that my car was contributing to this mess.  I wish we had a better way to get around cleanly and safely.  Hello, God, got any suggestions? 

 God:  Segways?

 The first plant I ever fell in love with was a weed. It was one of those puffy, gone to seed, dandelions in our lawn. I was heartbroken as my father whacked them down, pulled them up, tossed them in the trash. I thought they were pretty little yellow flowers that offered up hours of delight as they turned into those magical puff-balls every child has blown to the wind. My fondest memory is running around the yard picking and puffing, giggling and then giggling some more as the seeds of more weeds were borne off into some mysterious place to germinate. It was only through a child’s innocent soul that one could find such fun in this simple act.

It was always a mystery to me which plant was a weed and which plant was not. My mother tended her flower garden with love and a certain vengeance for pulling up weeds. How did she know something was a weed and not, well, you know, a real plant. Then someone came along and educated me about weeds. My view of plants and weeds was changed forever. Weeds, my informant told me, were nothing more than plants sprouting where you didn’t want them to sprout. Oh, well, now that has meaning. It means that if I planted a plot of dandelions they would be plants not weeds. But, when I planted my first ever garden of marigolds, anything that wasn’t a marigold plant was a weed. Simple. No wonder my mother was so adept at identifying and dispatching weeds in her garden.

The side window in my solarium faces a small slot of land between two townhouse units and in this small space a fabulous terrarium of weeds grows with wicked abandon. Challenging, daring anyone to grab their neck and tear them out the ground. They stubbornly dig in deep roots and grow to the majestic height of almost eight feet tall and grace themselves with lovely, delicate white flowers in the late summer. I won’t let anyone rip them up and toss them out. And, even when they insinuate themselves through the deck railing of the unit next door overflowing onto her deck, my friend also embraces them as strong, beautiful weeds that we need to nurture and grow over the summer. Before long they are no longer weeds, but plants that we might have deliberately grown to enhance our little plot of ground. I hope they come back next year for I plan to inspect them very closely, as assuredly there are tiny fairy belles hiding under the umbrella of their lush leaves. I’ll be very quiet and find them.

I have far more regular plants in my life than weeds. And, I am more apt to want to get rid of the weeds before they choke out the plants I want to keep in my garden. Why, oh why can’t they just live together in harmony, each enhancing the other? Around our pond that constitutes my back yard is a lovely collection of weeds and plants I want. For weeks I have been asking management to sort out the wheat from the chaff around our picturesque pond, but to no avail. They intermingle, intertwine with each other. They intermarry and produce the most gorgeous hybrid flower children. But you have to be careful with weeds. Unlike our well trained, socialized, and polite plants, weeds have a tendency to be avant garde with a strong dose of disrespect for those dainty wuss flowers that have no stamina, no staying power like us weeds.

 As I look around a room or a crowded subway I see clearly the weeds and the plants in this life. The weeds are assertive, offering no one a seat on the bus. They feel that only they matter. The plants need some attention, some nurturing, some protection from the invading weeds.

And so we pull the weeds from our life. We throw them into the dumpster and try to live as if they don’t exist. But, alas they do and, like the real weeds in our garden, we have to pay attention to them. Or, maybe, like the terrarium outside of my window, we can learn to live with them and give them some sun, room to grow, and finally to bloom – as lovely as the other plants.

A couple of blogs ago I wrote about bra burning.  Well, actually I wrote about how much more comfortable we women would be if we didn’t wear bras.  Of course, I was being a bit light-hearted about it all, but whammo – you just never know when something like that takes another turn or twist in life.

Last week in the Op Ed section of the Wilmington (DE) News Journal was a letter about a book called Dressed to Kill; The Link Between Breast Cancer and Bras by Sydney Ross Singer and Soma Grismaijer.  The book, written in the mid 1990’s, has some fascinating perspectives on how wearing a bra can increase one’s risk of breast cancer.  In the letter, the writer went on to say that there is also no evidence that wearing a bra prevents that inevitable trip south that our breasts make as age.  While I haven’t read the book, the premise is that bras bind up the natural flow of our capillary and lymphatic systems and can contribute to the development of cancer.  Aha!  I said, I was right about bras – but, for the wrong reason.

