TheBanyanTree: renaissance woman or feminist reject

[Julie Anna Teague]

Here’s a thing I love to do: hang clothes on the clothesline. In fact, 
I just ran another hundred feet around my backyard, randomly stringing 
line from tree to tree, so I can now dry all of the laundry instead of 
just the easy stuff like sheets and towels. In Indiana, we often have 
wicked humidity that keeps anything from drying, and in fact actually 
moistens things that are already dry. But I am more determined than 
ever to have a smaller carbon footprint, and now we are in the Vatta 
season, the dry time, the days of clear, blue, hazeless skies. I am out 
in the yard on a beautiful Saturday, hanging out the week’s laundry, a 
fly buzzing my head and the sun in my eyes, when I am struck by the 
fact that I am very, very happy. I am right where I want to be, doing 
what I want to be doing in this moment. It’s a feeling that comes over 
me more often these days–when I’m puttering in my garden, baking bread, 
sauteing onions and garlic in a decades- old, well seasoned iron 
skillet, or fluting the edges of a perfect pie crust. And I wonder at 
this core of domesticity in myself that makes me so, damned, happy.

Sometimes I think, possibly, I am a reject of the women’s movement that 
dominated my early life. My mom is of a generation of women who were 
much more limited in their life choices. But I read widely at a young 
age, I knew things were changing out there in the big world, and I was 
having none of that teacher-nurse-homemaker bullshit. I studied math 
and computer science in college when 95% of the science types were 
male, and all of the teachers were. The women were administrative 
assistants, and a few brave souls looking for something beyond what 
we’d been led to believe we were suited for. But I think we also bought 
into an idea of what women should no longer be doing, the kinds of 
things that were considered demeaning to women who had better things to 
do with their lives. Many of my friends defiantly and quite proudly 
don’t cook or sew. They don’t sit on the porch snapping fresh beans 
into a bowl or “put up” produce in cans or in the freezer. It was as if 
we couldn’t be modern women if we did those things or even claimed 
knowledge of them. My mom didn’t even do those things past the 70’s. It 
was retrograde to the women’s movement. I, instead, had a career, a 
401K, a nice car, a pizza place on speed dial, a hundred distracting 
activities and travels to keep me away from home and out of the 
kitchen. I put kids on hold until I was more than a decade older than 
when my mom had them. I had a thoroughly modern woman’s life, 180 
degrees off course from my grandmother’s, but somewhere along the way I 
forgot how to be happy. I forgot what even made me happy. I wondered 
why my grandmother had always seemed so happy, ironing her stupid 
pillowcases with light starch and canning her stupid peaches. Over the 
next ten years, I searched every nook and cranny of myself and my life 
for Happy, and I found it in the damndest places.

Although it is still an ever-changing and, in certain moments, a 
still-elusive thing, (and that was, afterall, the “gift” of the women’s 
movement–-a vastly more unlimited, and sometimes more confusing, vision 
of ourselves and our choices) I now know this truth about myself–-that 
Happiness can dress itself up but it still has the face and hands of my 
grandmother. It smells of carmelized onions and of sun-dried laundry, 
of basil and bubbling yeast and the earthy tang of pulled weeds. It has 
dirt under it’s nails and paint on it’s clothes. It makes popcorn and 
listens to the radio. Happiness digs for garlic like it’s looking for 
gold and picks wormy apples when it finds forgotten apples trees. It 
warms itself by the woodstove after hauling logs through the snow in 
big boots. It crochets, for chrissake. It takes up every corner of the 
house with it’s half finished art projects, collected pine cones, 
coffee cups, and last weeks zinnias going dead in a jar. It dances to 
almost anything. It toasts an even number of matching socks with red 
wine in a scratched glass. It smiles broadly at the end of a 
simply-lived day.