Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun

Self-portrait, 1800

Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (Marie Élisabeth Louise; 16 April 1755 – 30 March 1842) was a French painter, and is recognized as the most important female painter of the 18th century. Her style is generally considered Rococo and shows interest in the subject of neoclassical painting. Vigée Le Brun cannot be considered a pure Neoclassist, however, in that she creates mostly portraits in Neoclassical dress rather than the History painting. In her choice of color and style while serving as the portrait painter to Marie Antoinette, Vigée Le Brun is purely Rococo.

Early life

Born in Paris on 16 April 1755, Marie-Louise-Élisabeth Vigée was the daughter of a portraitist and fan painter, Louis Vigée, from whom she received her first instruction. Her mother was a hairdresser.[1] She was sent to live with relatives in Épernon until the age of 6 when she entered a convent where she remained for five years. Her father died when she was 12 years old following an infection from surgery to remove a fish bone lodged in his throat. In 1768, her mother married a wealthy jeweler, Jacques-Francois Le Sèvre and the family moved to the rue Saint-Honoré close to the Palais Royal. She was later patronised by the wealthy heiress Louise Marie Adélaïde de Bourbon, wife of Philippe Égalité. During this period Louise Élisabeth benefited by the advice of Gabriel François Doyen, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Joseph Vernet, and other masters of the period.

By the time she was in her early teens, Louise Élisabeth was painting portraits professionally. After her studio was seized, for practising without a license, she applied to the Académie de Saint Luc, which unwittingly exhibited her works in their Salon. On 25 October 1783, she was made a member of the Académie.

Madame Le Sèvre, 1772, fashionable hairdresser in Paris, 

née Jeanne Maissin (1728-1800), mother of 

Elisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun (Paris 1755-1842)

I'm going to interject my own comment here.  Of her works that are online, I could only find one portrait of an older woman (her mother) that was painted by Louise Élisabeth.  Much is made of her history as one of Marie Antoinette's favored artists. And comments are made that her likenesses aren't "good" (too flattering, is the consensus) - because her father died and she was largely self-taught.  No apparent appreciation of the fact that she was a highly successful and popular portrait painter without Daddy's help! 

And keep in mind that this woman was literally working during the "off with her head!" time period.  Clearly, one would be wise to flatter rich young women who are paying to have their portraits painted.  And frankly, I don't think she was overly flattering of Marie.  Actually, the young queen did much to help Louise Élisabeth.   But as history shows, the biggest threat to a painter much favored by the Queen of France was not from her patrons but the guillotine. 

Marie Antoinette

Marie Antoinette en chemise, portrait of the queen in a "muslin" dress, 

by Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun (1783). This controversial portrait was 

viewed by her critics to be improper for a queen.

On 7 August 1775 she married Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun, a painter and art dealer. (Her husband's great uncle was Charles Le Brun, first Director of the French Academy under Louis XIV.) Vigée Le Brun painted portraits of many of the nobility of the day and as her career blossomed, she was invited to the Palace of Versailles to paint Marie Antoinette. So pleased was the queen that during a period of six years, Vigée Le Brun would paint more than thirty portraits of the queen and her family, leading to her being commonly viewed as the official portraitist of Marie Antoinette. Whilst of benefit during the reign of the Bourbon royals, this label was to prove problematic later.

On 12 February 1780, Vigée Le Brun gave birth to a daughter, Jeanne Julie Louise, whom she called "Julie".

Self-portrait with her daughter Julie, 1786

In 1781 she and her husband toured Flanders and the Netherlands where seeing the works of the Flemish masters inspired her to try new techniques. There, she painted portraits of some of the nobility, including the Prince of Nassau.

On 31 May 1783, Vigée Le Brun was accepted as a member of France's Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. She submitted numerous portraits along with an allegorical history painting which she considered her morceau de réception—La Paix qui ramène l'Abondance (Peace Bringing Back Prosperity). The Academy did not place her work within an academic category of type of painting—history or portraiture.

Adélaïde Labille-Guiard also was admitted on the same day. The admission of Vigée Le Brun was opposed on the grounds that her husband was an art dealer, but eventually they were overruled by an order from Louis XVI because Marie Antoinette put considerable pressure on her husband on behalf of her painter. In 1789, she was succeeded as court painter to Marie Antoinette by Alexander Kucharsky.

French Revolution

After the arrest of the royal family during the French Revolution Vigée Le Brun fled France with her young daughter Julie. She lived and worked for some years in Italy, Austria, and Russia, where her experience in dealing with an aristocratic clientele was still useful. In Rome, her paintings met with great critical acclaim and she was elected to the Roman Accademia di San Luca.

In Russia, she was received by the nobility and painted numerous aristocrats including the last king of Poland Stanisław August Poniatowski and members of the family of Catherine the Great. Although the French aesthetic was widely admired in Russia there remained some cultural differences in what was deemed acceptable. Catherine was not initially happy with Vigée Le Brun's portrait of her granddaughters, Elena and Alexandra Pavlovna, due to the area of bare skin the short sleeved gowns revealed. In order to please the Empress, Vigée Le Brun added sleeves giving the work its characteristic look. This tactic seemed effective in pleasing Catherine as she agreed to sit herself for Vigée Le Brun (although Catherine died of a stroke before this work was due to begin).[2]

Alexandra and Elena Pavlovna, painted during Vigée Le Brun's time in St Petersburg.

While in Saint Petersburg, Vigée Le Brun was made a member of the Academy of Fine Arts of Saint Petersburg. Much to Vigée Le Brun's dismay, her daughter Julie married a Russian nobleman.[3]

After a sustained campaign by her ex-husband and other family members to have her name removed from the list of counter-revolutionary émigrés, Vigée Le Brun was finally able to return to France during the reign of Emperor Napoleon I. In spite of being no longer labeled as émigrée, her relationship with the new regime was never totally harmonious, as might be expected given that she was a strong royalist and the former portraitist of Marie Antoinette.

