Abigail Adams famously referred to Patience Wright as “the queen of sluts.” Wright was somewhat famously irreverent, even around British nobility.
(Aside: I’m reading A Founding Mother now, about Abigail Adams. Put “reading” in quotes since I’m only managing about 3 pages a day).
Short bio: Wright was an artist who made lifelike wax figures and acted as a spy for the American cause while living in London (she wrote her secret messages on paper scrolls and hid them in her wax figures).
Smithsonian article here. She fell out of favor in London after the Revolution, including with Franklin (partly because she encouraged him to support a British rebellion.)
More on Patience Wright, born in Bordentown, NJ. Sister, Rachel, also artistic.
Jumping to Sarah Wentworth Morton. Her husband’s father owned an establishment called The White Horse Tavern, located within the red circle on the map below.
Most subsequent sources that I’ve read assume that the incorrect attribution of The Power of Sympathy is the one to her. Most people I’ve seen believe Wm Hill Brown is the author. I’ve read most of it.
This is where Sarah Morton’s father operated his business — on Merchant’s Row. Either he or her grandfather or both were slave traders. Need to clarify.
Since Boston was a much much smaller landmass back then, there were many fewer wharves.
TL,DR: the pantheon is fucking up by letting my son die and DJT live.
Ariadne. Where are you? I’m lost. Or is your thread–cheat only for male warriors with an agenda?
Eros? Have you lost your mind? Every memory of my departed son is saturated with love, I mean grief, I mean love.
Diana, could you please get it together and take down the orange beast who threatens the well-being of all? No need to offer his head on a platter, just slay the fucker. One arrow. Please.
Persephone! I saw you there at the edge of the field of summer, disappearing in one fell tug. Hades must’ve grabbed you by the ankles. I wonder does the violent descent get easier with practice?
Does love, I mean grief, I mean love, get easier with practice? And what even is practice? It’s temporal. It’s repetition across time.
All practice leads to death.
Chronos. Have you anything to say about the merciless rigors of time? You say you’re neutral but we all know you pal around with the Grim Reaper.
Why is that bloviated menace still alive while my handsome son with the gracious smile is not?
Maybe stumbling clueless through the labyrinth is the better way to go – every bruise informing the next direction. Go left! Bump. No, go right!
If Hades can steal a youthful girl for a season of rape, why can’t he kidnap an 80-year-old man and dish him some of his own medicine and by his own medicine I mean, of course, rape?
I thought you gods were into retribution, just and unjust punishments, and hungry sexual predation.
Just ask Leda.
I swept dead leaves from the curb in preparation of this week’s storm. Heavy rain carries debris from the roadside and deposits it on the storm drain down the street. The innocent flow of water down the hill will create a lake if it’s clogged and if there’s a lake, there’s a good chance water will seep into our basement.
Some storms you can prepare for. Others, merely witness.
To be present while one’s child, craftily and in mute despair, marches to his own self-inflicted death is a torture that I wish on no one.
Well, maybe one someone, except that sick someone is so very without heart, I’m not sure that if his namesake offed himself he’d even care. I mean, the fat turd didn’t even attend the kid’s wedding.
Penelope wove and undid and wove and undid, sitting at the loom of worried expectation. She didn’t know if Odysseus, her somewhat scurrilous, conceited husband, would return.
When you read the epic poem knowing the outcome, the waiting seems trivial. We forget: she did not know.
Same with all those movies set in the early 40’s in France and England with a neighboring monster on a eugenic rampage. They did not know who would emerge the victor.
We did not know our son had bought a gun. We did not know he would really end his life. We worried and listened to the wind. We offered words of hope, delivered plates of apple slices with cinnamon.
He was having none of it. If he was Theseus, he would’ve run with unerring accuracy right into the maw of the monster. Go right! Yes, now go left!
That monster had been dogging him for years.
Sweeping up dead leaves is one thing, offering pumpkin bread and hugs to a high school friend of your dead son is another.
“We were a lot of us desperate,” he tells me. He tells me, “I went to Denver and I called and I called and he didn’t answer.”
This young man, now the age that my dead son will forever be, is getting married next year and even though I’ve only just met him, I want to be invited.
All the passages now foreclosed to our second born.
How do you even name your new circumstance? “Raised two boys. One of California, one formerly of Colorado.” That’s one new bio. That damn word count!
