Essays

Lynn’s non-fiction has been published in the Mystery Review, The Brattleboro Reformer, Out in the Mountains, Foster Families and the Southeastern Audubon Society newsletter.

Yes, I am a feminist

What is a woman if she is defined by women?  This was what I thought the women’s movement was all about.  In early consciousness raising groups, we encouraged women to speak up and speak out.  Implicit in such encouragement was a promise to listen.  Feminist presses sprang into being.  Poetry readings were held in every town.  We all had subscriptions to Ms. and, at least one other journal.  No doubt in the 60s feminism was my faith. I know I grabbed the books as fast as they were printed: Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Paule Marshall, June Jordon, Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood.  And those that were history rediscovered: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, Charlotte Bronte, Zora Neale Hurston.  By god, we were women and we were going to “dream of a common language” and save the world.

I listened to Anne Bradstreet:

I am obnoxious to each carping tongue

who says my hand a needle better fits,

a poet’s pen all scorn I should thus wrong,

for such despite they cast on female wit:

If what I do prove well, it won’t advance,

they’ll say it’s sto’n, or else it was by chance.

                        Building on her anger and my own,

I spoke up………..

I was a child born, not into poverty, but certainly into the working class.  There never was much money.  What wealth we had was in family.  I grew up surrounded by women: aunts, cousins, sisters, mothers, grandmothers.  As a baby I was passed from arm to arm.  One of my first learnings was, if one woman was too busy, go find another.  My grandmother held me in her lap.  She sang softly over my head.  If she was busy, there was always an aunt; another lap, another song.  Each woman sang a different song.  A love for women, not just a woman, was rocked into my bones.

Out of this love, I became political at the age of ten.  By insisting, despite teasing by a boy cousin, I could so talk to the birds.  And by biting one bully on the arm and then running like hell.  Living in a tenement, I identified with the many voiced laughter of the streets.  But I saw my destiny to be a wife and mother.  I adopted two children, gave birth to another.  Our family was asian, anglo and afro.  This was what it meant to me to be a woman, to celebrate diversity.  And when women began to speak out, to write, to march, I was ready to go.  My inner process and the Women’s Movement were in tune.  I was ready to seize the moment and demand equal pay, equal access to opportunity, the right of every woman to be heard.  Adrienne Rich put words to it.  Cris Williamson sang it.  Audre Lorde declared it.  We were going to change the world and we were going to do it right now. 

Today, we still struggle for equal rights.  (Remember the Equal Rights Amendment?).  We still struggle to have a voice. It has finally reached my consciousness that what I first saw as my own struggle was really a world wide struggle.  It’s about being our own authentic self.

There is so much to do.  Like Susan B. Anthony we need to keep coming back over and over again.  Especially today.  Diverting all the money to war is another way to keep us looking the wrong way.  The anti-war movement is a civil rights movement, is a feminist movement, is a gay rights movement.  It’s all the same.  There isn’t anything else to do but keep on trying, one dream at a time, to create a better world.  It will never be perfect, because we aren’t perfect, but it can be better.

Letters

Something real to hold in my hand:  the joy and lost art of letter writing

Today I picked up a pen.  The kind you get 10 for a dollar.  And a pad just like the pad we all used in school.  The pad cost $1.49.  Then I wrote a letter.  If you are very young, you may never have written or held a letter in your hand.  It is a missive between two people delivered by the Post Office anywhere in the United States for 45 cents.  It is a way to connect with another that most anyone can afford. As one friend writes, “You are the only friend I have who still writes letters and sends them with a stamp.  I love it.”  I enclosed a tea bag in one of my letters to another friend saying receiving a letter from her was like sitting down to tea and talk.  Since then we both include a tea bag drawing at the end of each letter.

I have, collected in boxes,  letters written to me from aunts, uncles, my mother, my sister, my brother, friends dating from the 1940’s on.  I have letters from my children chronicling their lives as they wrote from camp, from college, from various places they traveled to and from as they grew older.

One of my favorite letters says, “Your New Year’s letter arrived in time to celebrate my 92^nd  birthday,  which I actually didn’t celebrate, as none of my  family were here.  Your “determination to hold fast” was exactly the message I needed to counteract depressive thoughts—it’s probably not a bad idea to take someone thirty years younger as a role model!”

And,  I have been corresponding with a high school friend for 60 plus years.  She lives in the west; I live in the east.  I have all her letters stacked on my shelf.  These letters document our lives and our friendship.  Something real I can hold in my hand.  The same hand that is connected to my inner being, that not only talks to my friend but helps me understand myself.  We describe the weather, what it is like to be in Yellowstone National Park, what it is like in Vermont on a -20 degree morning.  I describe the joy of a poem accepted for publication; the disappointment of a rejection.  She tells me of collecting jade in a ghost town, of seeing Bighorn sheep on a recent camping trip.

Nowadays we are helping each other grow older.  With a lifetime of knowing each other, one sentence can evoke whole stories.  We can complain and yet know we are both survivors. We know we will keep putting one foot in front of the other no matter what the challenge.  After all we have been cheering each other on for a long time.

Today the pen I pick up is inscribed Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center.  This gives me enough material to fill paragraph after paragraph.  Dear friend I say, and  I’m off.

But I’m definitely a jay