Weekend of rain and sunshine, friends over for lunch, ripe quinces and pomegranates from the farmers’ market, These were the old hardwood hedges of the Cape, quince hedges lining dusty roads, pomegranate hedges dropping red into ditches. I have a shelf of old Cape cookbooks, recipes that assume the mistress of the house is capable of regulating her woodburning oven, cheerfully wringing the necks of poultry and singeing off feathers, delivering the calf of a bellowing cow and then cleaning up in time to gracefully ice a cake for dessert.
Our foremothers may have been made of sterner stuff. As I said to a friend as we walked along rows of yellowing vines, ‘If my life was a piece of knitting, you would see more dropped stitches than anything else.’
Dropped stitches, failures, misunderstandings, unskilfulness. But on we go, and try to do better next time, if we are lucky enough to get a next time. My friend, who seems to have survived everything except an atomic bomb, a tall grey-eyed woman with shining silver hair swept back and up in a coif, is also a Quaker and has the kind of patience you find in those who have glimpsed the Light and can wait on it to shed radiance again. Dropped stitches to her are all part of a bigger tapestry, a meaning we don’t get to glimpse most of the time. I think of her as an agnostic mystic, someone who is at home anywhere in the world and just sits out the darker hours and precipice falls.
Last night I dreamt I was riding an underground railway in Chile, sandwiched between rock strata and roaring along in darkness in the heart of the mountain. I was busy searching for a window with a view and wouldn’t give up the search.
And of course I’m thinking here about pomegranate seeds and Persephone descending into Hades and the weeping mother Ceres who searches the whole world for her daughter and will call her out of hell. And the poem by Eavan Boland I first read 30 years ago when I was Persephone and lost without knowing it. A long poem but rich in meanings, now that I am both a maternally loving Ceres and a wiser sadder Persephone.
The Pomegranate
By Eavan Boland
The only legend I have ever loved is
the story of a daughter lost in hell.
And found and rescued there.
Love and blackmail are the gist of it.
Ceres and Persephone the names.
And the best thing about the legend is
I can enter it anywhere. And have.
As a child in exile in
a city of fogs and strange consonants,
I read it first and at first I was
an exiled child in the crackling dusk of
the underworld, the stars blighted. Later
I walked out in a summer twilight
searching for my daughter at bed-time.
When she came running I was ready
to make any bargain to keep her.
I carried her back past whitebeams
and wasps and honey-scented buddleias.
But I was Ceres then and I knew
winter was in store for every leaf
on every tree on that road.
Was inescapable for each one we passed.
And for me.
It is winter
and the stars are hidden.
I climb the stairs and stand where I can see
my child asleep beside her teen magazines,
her can of Coke, her plate of uncut fruit.
The pomegranate! How did I forget it?
She could have come home and been safe
and ended the story and all
our heart-broken searching but she reached
out a hand and plucked a pomegranate.
She put out her hand and pulled down
the French sound for apple and
the noise of stone and the proof
that even in the place of death,
at the heart of legend, in the midst
of rocks full of unshed tears
ready to be diamonds by the time
the story was told, a child can be
hungry. I could warn her. There is still a chance.
The rain is cold. The road is flint-coloured.
The suburb has cars and cable television.
The veiled stars are above ground.
It is another world. But what else
can a mother give her daughter but such
beautiful rifts in time?
If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift.
The legend will be hers as well as mine.
She will enter it. As I have.
She will wake up. She will hold
the papery flushed skin in her hand.
And to her lips. I will say nothing.
Bravo the dropped stitches. Are they not also like those cracks, the ones to which Leonard Cohen refers, the ones that let in the light?
Ah, that’s a thought! Thanks Elisabeth.
the kind of patience you find in those who have glimpsed the Light and can wait on it to shed radiance again – Beautiful! I feel blessed to have encountered this sort of Light. Only sober….only sober
I do think that active alcoholism is a kind of darkness or fog and we begin to open to sunlight and intuition and grace when we get sober. Thanks for your comment.
Thanks for this post feeling out of sorts with myself and poems of Persephone lost in hell bring me back to college days. That time was a mixed bag memorizing poems in Latin and destroying myself with drinking binges.
Going home in a couple weeks struggling to let go of fixing at the expense of my serenity. The cracks let the light in like this metaphor. Gratitude for my program I don’t have to do it alone.
Sometimes a memory of myself as a young woman struggling with alcoholism brings me right back into the here and now and where the journey led — and Dee I know all about the struggle to let go of fixing.
Today I shall post “just sits out the darker hours and the precipice falls”. I greatly enjoyed your posting of the video of the Burning Man Dr. Seuss reading. I was unfamiliar with the Burning Man, but googled it for much interesting information. I live in the state of Indiana, USA where food is very important, as it is an agrarian area. I am literally surrounded by thousands of acres of corn and soybeans. I am captivated by your descriptions of your foods and have googled a number of ingredients of which I’m unfamiliar. My Grandparents taught me to read when I was 4-5 years old, and I’ve rarely been without a book in the ensuing 61 years. I like to think I have some appreciation of good writing, and I love your turns of phrase and the tender and sensitive way you write. Thank you for sharing your musings and insights with us, your faithful blog devotees. I am grateful.
Thanks so much for commenting and letting me know you are reading Kathleen — out here we have agriculture and sheep farming but not on the same scale and much of the veld here is still wilderness because it is so dry and we don’t have that much water for irrigation. I loved hearing about your grandparents teaching you to read — and I am also a lifelong reader, never without a book in hand.
I have an old cookbook that uses squirrel for Brunswick Stew, and chicken fat for cakes! A few dropped stitches lend character to a knitted piece.
As I read this, I saw a small red squirrel bouncing down the road and I am grateful never to have to think about eating squirrel — but I love old cookbooks. One favourite I have is William Weaver on the German and Mennonite dishes of Pennsylvania and years ago in London I discovered a copy of Fanny Farmer.
I’m a bad knitter and my mother (who taught me) was taught to knit backwards by a German nurse so I can’t follow patterns.
Mary – I am glad neither of us has to go out and kill a squirrel for supper! The “backwards” or European knitting is making a big comeback – I took a class on knitting that way a few years ago. It really does make a prettier stitch. But I still go back to the way I learned because it is a comfort thing.
I don’t know anything about dropping stitches, but do like pomegranate in juice. And I believe that many women are made of much sterner stuff than men can comprehend.
I like pomegranate juice too Syd — I also know some very strong and gentle men.