Love Letter From A Broad : Shout it out Loud Sisters!

"As a woman I have no country.  

As a woman my country is the whole world." 

 - Virginia Woolf

No one walks alone.  Our lives are handmade by the many.  Last week, the air smelled just like springtime in Austin, Texas, my home for over twenty years.  I wanted to get into the car and drive home, but there is no more home for me there.  The clubhouse my son and his grandfather built together, where my son played for hours with neighborhood friends, where my daughter later held tea parties, and where I eventually stored my gardening tools, is being used by a cute four year old named Grant, the son of the new owners.  

My raised beds, filled with the most sublime soil that anyone has every touched, were filled with tomatoes, squash, corn, radishes, and carrots, that I planted before I listed my home for sale. Enthusiastic to learn the ways of farming, the new owners asked me for advise.  A neighbor tells me that the dirt is barren, no blossoms and no bees are happily using those beds.  My flowers are still thriving, and that is a credit to a higher power, the one who designed particular plants for particular lands.  The dry creek bed, that serves as the walk to the once upon time this was my house front door, receives footsteps regularly.  The new owners are hipsters wanting to return to the land - a corner suburban lot turned into a certified nature habitat - where the smell of pot fills the air more readily than the perfume of compost!  Life is an amazing ride!


I miss my home, the smell of my children, the color of the Austin skyline after a storm, and I miss having gardens.  My love of nature, inherited from my father, must wait a season longer, as I must wait for my new home in Mexico to be remodeled.  In the meantime, I am grateful for the loving friend who gave me four earthy pots so that I can plant herbs, and for my village dump, though an eyesore, for not burying a wonderfully worn giant pot.  I am grateful to the friend that wanted to explore this new life with me, for being fearless in our adventures, it brought us to a nestled nursery where I unearthed another ancient pot.  I am blessed by a new neighbor, whose father raised Yucatan stingless honeybees, and her willingness to share what has been hers alone for eighty years. 

This is your opportunity to acknowledge the women and men  who have inspired you to dream, had you laughing so hard that your wine was coming out your nose, and taught you that love could be boundless. 

What This Broad Loves About You

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The Power of Words : Affirming Intention & Context

"This is the oppressor's language // yet I need it to talk to you,..."

Adrienne Rich, American Poet, The Will to Change

A petite woman with a Dallas accent, and the alter ego of Dolly Parton, walked into my first graduate school course, and shouted, "Get out of my face Mother F**ker!"  Yeah, it was shocking, and that was Doris Arrington's intent.  Doris was the department chair.  She had a way of making every one of her words count.  There was no splitting hairs over her words' intentions.

This particular sentence began a discourse in preparation for ways our future clients may choose to distance us, and themselves from the counseling process.  My fellow classmate, and carpool buddy, Anna Hiscox, could not stop laughing our entire trip back home. As a New York Bronx native, this kind of language coming from a tiny blond, and very white woman, was enough to split Anna's gut.  We began to imagine Doris in a variety of scenarios, like her observing a fine specimen of a man - "He is one fine Mother F**ker!".  Or perhaps she would have to fend off advances by a drunk in the subway - "Don't f**k with me Mother F**ker!".  At any rate, we could barely control ourselves, and it forever changed the way we perceived Doris.

Living abroad, is living out of context.  For many of us, living without the full command of the language of our adopted country, is living in silence.  Many of us can pick-up the general intention of the native speaker, say for example if you are ordering a meal.  Yet, in a more complex social situations, being without words, having little to no command of the language, makes true living less rich, and at times, intimidating.  

Four years ago, when I first began investigating the state where I am now living, I was verbally accosted by a couple of very drunk men, at a very early hour.  At 6:30 a.m., heading into the village center to catch a bus into the city, I hear the stumbling and mumblings of a person.  Keeping a steady pace, I turn around to see the two coming out of a local beer store.  One of them shouts, "Hey whore, come give me a kiss", while his partner lets out a lasciviously laugh that lands him face down on the sand road.  At that moment, in a fearful state, all I can bring to mind is a line from a Spanish language soap opera.  I whirl around with the might of a freight engine, and shout, "Soy su segunda madre, asshole!", which means, "I am your second mother, asshole!"  The drunk standing, stops dead in his tracks, sort of, and with a warble in in voice, says, in English,  "I'm sorry Lady."

A few years later, I'm retelling this story to an expatriate man in my adopted village, who has less command of the language than I do.  After I repeat, in Spanish, the words the drunk initially spoke to me, this man says, "I don't believe you, but go on."  Of course, I'm not going to continue with the story, but I do want to know what it is he does not believe.  "What is the word for bridge?"  To fully comprehend this portion of the tale, you have to know that the offensive word, "whore", begins with the letter "P" and that word I am being asked to say, "bridge", also begins with the letter "P".  I reply, "I assure you, he was not calling me a bridge."

It's all about the context.

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