Much in demand by the élite of Europe, she visited England at the beginning of the 19th century and painted the portrait of several British notables including Lord Byron. In 1807 she traveled to Switzerland and was made an honorary member of the Société pour l'Avancement des Beaux-Arts of Geneva.

She published her memoirs in 1835 and 1837, which provide an interesting view of the training of artists at the end of the period dominated by royal academies. Her portrait of fellow neoclassical painter, Hubert Robert, is in Paris at Musée National du Louvre.

Still very active with her painting in her fifties, she purchased a house in Louveciennes, Île-de-France, and lived there until the house was seized by the Prussian Army during the war in 1814. She stayed in Paris until her death on 30 March 1842 when her body was taken back to Louveciennes and buried in the Cimetière de Louveciennes near her old home.

Her tombstone epitaph states "Ici, enfin, je repose…" (Here, at last, I rest…).

Vigée Le Brun left a legacy of 660 portraits and 200 landscapes. In addition to private collections, her works may be found at major museums, such as Hermitage Museum, London's National Gallery, in Europe and the United States.

References

1. ^ CyberPathways Art World
2. ^ Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun: the odyssey of an artist in an age of revolution/Gita May
3. ^ CyberPathways Art World

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
• Lebrun, Souvenirs, Paris, 1835–1837 (translated by Lionel Strachey, New York, 1903).

~~~~~~~~~

I'm not crazy about this mini-bio because it leaves so many questions unanswered for me. But I have to say, this was one strong, gutsy woman!  She made it out of France alive, worked and supported herself and her daughter - alone in foreign countries - for several years.  What happened to her mother?  And why the reference to an ex-husband, who helps get her off the list of counter-revolutionary émigrés, and  back into France?

Did he divorce her to save her life? Divorce was unheard of (if not impossible) in Catholic France until after the revolution.  And why did he stay and then campaign for her return?  It seems to me I'm going to be reading this woman's memoirs. Forget Marie Antoinette! As much as I found Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette (2006) fun and fascinating, as I said, I think there's quite a story about a strong woman lurking in this sketch.

Grief, The Great Yearning

From fellow Second Wind Author, Pat Bertram, a personal and beautiful meditation upon one of the toughest things about the Crone-Age, which is that Death becomes our constant companion. We open a newspaper and read the Obits, perhaps for the first time in our lives, and see the names of friends, family, and our own husbands and wives who have fallen into the past.


Connect with Pat at   http://www.secondwindpublishing.com/product_info.php?products_id=94

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Death came in the spring.

At the beginning of March 2010, the doctors said that Jeff, my life mate—my soul mate—had inoperable kidney cancer and that he had six months to live. He had only three weeks. We’d spent thirty-four years together, and suddenly I was alone, unprepared, and totally devastated. I couldn’t even begin to comprehend the wreckage of my life. It wasn’t just he who died but “we.” There was no more “us,” no more shared plans and dreams and private jokes. There was only me.

Other losses compounded the misery. I had to sort through the accumulation of decades, dismantle what was left of our life, move from our home. We bereft are counseled not to make major changes during the first year after a significant loss—one’s thinking processes become muddled, leaving one prey to faulty logic and rash decisions—but I needed to go stay with my father for a while. Although he was doing well by himself, he was 93 years old, and it wasn’t wise for him to continue living alone.

I relocated from cool mountain climes to the heat of a southwestern community. Lost, heartbroken, awash in tears, I walked for hours every day beneath the cloudless sky, finding what comfort I could in the simple activity. During one such walk, I turned down an unfamiliar city street, and followed it . . . into the desert.

I was stunned to find myself in a vast wilderness of rocky knolls, creosote bushes, cacti, rabbits, lizards, and snakes. I’d been to the area several times during my mother’s last few months, but I’d spent little time outside. I hated the heat, the constant glare of the sun, the harsh winds. After Jeff died, however, that bleak weather, that bleak terrain seemed to mirror my inner landscape. Wandering in the desert, crying in the wilderness, I tried to find meaning in all that had happened. I didn’t find it, of course. How can there be meaning in the painful, horrific death of a 63-year-old man? I didn’t find myself, either. It was too soon for me to move on, to abandon my grief. I felt as if I’d be negating him and the life we led.

What I did find was the peace of the moment.

Children, most of whom know little of death and the horrors of life, live in the moment because they can—it’s all they have. The bereft, who know too much about death and the horrors of life, live in the moment because they must—it’s the only way they can survive.

During the first year after Jeff’s death, I lived as a child—moment to moment, embracing my grief, trying not to think about the future because such thoughts brought panic about growing old alone, trying not to think about the past because such thoughts reminded me of all I had lost.

And so went the seasons of my soul. The spring of death gave way to the summer of grief, and grief flowed into the fall and winter of renewal.

As I struggled to get through that first year of grief, I wrote blog posts, letters to Jeff, journal entries, anything to help me stay in the moment, and afterward, I compiled the best of my grief writings into a book called Grief, The Great Yearning, which has been released by Second Wind Publishing. Our society seems to value cheerfulness at all costs, and I wanted to let people know that sometimes those costs are too high. It’s important to grieve but it’s also important to know you are not alone in your grief. Whatever you feel, others have felt. Whatever seemingly crazy thing you do to bring yourself comfort, others have done. And, as impossible as it is to imagine now, you will survive.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Great Yearning and four novels --- Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. All Bertram’s books are available both in print and in ebook format. You can get them online at Second Wind Publishing, Amazon, B&N and Smashwords.  At Smashwords, the books are available in all ebook formats including palm reading devices, and you can download the first 20-30% free!

