Stillwater

Growing up, I was only aware of what I did not want from life. I was not a happy kid for dozens of reasons, and adult life just seemed like an endless miserable extension of childhood, getting up and going to work in the dark and coming home drained and exhausted and watching dull sitcoms and then to bed, lather rinse repeat forever.

You could go and live in a city where it stunk and was full of people and busy and full of cars or you could live in the country and die of boredom and get eaten by a bear. You could be an astronaut - or so we were told by our optimistic young hippy teachers, although none of us believed them - you could be an astronaut and land on the moon, but you still couldn't escape it, although I didn't know what it was, could not articulate what this pressing horror was that made life seem so endless and unbearable.


I read a lot. A LOT. I read several books a week now and look back in astonishment over how much I read then in my attempts to find some shelter, something. I read The Secret Garden many times and each time would feel the same sort of sobbing bewilderment - what was it that I wanted? what moved me so much? I knew from personal experience even then that I HATED gardening and was rather indifferent to flowers, so it wasn't that.


And then this book happened into my hands:

It was as though a sudden radiant lightswitch was turned on, illuminating everything. She wrote about how they celebrated St. Nicholas's Day and made paper cornucopias full of homemade fudge for the tree and put on marionette shows and it occurred to me, all at once, that this was how I wanted my life to be, like a road sign suddenly appearing in the fog.

I could have a dollhouse in my kitchen, which thrilled me deeply when I was a child but which I've now recovered from, mostly. I could mark on my wall when I made my first pitcher of lemonade every year. I could have little girls in dresses and sturdy little boys, all getting into the cookie jar which would always, always be full of cookies. I could make cakes on Midsummer's Eve and float them lit with candles down the river on a raft, although I have yet to own a river. I could wear nothing but vintage dresses and aprons for the rest of my life, if I liked. I could live fully and radiantly within my faith. I could have geese that would flock picturesquely around me, if I didn't truly loathe geese not just as a species but as INDIVIDUALS. I could do WHAT I LIKED with my life, live how I wanted, and suddenly I had the map to where my happiness might be.

Now that I'm in my mid-30s, many of the women I know are beginning a type of quiet panic about the nearly daily loss of hotness that we're currently experiencing, the slow slide into middle age. Some of them are giving up already, retreating bitterly into elastic waist pants and sexless haircuts. Some of them are doing Pilates 24 hours a day and talking about getting their boobs lifted and their eyes done and spend hours every month making sure that their hair is completely ungrey and talking rather desperately about their desires to be desirable to their son's future teenaged friends. Which is just nasty, really.

I remember being a teenager and reading with deep fascination about Tasha Tudor in Victoria magazine - she was SO OLD! We rarely see very, very old people - well, unless you're in my family and then I had old people by the bushel, back then - but you rarely see very old people in magazines, and you never see them so proud, and so - I realized with a shock - beautiful. There was nothing to fear in the end of youth, nothing to be dreaded.

"It's wonderful to grow old," Tasha Tudor said in an interview. " You can get away with murder. Everyone takes great care of you. And they're afraid of offending you. You can say the most outrageous things and get away with it. I fully believe old age is one of the most delightful periods of my life."

And yesterday, at 92, Tasha Tudor died in her own bed, surrounded by her children and grand-children, having lived her life wholeheartedly and with great joy. I owe everything in my life to her.

(If you've never heard of Tasha Tudor before, she was a beloved children's book author and illustrator who lived a VERY unusual life. A Is For Annabelle and A Time To Keep are two lovely books to start with.)