As in any of these studies this information may or may not be nailed-to-the-floor scientific evidence.  However, last year my loving spouse had an attack of cardiac atrial fibrillation (cardiac arrythymia).  Now all I can tell you about it is that the atrial chamber in the heart has a sort of spasm and rather than dumping the blood into another chamber (below, I think), it pools up and can form clots.  Patients with this condition are put on rat poison – politely called “Coumadin” to keep the blood thin so it won’t form those nasty clots if another fibrillation occurs. (Google it for better information).

Given this situation then, it makes a lot of sense that anything that binds up the flow of our bodily fluids might be a cause for any number of rather unpleasant consequences, including cancer.  Surely kidney stones back up our kidneys and are very painful.  Bladder infections can actually form large blood clots in the bladder and contribute to pain and suffering.  We all know that blocked arteries cause heart attacks, constipation isn’t good, and God knows what else goes on underneath our amazing sack of skin in the dark recesses of our body.

Come to think of it, in our au naturel state nothing binds us up.  Maybe the healthiest alternative is to go naked.  It has its advantages – don’t have to keep “in style,” no dry cleaning bills, no need for a washer and dryer, a walk-in closet space could be used as an extra bedroom for small people.  We could fill our minds with much more useful information instead of wasting it deciding what to wear, what color looks best, or whether or not a certain outfit makes us look fat.  And our time – think of the time spent shopping for clothes – hey, we could read the classics, listen to music, volunteer at a non-profit, play with our children or grandchildren, write that book……the possibilities are endless…or at least bra-less.

I was reminded recently of the practice of women burning their brassieres back in the 1970’s in protest of their “bondage” to the patriarchal society and the notion that women were considered more of a possession than human being to be honored and loved.  But back to those bras.  Once they were burned and a generation of women gave up wearing them altogether, why, dear God, did we ever go back to wearing them?

For sure they were never comfortable.  Even that 18-hour number eventually felt like a camel’s saddle strapped onto one’s body!  And, I wonder, how many shoulders were pulled from the socket as we struggled to hook those things in the back.  Now I know some women figured out that you could hook them in the front and then twist them around to the back, but not this woman.  I was taught that by blindly trying to hook those infinitesimally small hooks behind my back for three hours that I would keep the “range of motion” in my arm sockets.  Well, I can still clasp my hands behind my back (a talent I never find useful for much) but my arthritis is screaming to be let out of prison.

 And then, what about the fit?  I don’t know about other women, but my two girls never were the same size or hung down the same length.  One was always bigger than the other.  So, if I bought a “C” cup for the big girl, the little girl was hiding behind a cup that crinkled and sagged as it yearned to be filled.  If I bought a “B” cup for the little girl, the big girl was overflowing her cup as she gasped for breath.  It was a lose-lose situation.  And, who ever thought up that trick about measuring beneath your girls and adding five inches to get your bra size?  During ovulation that number swelled up to two inches and then shrank back when the ovaries and uterus were done with their monthly chore.  Now I know why those hooks were always sewed onto elastic bands.

 I never wore a bra, any bra, that at the end of the day hadn’t left its brand on me.  Sometimes it was a deep red band and other times just a small pink indentation depending on the time of the month and the brand of the bra.  And forget about those strapless numbers.  I don’t care how many “bones” or “stays” or “under-wires” they put in them they still fall down.  Even the ones that supposedly go all the way down to the waist.  Those just gouge out your stomach.

 Big girls, little girls, in my humble opinion, they should all be left to dangle free.  To celebrate the fact that they are nature’s way of feeding our young and they, like women, should not be held in bondage.  Left them rest freely on our rib cages where they belong.  After all that’s where they are headed anyway as we age.  Let them go.  Be brave.  Burn those bras.  I did!