Ethyl: 1976-1988

Her name was Ethyl—the perfect name for a battered redhead well past her prime but still up for adventure.

The year was 1986. I was a freshly minted journalism grad who had relied on Chicago public transportation to get from my apartment in Evanston to school, work and socializing in the city and never thought she’d need to drive again. But after I landed my dream job as a beat reporter at Chicago’s legendary City News Bureau, I knew I’d have to relinquish my CTA tokens for an ignition key. I needed a cheap, reliable beater, and fast.

The solution came from my high-school buddy Georgia and her motorhead husband Mike. The car in question was a 1976 Chevy Nova, orange, with well over 150,000 miles on her odometer. Georgia had driven the car for several years but was finally in a position to upgrade. Mike was constantly working on it and could vouch for its reliability. Asking price? $350. Done.

I’m not big on naming things, but just looking at the rust-scabby redhead with the torn black-and-white checked cloth upholstery evoked the name Ethyl—a play on words referring to both the old lead additive to gasoline and my high-school principal, Sister Ethel. She was loose-limbed and well broken in—the car, not the nun—with manual steering and a windshield that leaked around the edges in a heavy rain, giving the interior a distinctive musty smell.

Ethyl and I immediately started a drivers’ ed crash refresher with my father—a guy with a serious history behind the wheel (a novel in itself, involving both his activities as a wheelman for some nefarious West Side Chicago characters and the Bronze Star in World War II). In the two weeks before I started the job, the old man rode shotgun while I struggled with parallel parking, overcame my expressway phobia and practically wore out the little blue-and-white “Chicago Streets” book that listed all the city’s byways. By the time I started the job, I was as ready as I’d ever be.

City News was a baptism by fire for a suburban kid and reporting newbie, and Ethyl was the perfect accomplice to my adventures. She waited at the curb as I tailed Mayor Harold Washington and various Chicago pols and celebrities (Adlai Stevenson Jr., former Mayor Jane Byrne, Irv Kupcinet, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert) as a regular part of my rounds. She was a regular fixture in the parking lot of the old District 20 police headquarters at California and Pershing. In those pre-cell days, I used the phones to call bereaved families for comments on dead loved ones, checked with the coroner’s office for gory details, called in stories to persnickety editors, and got endless good-natured grief from Chicago’s Finest. She nervously waited on the street when I accidently got locked into a West Side community center after hours on a Saturday night. And I had to rescue her one day when she was towed from a downtown street. My efforts to free her from the auto pound in the labyrinthine bowels of lower Wacker took on the desperation of Dante in one of the Seven Circles.

In our free time, Ethyl transported me and my favorite drinking buddy Eileen to a myriad of locations—from Joe Danno’s fabled speakeasy Bucket O’ Suds, to the then-funky Higgins Tap, to the Sunset Inn on Cermak in Berwyn to the dive bar attached to Dino’s Pizzeria in Norwood Park.

Ethyl was as far from high maintenance as a gal could be. My old man and his buddy Lou were constantly tinkering with her, replacing her innards as they wore out with parts scavenged from their Sunday morning sojourns to Maxwell Street. As a result, she was the healthiest, if not most attractive beater on the streets.

But finally, inevitably, our days together drew to a close after Ethyl got a fatal transmission diagnosis and I got another job and was making enough to buy an almost-new Chevy Cavalier.

She was a fighter until the end. She was still running when my old man managed to sell her at a neighborhood gas station for $350—the same price I’d paid for her two years earlier.

Requiescat in pace, old girl.

Researching Dogs

While writing historical stories, I have researched a lot of topics, including dogs. Except for a brief mention of bloodhounds, my Civil War trilogy has no dogs. For a dog lover like me that's a tough topic to omit, but I'm also not the sort of writer who will place something into a story simply because I like it. I also aspire to be realistic in my animal portrayal. For instance, I'm a bird lover too, and it annoys me to no end to see parrots shown as nothing more than a talking machine that conveniently says the right thing to help solve a plot.

After finishing my trilogy, I turned to writing a Civil War ghost story Whispers from the Grave. For the first time, I wrote in present day with the past influencing the modern characters. A dog also fit into my plot. I have Belgian sheepdogs, and a Belgian ideally suited what I had in mind. That made writing the story much easier because I didn't need to research the breed. I called my literary Belgian "Saber" to fit the Civil War themed plot.

For some odd reason, the Belgian in my story took on the same characteristics as my own dog Magic. By the time I began writing the sequel, Magic had died of cancer, and I had my own Saber, named after the Belgian in the book. In Whispers Through Time, Saber's mannerisms shifted a little to be more like his counterpart in real life.

One of the characters in the past also had a dog that looked a lot like the modern dog in the story. I couldn't call him a Belgian because the breed didn't exist during the Civil War, but black shepherd looking dogs have been around for a long time. As a matter of fact, I saw the spitting image of a dog Belgian fanciers would call "old-style" in a Civil War photo.

In my most recent release, The Dreaming, I switched to the 17^th century. In Virginia, the tribal tidewater Natives, commonly referred to as the Powhatan, had hunting dogs that appeared like a cross between a hound and a wolf. As a group of people, they didn't bury animals, nor keep dogs as pets. But in at least one instance, a dog was found buried with an elderly woman. It was placed in a sleeping position on top of the woman's feet. The dog's skeleton showed no sign of trauma, so it's doubtful it was buried as part of a ritual. Instead, the gesture most likely speaks volumes as to how that particular dog was regarded by that individual woman.

