What Seasoned Women Have That Everyone Needs by Brian Smith

Author:Brian Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BookBaby
Published: 2018-08-17T15:32:22+00:00

Chapter Five:

Your Spirit

Celebrating

Even more than an open mind we need an open spirit.

A number of years ago I wrote the following short essay about the spirit of one of my ancestors, a Seasoned Woman who had lived her life in a time when the marginalization of women in our society was considerably more routine and unexamined than it is today. (We are clearly not where we want to be, but we have made some progress, especially very recently.)

Portrait Of Her Spirit

In one corner of our dining room hangs a portrait of a beautiful young woman. She seems to be looking at something across the room, with a quiet but intelligent curiosity and a hint of surprise overlain by a personality which seems essentially sad.

The picture is perfectly composed and tinted sepia; it could easily be mistaken for an old photograph. The matting is white with a subtle internal border of gold lines and a simple, cheap frame sprayed with a finely textured gold lacquer.

It is only as I write this that I understand yet another level of why we so treasure this almost photographic yet so much more than photographic drawing. For the brilliant and talented woman who did this in her later years was actually creating a self-portrait, though the features of the young girl do not match the features of the artist at any time during her life.

What she captures so brilliantly is her own intelligence, curiosity, and sadness, preserving her own essence in this modest, unsigned work of art. What she has allowed us to see is the face of the beautifully creative artist whose dreams were deferred, again and again, while she patiently waited...

She cooked, she cleaned, she sewed clothing for her family. She cared for the man whom she accepted as the provider. A little macramé and petit point were her main creative outlets, connected as they were to the domesticity of draperies and doilies.

The heart of her passion acquiesced to expectations. She had been born a female and thus was to become a girl, a wife, a mother, and a grandmother, respectful of the tradition and custom of subsuming her essence to the service of procreation and instinctive and dutiful nurture.

She had learned to find her happiness and her joys in the growing of seeds sown in her own fortunate fertility. She had been taught that she ought not ask for more, nor should the yearning girl children she bore to the same vocation of selfless service and sacrifice.

For the patriarchs had spoken to their offspring, defined duty, marked out morality, and prescribed the parameters of pleasure, purpose, and pride.

For what is a sepia-tinted drawing to a life, a family of lives, to the safeguarding of fragile lines of progeny and the generation of generations.

And yet the soft heart one can sense in the living eyes captured in this beautiful drawing seems to tremble, almost palpably, still.

Hemingway said that people of courage can be destroyed but not defeated. As the girl in the passage above evolved into a Seasoned Woman, many of her dreams were destroyed.

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