When the rain gets heavy this weekend, I will pray for my boy. Pray that he rests in the shelter of his own expanded self. Pray that the suffering he so doggedly encountered in life, has fallen away, leaving him pure essence, pure intelligence, pure heart.
America is dying by suicide too by the way.
So go ahead, put our dear leader’s name on the Ford Theater and then maybe by some mojo or other, he’ll share Lincoln’s demise. Can I even say that here or will some Palantir search engine find me and take me down?
Ask me if I care, Athena, but perhaps lend me your shield.
even when the rubber bands drive me nuts, snapping and twisting the wrong way.
I’m okay
when I forget to change into my crap sneakers before dyeing and drip dye on my feet, turning some of my toes blue.
Seriously, who cares?
When my chest hurts remembering the suit that Danny dropped off to be tailored and then never picked up
because he died, I’m okay.
When I recall how strenuously we hoped that dropping off a suit to be tailored meant he wanted to live, grief grabs my throat and gives it a squeeze, but I think
I’m okay.
I’m still breathing aren’t I? Even if it hurts to breathe, I’m still breathing.
(It’s still there, I think, Danny’s suit, at that store in Boulder).
When I’m torn up trying to compose a eulogy — wondering how you sum up a person? — wondering how to introduce the adult son to folks who only knew him as a child or teen — as hard as it is, I’m okay.
What I share to others will be okay and when the time comes if I can’t get through it, that’ll be okay too.
I don’t want to cook. For days now. Even though food usually offers grounding movements, decisions, anticipations, all driven by a healthy hunger
I’m okay.
When I couldn’t focus on pricing for lenses at the eye doctor on Friday I left, knowing it was okay,
knowing I didn’t have to tell him why.
When I cry reading a text from one of Danny’s friends out loud, I’m okay. They love him too.
They love him too.
When I go to bed, exhausted but unwilling to surrender to the night, I’ll manage. I’ll read a little longer.
I feed the birds I walk in the rain I Windex the glass I forget my toast in the toaster I get dressed I wear a necklace with navy blue beads I wonder where you are I look at the scattering of dogwood blossoms on the ground and think of you, dead We walk through the playground where you went to elementary school
You were alive My umbrella is red My necklace is blue My heart is broken Cliches cluster inside my aching throat Those dogwood flowers shone pearly white, edges tinged with pink not long ago. Not long ago you were staring at a screen, face lit up — gaming? Or maybe researching where to buy ammunition for a 9mm gun The dogwood blossoms rot. You are ashes
Muscle, bone, skin incinerated
I cook my strawberries I buy local lettuce You are gone. Gone It’s almost time for lunch Lentils and rice Rice already cooked, lentils in a bag. You are well and truly gone Not every meal has to be from scratch.
In making you, our bodies traded genetic material. Some of me was in you and some of you is still in me. How do I think about this?
We pile up stuff We fill the trunk We drop boxes off The weight of our belongings. So little of it holds meaning now, if it ever did. I need a mug, my pillows, baskets of fabric, pins and thread, fans, a mirror or two, a few favorite paintings, my electric toothbrush. Some notebooks. How little really!
What you needed was out of reach, beyond you, or so you thought. A life rendered impossible by a failure of imagination is one way to look at it.
I wish you could have stayed. I wish you were here. I wish you could have stayed.
Feathers? A picture falling off a shelf. That one dream. It’s not enough.
At my sister’s Salem apartment
I know you’re at peace. At rest. That’s something. That gives me peace too.
My thumb hurts. My eyes are tired. Another day comes to an end.
Yesterday’s collage: Fall will arrive without you
PS Readers — forgive the repetitive nature of how I am processing the loss of Danny. I give myself permission to bore you, to repeat myself, to hammer the same words home over and over as I try to make sense of what makes no sense.
Often before a writing workshop, I’ll pull a Tarot card for each participant. Sometimes I’ll jot down some thoughts — usually in service of identifying a prompt but sometimes just to get the day’s flavor.
In my drafts folder, I found this old post of card responses. They read like a weird poem, but also constitute a fabulous list of writing prompts. Help yourself!
November 11 cards
They couldn’t pay her enough
How his cheapness showed
It was worth every penny
Love is blind, but so is Justice
Where is fairness?
The indecision threatened to pull her under. Riptide.
Only time alone in a cave would help
The blood along the wound clotted now
Scars as evidence
The knives clattered to the floor
Infinity is infinity one way or the other and also from the side