 The 17^th-century English had mastiffs, greyhounds, and generic looking spaniels. The dreaming in my book is a cunning woman's (healers of the time period) shamanic journey, and the cunning folk had familiar spirits. Common familiar spirits of the time were hares, cats, toads, and of course, dogs. I discovered my cunning woman's familiar spirit after I had read about John Smith giving the paramount chief Powhatan a white greyhound as a gift.

Ironically, I have read on some greyhound sites that the breed didn't arrive in North America until a much later date. While John Smith wasn't always truthful in his writings, I doubt the subject of a greyhound making the journey to Virginia would be noteworthy enough to embellish.

My next work? Well, since it's a sequel to The Dreaming, the greyhound will definitely reappear. I'm also working on a crow spirit, and I've already discovered they are magnificent birds.

Kim Murphy
www.KimMurphy.net

CroneVintage

A local Retreat Centre recently hosted a Spring Clean-up Day. In exchange for good food and good company we gathered from our scattered communities to rake, paint, and clean windows. Most of the volunteers were of Crone Vintage, both women and men, and I wondered whether our small contributions would make a visible difference.

When we gathered for lunch there was rich, good natured banter about ladders and missing rakes. The flavour of the conversation was respectful and nourishing. As others started returning to work a younger woman at our table began to share about a conflict she was having at home with her supervisor. It soon became apparent that a painful anger was simmering as her tone became bitter. As she started to apologize for her words a wise woman spoke up gently and assured her that anger was better out than swallowed, as it can turn toxic within.

There were other suggestions, all quite practical, on ways to use her anger to make some necessary changes. There was no doubt in my mind that the generous portions of advice came from personal experience painful in the past, but now a source of resilience having been filtered through the sieve of time.

Were the windows cleaner?

Were the flower beds neater?

More important? - the look of wonder on a young woman's face when she tasted the truth that anger can be a very tasty choice, when properly served.

The Timing is Everything

I love meeting people. The differences are wonderful to me. Teaching has helped me remain appreciative of people younger than myself – they do not shock or dismay me easily. ( I try to remind myself that I appear to them like an aging parent or even a grandmother. I don’t think I will ever see myself as older than they are, but I try.) So, I am drawn to their energy and the freshness of their vision.

In the past few years I have been meeting quite a few young farmers. I had never known or even imagined young farmers when I was their age. Farmers were beautifully gnarly old men who weren’t very interested in me or my concerns. But these are young, vibrant, community-minded farmers. They believe that organic, sustainable farming is the key to the future – politically as well as culturally. And I happen to think they are right.

I am not a vegetable grower by nature, but gardening is important to me. Watching seeds sprout and grow is witnessing transformation. Nurturing life is a responsibility. Kneeling in the sun to plant or weed sometimes feels like a prayer. The earth is sacred – a connection with eternity. My love of gardening is an inheritance.

I learned to appreciate plants while weeding, mowing, planting, and weeding my Mother’s garden. That was a 90-foot bed that was terraced into the hill across the width of our back yard. There were probably 40 flower species minimum in that bed. The yard was also planted with at least 20 tree species – several of them hybrids, gifts of an amateur nursery-man and friend. My Mother painted with flowers. My Father sculpted with pruners.

My Mother’s father staked out a corner of our backyard for sweet-corn and tomatoes. We have pictures of him in a big straw hat and denim overalls. My paternal Grandmother cultivated flowers, vines, bushes, trees, and an unknown quantity of vegetables. I never noticed the vegetables. The wisteria, forsythia, camellias, peonies, and (my favorites) Johnny Jump-Ups filled my eyes with every visit. Her yard was a double-length city plot, maybe 15 yards wide, filled to bursting.

Grandma’s family moved to Lancaster from a farm in Eden Township around 1904. ( I know, they left a farm in Eden.) We have a picture of my Grandmother standing at the end of the farm lane when she was 3 or 4 years old. She is dressed in what appears to be a nightgown and her bare feet are covered with dust. I would like to know where that farm was. I just want to stand on that piece of family history and study an old tree or hedgerow. The physical connection would be nice. It isn’t necessary, but it really would be nice.

When I work in my garden or think of that old family farm, I feel a deep connection with the past. I think of the farmers who settled America. They had departed from a continent farmed by Anglo-Saxon, after Celtic, after Neolithic men and women of the old and ancient past. And before them there was Abel, the brother who wasn’t mentioned nearly as much as his brother – the murderer – in my Sunday Church School memories. Yet the rhythm of our lives is still the timing of planting, harvesting, and resting with the seasonal cultivation of our landscape. The rhythm of our souls follows the ancient mythologies of a sacred landscape – nature personified and worshipped as holy.

And now I am thinking of going back to school to study horticulture. I meant to slow down in the garden. I was going to plant fewer flowers and more bushes this year. Let the mint and bergamot spread to fill in more space, seed the bed by the shed with grass. But recently I heard “ever the Mother, birthing and tending,” while trying to stand in the waning quarter of life’s circle. The Mother‘s timing is unexpected – but that is her realm of influence. The timing is everything, after all.

"Enchanted April"

April 7th was my 50th birthday. I thought this was great - my name came up on the Crone calendar on the Friday before. So I was going to post something poetic or profound. Or blog about the significant crones in my life (except I'm still kicking and groaning about the term - "crone" and my mind kept going blank about the profound and wise revelations passed down to me by my mother and paternal grandmother. . . Has my mind already gone into decline? Or hadn't they ever really imparted the wisdom of the ages to me . . .?!)

