How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life by Mameve Medwed

Author:Mameve Medwed [Medwed, Mameve]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

A number of vans, pickup trucks, SUVs, and cars toting roof racks and pulling trailers are already parked in haphazard zigzags on the farmer’s field when we get there at exactly five of ten. The minute I step out of the car onto the patches of mud, tufts of grass, dried bristles of hay, I tremble with the frisson of excitement I always feel right before the chase. My hunter-gatherer instinct is on full alert. I am cavewoman with club, calculator, and magnifying glass. At flea markets, auctions, tag sales, all things are possible (even romance, cf Clyde). Buried treasure lurks under the junk. Somewhere one particular item will speak to me and change my life. It has already happened of course. But that time it was my mother’s sharp eye (perhaps a bit of Henrietta’s, too) that deserved full credit for the chamber pot. This time I’ll flaunt my own discernment, my own professional expertise to Todd Tucker, to the readers of the Boston Globe, to my colleagues in the antiques field, to my father who insisted I couldn’t set foot in the world without a Ph.D., to my lawyer, to my legal adversaries. And to one adversary in particular. Let the world know that the treasure-tapping gene has been passed down in my DNA. Not that, to be fair, one could ever overlook the element of luck.

“Are you feeling lucky, Abby?” Todd asks. He’s got on a tattered straw hat a scarecrow might sport. His notebook and pen stick out of his shirt pocket. I notice his pen has leaked. A black amoeba-shaped blob marks his heart. I think of The Wizard of Oz. The missing heart. Yet it wasn’t the heart the Scarecrow lacked, I correct, but a brain. There’s nothing wrong with Todd’s brain, however. Proved by a man who’s both a poet and a reporter, yin and yang, a man who loves the Brownings, who knows Flush, whose dog is called Wordsworth, a man who reads E. E. Cummings in bed. “You’ve got that dog-on-the-scent look,” he declares.

I laugh. Since what matters is context, I’m more than happy to be compared to a dog. “And you…” I begin.

He snaps up a stick of hay. He jabs it into the side of his mouth. He chews on it.

“And you,” I repeat. “Agricolae poetae sunt.”

For a second I hear Ned’s voice: Omnia Gallia in tres partes divisa est. I picture his face in the Thayers’ living room. He’s smiling. He’s balancing a glass of sherry on his knee. He’s holding a bowl of toasted almonds. I listen to my own voice quote Amo, amas, amat. I love. You love. He loves. So long ago. Another place. Another me. Once upon a time when those words meant everything.

“Come again?” Todd asks.

“It’s Latin.”

“Which is all Greek to me.”

“It means farmers are poets.” I stop. “You never studied Latin?”

He shakes his head. Clumps of straw fall off his hat. “But now I will.” He bangs his hand over his ink-stained heart.

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