Skip to main content

WIDOW'S WALK IS PUBLISHED

I  Have Always Been With You
Artist: Shiloh Sophia
A sense of loss followed me like a shadow all my life. Real loss. Actual dead and gone kind of loss. Maybe it’s like that for everyone; who can know unless they tell you? From early childhood I knew I’d have to do something about this haunting or it would eat me up. There’s an old 16 mm film of me as a three-year-old circling the tiny grave of a bird that died--a tiny yellow chicken that my neighbor Minnie Osborn gave me from her coop. I’m performing a kind of ritual, like a priest circling the altar with incense. You can see the tears on my cheeks.
As life goes on we lose a lot of who and what we love, those people and things that make us what we are. Maybe every experience of love continues as a part of us. Maybe we are made of the bits and pieces of the content of every moment we’ve lived--all we’ve seen and heard and touched and smelled, every gaze, embrace, word, sound. Every tree we’ve leaned against has blessed us. Every breeze. Do you ever sit in your favorite chair remembering the look in the eyes of someone you loved for a lifetime or an instant just before they turned and walked away? Or closed their eyes that last time?
I tried a lot of things to preserve myself from these turnings, and later to save myself from their hauntings. In youth I tried holding tight to what I loved. Then I tried isolation. I tried dissolving into nature and when that was not enough I tried imagination. Then I turned to religion with all its symbols, rituals, and stories--with its gods. I tried varieties of those. I read thousands of books, and wrote a few myself. I gazed into many, many eyes.
Some were the eyes husbands dying. I was widowed twice. Two amazing men who loved me and I loved. Grief over the turnings in life can overwhelm. There are things no one tells a widow: secrets of the body, soul and spirit that are just too intimate to share. There are memoirs anyway--some raw and aching, not quite getting deep enough for the second turning. The re-turning to a new self always there but never before quite seen . I thought I’d write a memoir of each husband, but the story wasn’t so much about the husband as about the widow struggling in my soul. She couldn’t be accessed in memory. Only the spiritual leap to the edge of being, the novel with its daring kind of truth that transcends fact could spin the story into words.
One day I heard her voice deep, deep in me, and I put my fingers on the keys. She said:
“I woke alone, thinking nothing had happened, thinking the green curtains an ocean as they waved, forgetting where I was and why and with whom I might be living—a stranger I imagined I knew but never knew, pretending then, pretending now, constructing our reality on a breath, on a wave, and believing it...”
And the adventure of the WIDOW’S WALK had begun.

Order from Amazon.com


Comments

  1. Do you have copies at your home? Would you mind meeting and bringing a copy for me?
    Happy New Year! Beate

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

WomanChrist: The 30th Anniversary Edition

A few weeks after my novel, Widow's Walk,  was released I was visiting with my neighbor, Cecile. She was c urious  about one of my first published books, WomanChrist, and asked if I had a copy. I did. It was a second-hand Amazon.com copy, rather battered, with a sticky-note inside the cover that read:   “Cheryl--yes, this book is Really weird! (I had no idea when I bought it 😊 ) But bear with it—she has a lot of good ideas about being a woman today while also being Religious. Hope you enjoy it— (it’s not just to skip around and browse through)!!” Cecile might get a laugh out of that, I thought. Her reaction after reading the book was, “This is your best book! It’s so current. How could you have written this all those years ago? It’s actually prophetic.” She was the first one who told me to republish it. It had been written on my very first computer, more like a glorified typewriter and neither DOS-based nor Windows-based. I had only the published book; if I intend

The Generosity of Readers

The light and shadow, solidity and wisp, Autumn. I had more brilliant pictures of Fall color more intense than any here since I arrived eighteen years ago. But this one captures best the complexity of my readers' comments and the effect they have had on my re-write of Widow's  Walk. Five talented and generous people have now read my first draft, and a few more are right in the middle of it. Already their comments are giving the narrative more depth and filling it in where I took too much for granted. I spend from three days to a week or more with each reader, returning to the narrative through their eyes, listening as deeply as is possible for me to their questions, suggestions, confusions, reactions. Each reader has his or her unique gift that motivated me to request their assistance, from personal experience with the flow and content in this novel, to a particularly accomplished sense of literary structure, to a creative ability with language, to a habit of reading contem