Anyway, I did have a lovely, very low key kind of day. My sister took Juliet and my daughter and I out for lunch. (I was going to say out 'to' lunch and realized we were back to the mind in decline motif . . . Yes it's there, but let's just not make it an issue . . .).

The evening before, my big sis came to my house and we had another fun evening while she baked me a "weird but eatable" cake as I've been on a no wheat, gluten, or sugar diet for a few years now.

So the three of us sat around my kitchen table on Saturday afternoon and ate the weird but still edible chocolate cake and had a few good laughs. Nothing profound and no real revelations. But just right. Comforting, ordinary and hopeful. Exactly what I needed right now, as I face the next half of my life.

Later that evening, as I came back to the computer to try and pound something out to post here, my eye was caught by a pile of DVDs and videos stacked beside my night stand. "Enchanted April" is my feel-good movie. There it was, waiting for me.

When I was in college and up until my Katie was born, my feel-better movie was "Meet me in St. Louis." But now the challenges of loving and accepting your parents and siblings, as well as getting the boy next door to notice and marry you were not the issues that mattered. Post baby it was figuring out how to deal with your hum-drum, ordinary married life and how to feel loved and valuable in that role. Granted I got a divorce between the birth of my daughter and now. But "Enchanted April" has never failed to work its magic for me and I need to make time to watch it, again.

Imagine it's a cold, wet March. Oh, right. We had one of those. Anyway, two middle-aged women feel trapped in their lives in post World War I London. "Enchanted April" is about what happens when these ladies break out of their routine and escape to Italy for a holiday.

Lottie (on the right) is timid, well meaning and married to a stingy, pompous lawyer with social-climbing ambitions. Rose (left) spends her time on church charity work and pretends not to mind that her husband leads a life separate from hers, writing racy novels under a pseudonym.

They are bored, lonely and an ad in the Times that promises "Wisteria and sunshine" captures Lottie's attention and her imagination.

Lottie's husband is incensed that she's spending money and not only did she not consult him about her plans, but how dare she! she's not taking him with her! Sound familiar? Or maybe your significant other would react like Rose's husband? Have a nice time, dear, I'm going to be away that month, anyway . . . Complete indifference.

I've read my share of movie reviews that all agree that this movie is about the way that this corner of paradise transforms the lives of four unhappy women. (In order to afford this wild jaunt they find two other "lost" females to take along with them. I won't talk about them because I don't want to give too much away. I'm hoping you'll watch this and enjoy it as much as I do.

And yes, it's a wild jaunt if you've always done what you've been told to do. Not wild in a Thelma and Louise kind of way. Don't go there. We're talking Merchant-Ivory and Masterpiece Classic, Pre-Downton Abbey kind of jaunts. Got it?)

Well, yes, Italy transforms them in a way. Nature can be transforming. Sunshine, wisteria, blue skies, masses of colorful flowers and turquoise water after a boring, cold, grey winter will do that for you. Lots of swimming, picnics, napping and lazing around in hammocks kind of therapy.

But I have to argue that their lives aren't truly transformed. When their month is over, they will go back to being wives living in London. No one is getting a divorce and there are no wild revelations or scandals.

I think this movie is about the power of friendship. Getting in touch with yourself and finding the value in who and what you are right now. These women are changed from their month in paradise - but not because they are different or better but this experience allows them to see what special,worthwhile and valuable women they were all along.

And that's exactly the kind of spring soul cleansing I need right now. And the kind of just-right 50th birthday celebration I've been having.

~

No More Pennies from Heaven...

No More Pennies from Heaven...

Just this week, on the occasion of my 45th birthday, I posted on Facebook that life is short and precious, and therefore one needs to seize every opportunity to slide, glide, bounce or roll obnoxiously into cronehood. The example I used was that one should, for instance, indulge in the luxury of counting small increments of change out piece by piece at the grocery store checkout, thus holding up the entire line and thoroughly pissing the Rushy McRushsons behind one off...

And later this same week came the public announcement that Canada is discontinuing the penny! That's right, as of this autumn, 2012, the penny will be withdrawn from circulation, thus shattering my future geriatric dreams of plaguing instant gratification fiends with angst, annoyance, and grocery queue rage! How, how shall I ever become an agent of chaos now?

Plan B was to perch near the front of city buses after I am too grizzled to drive, tapping a skull-topped shaman stick on the floor and reeking of garlic and patchouli oil while muttering esoteric woids and phrases. Maybe even imitating Alice Cooper and randomly screeching, "WAKE UP! WAKE UP! WAKE UP! WAKE UP!" following several hours of companionable silence. And yet all this may be thwarted, too, if shamanism, like yoga, continues along its surefire path into the cultural mainstream. Little pink-spandex-wearing shamanistas in Nikes will doubtless sprout up on every city bus in the next 20 years, shaking designer rattles and pointing out every person who has a wayward dead guy attached to them. Sigh... what's a girl to do?

Ah well, I'm sure I'll think of something. In the meantime I shall content myself with placing my bare hand on the belly of Mother Earth and reminding her that we long for spring. There's delight in that. I'm as tired of the snain as stale Twinkies in my high school lunch bag.

I go neither gently nor gracefully into Cronehood... but I go in the knowledge that pink spandex sucks. It sucks now, and it will suck in 20 years. And by the Goddess, there's some comfort in that!

Rabbits Don't Lay Eggs

 

I’ve always wanted to come to the bottom of this particularly odd imagery which goes hand in hand with Easter. When I was little, back in the early fifties, I received an Easter basket, usually complete with a fluffy toy bunny. We had festive posters on the school room walls of cheerful rabbits carrying baskets of colored eggs.  Bunnies=Easter—that was simply how it was. Nothing to do with the awe-full Christian story of agony and resurrection, of course, but running in inexplicable tandem.

