Morning sky - pearl-grey, an opal horizon against which bare, black branches lattice, lace-like, like fish-net stockings.
I used to think I was robust, a tomboy you can see it in the photograph. I was Robin Hood never Maid Marion, Buffalo Bill not Annie Oakley, the Prince not Cinderella. Now, I can look back and realise I was actually quite fragile, not made of stern-stuff but a broken reed, probably more like Beth than Joe in 'Little Women'. My hero was Katherine Hepburn when in reality it might have been better to have been Virginia Woolf. Unlike Ginny tho' at the last moment something snatched me back from the brink. Funnily enough my Mum said that after I was born she took me to see her Grandmother by that time very old and wizened. When she was told my name she apparently said, "Oh..don't call her that, they'll call her Ginny!".
To my knowledge throughout my sixty-one years not one person has ever called me Ginny!
Funny that.
5 comments:
That's an interesting fact from your life, I never imagined that you were a tomboy, even though you see now that you were fragile.
"I was Robin Hood never Maid Marion, Buffalo Bill not Annie Oakley, the Prince not Cinderella. "
Makes two of us. We both came out of the 1950's. Part of that two decades of cultural gnashing of gears when things were changing for women, and not always for the better. And a double whammy from the gene pool here with depression on one side of the family and alcoholism on the other. I can't help wondering what I would have been like if I was born 10 years later, or better still, 20 years later.
The sky looks much like ours here today. I thought 'leaden' was a good word for ours.
Perhaps your strength is in recognizing your fragility? Or in many other hidden things, like the magical way in which you write, even about a gray morning.
I love your description of the morning sky "an opal horizon against which bare, black branches lattice"... gorgeous words!
I am a Jane as well; I was always called Ginny by my parents, and sometimes by my husband too :-)
The Time Sculptor
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