As I grew older, I became fascinated with mythology and with history. Following those tracks back to the  long ago place where they merge, I came upon a Saxon goddess named Eostre, whose arrival brought spring to the isles. Like others of her regenerative earth goddess kind, flowers sprang up where she walked.  Eggs are laid in spring, and so perhaps, I thought, the basket is actually a nest, containing eggs, and the eggs and new born rabbits and all the other creatures who begin their life cycles at this time have simply become conflated into a mash-up of imagery.

This satisfied me for a very long time, until this year, in fact, when, with input from British scholars, Philip and Stephanie Carr-Gomm, I think I’ve finally come to the bottom of the rabbit with the eggs conundrum.  Long ago, in England, before the Romans came, there were only “hares,” decidedly not the same animal as the smaller, “silly rabbit.” They were larger, wily relatives of the white Arctic Hare, thriving in the extensive, grazing-created grasslands of the Neolithic.  Hares do not sleep in burrows, but in “forms,” made by their neatly tucked up bodies in the long grass.  

A British bird, the lapwing, shares this habitat. She lays her eggs on the ground, like the American whippoorwill. She even does a similar “my wing is broken” routine to lead predators away from her eggs/chicks. Sometimes the lapwing makes use of a hare’s abandoned “form” for her eggs—and presto!

Ancient people saw the forms, sometimes containing the pretty speckled eggs of the lapwing, and a magical image was born. To put a cap on it, at least from any long-ago islander's point of view, both these animals belonged the earth goddess, Eostre, the sweet lady who brought fertility and flowers, so welcome after winter’s dead time.

It never ceases to amaze, what a very long time a good story can last.

--Juliet Waldron

 * From The Druid Animal Oracle

 http://www.amazon.com/Druid-Animal-Oracle-Philip-Carr-Gomm/dp/0671503006/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1332938208&sr=1-1

http://www.julietwaldron.com

 Image from:  celticawitch.wordpress.com

 

Excerpt from RED MAGIC

An excerpt from my latest "drawer baby."

As Christoph prepared for his journey to Vienna, Cat was inspired to ask to come. She didn't like the idea of him traveling with the wildly enamoured Josefa, who was, in fact, being sent into service at the stone mason’s home.

She didn't like the idea of him being easily able to visit the woman who'd written the cryptic letter. There was also the anticipated discomfort of being left alone on Heldenberg. These things loomed larger than any desire to see the great capital city.

However, the suspicion-evoking reply she was given was that he had too much business to attend to and that she'd be better right where she was.

"Besides," he'd added unkindly, "as soon as you opened your mouth in front of my Viennese friends, I'd be teased about having become a nursemaid, not a husband."

"You will be alone with Josefa and then you will visit Frau Ermler." The words came blurting out. "And, even if you are telling me the truth about them, there is‑‑" and here she almost blurted out "Konstanze", but managed to change it to "those other Viennese women of yours."

" Cat! I warn you; I'm nearly dead from this unhealthy abstinence, but I shall keep my promise to you, although there are times‑‑like now‑‑when I wonder why I bother."

"Well, go on then! Tell all the heifers I say they can have you. Start with Josefa. I don't care! Why should I?"

"Your mouth, little girl! Get out of here before I take you over my knee. I'm done talking. Scat! Scat!" Scowling and looking purposeful, he strode towards her, raising a hand as if she were Furst and he intended to cuff her for the high crime of scratching the chairs.

Cat took off, beating a hasty retreat to the stables. Star, as always, welcomed with a soft whicker and the moist touch of her velvet nose.

Burying her face against the warm smell of the sorrel's neck, Cat cried a little. For the thousandth time she asked herself: why did Wili die? Her sister would have unreservedly loved this man--this wicked man--who was probably going to Vienna to see a whole crew of mistresses…

For comfort, Cat did what she always did. She saddled up and rode into the forest, cantering along a trail that led up the mountain. As she rode ever higher, the trees shrank and shriveled, as if they'd come under an evil spell. Soon, she knew, they'd disappear, and she would be on the rock-strewn high meadows. She would ride straight across to the western cattle path. Then, in waning light, she'd follow that back down to the manor.

***

After a glorious gallop in the cold bright sun, Cat felt better, although still melancholy.

Was it, after all, entirely reasonable to expect a man to remain faithful to a wife who wasn't really a wife? I know exactly what Papa would say!

She felt a little hungry, for it was close to supper, but she was unwilling to go back to her troubles just yet. It was a beautiful warm afternoon, a mingling ofgold, brown and rust in the forests that spread out below. The sky over her head was blue. The view of Great Heldenberg and her companions was spectacular, even if the peaks were obscured.

There'd been clouds up on the mountain all day, a gray mass which moved as if it were alive, expanding and contracting across the strange lifeless zone of rock and castle‑sized boulder that shouldered the beige, late fall meadows. She’d often seen the peaks hidden in this strange shroud.

In the stables, Cat had heard tales about these clouds. They said they sometimes came down to blanket the upper pastures for days, leaving the herders and their animals in a situation where they hardly dared take a step. Hidden within it, wolves, trusting to their noses, came from the forest and carried off unlucky strays, or, sometimes, dogs or small children. After a time, Cat slowed Star to a trot. The sun was low and she didn't want to miss the cattle path. It was dangerous to do so because of the ravine which lay about a half kilometer beyond. She had turned slightly south and had just entered one of those depressions with which the mountain was pitted, when she felt a cold wet breath on the back of her neck

In an eye blink, the world she'd been moving through, the world of valley and mountain, of brilliant colors and rosy, waning sun, disappeared. Star snorted, half-reared and then stood stock still.

They were enveloped in fog. The air inside was cold and wet and queer smelling, like the exhalation of the ancient bog they’d been skirting. Stiffling a shudder, Caterina dismounted. "Come on, girl," she said to the mare, rubbing her sweaty neck. "Maybe it will go back up the mountain again. In the meantime, we'll walk."

Holding the reins, she began to move in a direction that felt like down. Surely, if they just kept going as they had been, they'd soon hit the cattle path. "If not," she whispered, "You and I will be spending a miserable night together."

Of course, being out in the weather was the least of her worries. Cat racked her brains, trying to orient herself, trying remember the location of the huts shared by the local herders. She walked on, staring at the ground and praying not to miss the worn manured path the cattle made.

Fog poured around them like a river. Sometimes she could see a few yards ahead, sometimes she couldn't even see her feet. She hoped to keep the high meadows on her left, but the grass—when she could see it--seemed sparser.

Was she actually going back up the mountain? It was impossible to tell. Worse, she kept hearing strange sounds, a smothered wailing.

Shepherds? Or--a scouting wolf?

Fear gnawed at her. Without the sun, her sense of time seemed lost as well, and it soon seemed they’d been in the fog forever.

***

Star's ears pricked. Then, she reared. If Caterina hadn't had a good grasp on her bridle, she would have bolted, perhaps to break a leg or fall into the dreaded ravine.

"Whoa! Whoa! Star!" She threw her arms around the horse's neck. Clinging to the mane with all her strength, Cat desperately sought to find, somewhere in the turmoil, thoughts of calm to send.

The mare hopped from side to side, but Cat managed to hold on. At last Star stood, brown eyes rolling, nostrils quivering.

Looking around, Caterina strained to see what had so frightened the mare. As one of those intermittent breaks flowed past, it let in a rosy shaft which told of sunset. Close, in that light, she saw a familiar landmark: an ancient stone, roughly pillar shaped, perhaps eight feet tall. The shiny gray surface was covered with a moving carpet of sparkling droplets.

This pillar, she knew, sat near the herdsmen's huts, at the very upward end of the cattle path. With a chill, she realized that if she'd gone much farther, she would have ended near the awful ravine.

But--which way was down? She peered at the ground, but now her feet‑‑and everything else‑‑ disappeared again. Matching her spirits, everything turned into ghastly gray. Hoping not communicate her fear, Cat stroked Star's sweaty neck. At the same time, a long shiver coursed along her back.

What to do? Stay by the stone?

As she patted Star and wondered what to do next, a giant, a man of cloud, stepped out of that gray on gray. Water beaded his clothes, silvered his dark head and clung in beads to his flesh. Cat started, and Star reared again, nearly pulling her off her feet.

"Thank the Trinity, the Blessed Mother, and every demon on this mountain!"

The otherworldly man grabbed her horse’s reins.

“The peasants say this thing is a lodestone which keeps people from the ravine, but I never believed it 'till now."

"Christoph!" Cat had never been so glad to see anyone in her life...

The Night The Moon Sang

My husband, two little boys and I had driven 7 hours north through snow and ice from Connecticut to Maine to see his favorite cousin, Susan. She and her family were house-sitting in a large, lovely 18^th Century sea-captain’s home whose sloping lawn stretched down to an inlet of the sea.

The whole world was electric blue in the twilight when we piled out of the VW and waded the last few feet of their driveway. We stomped our feet to get rid of snow in the unheated  mud room. The kitchen was wood fire piecemeal hot, and Susan was belatedly beginning to work on a sink full of dishes. The family lived for the winter in a few downstairs rooms, and kept the pipes warm for the owners, who were off sailing in the tropics, very upscale and almost unimaginable to us. Sue’s husband was a potter, and while he made beautiful things, from dinner services to exotic display pieces, they were not exactly flush with cash. Beans or spaghetti and homemade bread were probably supper that night; I don’t remember.  It was Susan’s birthday, so she’d made a delicious, heavy, scratch chocolate cake, and I’d brought up Grandma Carol’s family famous “Cowboy Cookies.”

Night grew deeper. Finally, the kid cousins were extinguished, the adults all talked out. We retired to couches and sleeping bags. It was cold as the hinges of the 9^th Circle of Hell in any room not heated by a woodstove, an utterly clear, dark sky, starry night—at least, until the full moon got up over the tall black pines. Then it was like day out-of-doors, the moon balefully glittering down on those crisp, fresh pillows of snow. Susan and I had agreed to wake up later, because we’d consulted the almanac and learned that there was to be a lunar eclipse around 1 a.m. It was the night between our birthdays—mine would be tomorrow. We were a kindred pair of magical-mystery-tour women, both Pisces in the cusp, and not about to miss such a grand celestial side-show.

Exhausted from carbohydrates and driving , I’d fallen into a deep sleep, but in what seemed to be only a few minutes, I heard Susan urgently whispering.

“Juliet! Get up! Get Up!”

I sat up groggily. I could see her quite well with the moonlight pouring in the windows; it was amazingly bright.

“Get your boots and get downstairs—quick—quick--hurry!”

I did as she asked, for she sounded almost desperate, as if something was terribly wrong. Not only that, but she enforced the idea by rushing out of the room as soon as she finished speaking. I heard her feet going down the stairs rapidly. I got my boots on and followed, fast as I could. When I reached the kitchen, there she was, my coat in hand.

“Is it the eclipse? What’s up?”

“Come on—quick! You have to hear this! It’s crazy!”

I threw the coat on and followed her out the door. The first breath, as we stood on the back steps, froze my nose and made me choke. It must have been zero—or lower—outside. She gestured upward toward the moon, sailing high now over the forbidding, snow robed pines.

As we stood there, trembling, it acquired a halo of dull red as the eclipse began. The weighted branches of the pines randomly cracked. I had an odd feeling inside my head; I seemed to be looking up through water.  Next came a kind of hum, a low tone that reverberated through the scene, and then I heard sweet round tones, like a flute or an electronic instrument, ring across the sleeping, snow shrouded land and across the icy ocean at the bottom of the hill.

The veiled moon grew redder; the sweet little song repeated. Susan grabbed me by the shoulder.

“Do you hear it? Do you?”

“Yes! Yes! What on earth…?” I kept looking up and down and side to side to see if anything was different, but nothing else in this reality appeared unusual.

“Thank God!” Susan giggled. It was a beautiful melodic –and normal--sound. “I thought I’d completely lost it.”

Well, when the “singing” stopped, we went back inside and attempted to wake our respective spouses, but that was hopeless. Neither of them wanted to leave the warmth of their beds—besides, they knew that the two Pisces women were engaged in some weird, annoying folie à deux. 

Now if you are thinking about Close Encounters of the Third Kind, go right ahead.  Our brush with the other happened in 1973, four years before Spielberg’s blockbuster.  In fact, when I heard "the tones" in the movie, all the hair on the back of my neck stood straight up, as I remembered the night the moon sang to Susan and me.

~~ Juliet Waldron

http://www.julietwaldron.com/

Waiting for 1940

Full disclosure: I turned 57 this month. There, I said it.
And there’s nothing like seeing that bald number in black on white in front of
your nose to give you the dreaded wake-up call that you’re a hell of a lot
closer to 60 than to 50 -- and that no amount of hydrating crèmes,
anti-cellulite wraps, Zumba classes, Brazilian waxing or other palliatives will
stop you from eventually dying.
On the actual day of my birthday, I Facebooked the snide
comment: “Live fast, die young, have a good-looking corpse. Oops, too late.”
And my handful of FB pals did the obligatory thing and wished me many happy
returns of the day.
But to be perfectly honest, ever since the odometer clicked
over to the latest number, I feel less of a connection to the life on Facebook and
more of an interest in the people I’ve gotten to know on Ancestry.com. And I’m
talking about the dead ones.
In case you haven’t had the pleasure of delving into your
past, you can’t understand how exciting it is to get a glimpse of elderly
relatives when they were legal dependents, and relatives long gone who you’ve
never even known come alive on the page. The meticulously kept U.S. Census
Bureau Records, recorded in Palmer method longhand by long-gone government-paid
scriveners, are a fairly detailed peep into the windows of the bungalows,
tenements, farmhouses and cold-water flats where our relatives once lived en famille. It’s all the thrills of a Private
Dick and a Peeping Tom combined.
And it’s gotten to be
a lot more interesting to cyberstalk and speculate on the sex lives of my
long-dead ancestors than to follow the drivel most people put up on Facebook.
Case in point: My husband’s family. What a snake pit of
intrigue, wanderlust, prodigious childbearing and probable bigamy that clan
encompasses! My forebears were your basic hoi
polloi mélange of wops and bohunks, newly arrived and crammed into Chicago
tenements or Pennsylvania coal mining town shacks; and we had our share of
miscreants -- a bootlegger uncle, a baby-daddy cousin, a great-uncle who
murdered his wife. But their exploits pale in comparison to the American Gothic
that is my husband’s family.
A tangled genetic web of Swiss, Germanic and
straight-off-the-Mayflower Anglo-Saxon (much to the chagrin of my Scots-ophile
husband, he is distantly related to Longshanks himself), the paternal side of
the family found its finest flower in my husband’s paternal grandfather, a
character named Albert.
Albert started life shortly after the Civil War in a small
Ohio farming community, one of three sons of Benonia and Marilda (that’s
another thing about genealogy – gotta love the names). Around the turn of the
last century, he was working as a bookkeeper in a sawmill (you can practically
hear the fiddle music) when he met and married Lena, his boss’s daughter. The
1910 census had the couple and their two children firmly settled in with his
father-in-law in Ohio -- although both the children’s birthplaces were listed
as Oklahoma. (I’m smelling some sort of arranged marriage here, since the girl
was sent to Kansas in 1900 to live with an uncle – a move that back in the day
signified an unplanned and unsanctioned pregnancy.)
By 1918, Albert is suddenly living in Des Plaines, Illinois,
working at an electrical supply manufacturing company, according to his World
War I draft registration card – and his wife is listed as Mary Cecilia, my
husband’s grandmother. My husband’s father was born in 1917, so it’s apparent
there was something very hinky going on with Grandpa Al.
And next thing you know, the 1920 census lists Albert as
living in Alamosa, Colorado, classified as “single,” and working as the manager
of a Western Union office.
Family lore has it that Grandpa Al skipped and never came
back, and the records prove it. He left two families without anything even
faintly resembling child support. Lena and her two children ended up living
with her elderly parents; Lena died in 1930. His other wife -- my husband’s
beloved grandma -- lived her life in Chicago as a scrappy flapper and single mother,
supporting herself and her only child as a secretary for the Archdiocese of
Chicago.
Albert’s brother Emery seems to have had the same traveling
bone, so to say. Like his brother, he married an Ohio girl and migrated to
Waukegan, Illinois, where in 1910 he was living with his in-laws. Listed as a “traveling
agent,” Emery traveled, all right. He was still married to Belle in 1918, when
he was working as a telegraph operator for the Chicago and Northwestern
Railroad. But by 1922, city directories show him living in Evanston, Illinois and
having ditched Belle for Blanche – the daughter of the partner in a cement
construction firm -- with whom he sired two children. (He sure must have done
some interesting commuting from 1918 to 1922.) By 1930, he and his new family
are listed as living in the swank northern Chicago suburb of Kenilworth. I don’t
know whatever happened to Belle.
The third brother, Walker, lit out for Kansas with his wife and
never looked back, eventually having what from all appearances was a normal
family life.
If these guys were alive today, their lives would make the
best reality TV show ever – the Kardashians and the Jersey Shore gang couldn’t hold
a candle to it.
If you’re not into genealogy, the year 1940 probably won’t
mean much to you, but to those of us who are tracking this ongoing soap opera, it’s
a big deal. In a few weeks, the U.S. Census Bureau data for that year will be
released, which will move them all a little closer in time to where we are now.

Although we already know what happens to everyone, the added details will only add to the intrigue. Will Albert squeeze in another wife? Will Emery and Blanche end up in a fancier house? Where will Albert's children move and who will they marry?

Stay tuned.