The Lark Ascending
In which I give myself one of my fondest childhood dreams
When I was a child, I lived in an underground house.
The walls were dirt, and sometimes, a mole would push its way out or a small fern would push its way through the dark red-brown clay and try to grow into our kitchen. The floors were also dirt, but packed so tight and smooth that it would gleam with faint reflection after I swept.
It was dark and cool at all times in our house - even if the weather reached 100 degrees outside, the interior of our downstairs was like a cave.
No, it actually WAS a cave.
There was an Earth Stove (all the rage among the off-gridders in the 1970s) in the center of the home, resting on a round, stone hearth that my sisters and I built under my father’s guidance. A second wood stove, in the kitchen area, was a cookstove with one side of the cooktop polished smooth for pancakes and other frying.
My older sisters, in their teens, perfected the art of baking pies in that wood-fired cookstove, reaching their hand into the opened oven to determine if the temperature was right for baking. Their pies were so beautiful and delicious that they had a small business, for a time, selling them by the slice to workmen at local construction sites and garages.
While I never got as good at pie-baking as they did, I was a good bread-maker. I would vent my lonely teenager angst by kneading the dough so aggressively that it would then rise light and lovely, far above the top of the stainless steel mixing bowl, pushing the woven cloth that covered it up into a smooth blue arc.
I was in my teens in the 1980s, but you’d never have known it. I never heard any of the 1980s music - I never saw television - I did not go to malls or even into a town except a few times a year. I wore long braids and a long dress, as did my sisters and my mother (though her hair was tucked under a cap like an Amish woman, though we were not Amish).
Where I lived, it was 1865.
I was homeschooled in a time when it was not even legal.
I will tell a more complete story about this life another time, but I wish to give this much as a backdrop for what I’m thinking about today…
I was maybe 11 or 12 when I read a book - I don’t remember anything about the book except for this one particular part, and it made a deep impression upon Wildly Ignorant/Innocent Child Me. The main character stays overnight at someone’s apartment, and the next morning is Sunday. Sunlight slants in the window, she has fragrant coffee and toast and fruit on a tray in bed, and does the Times crossword from the Sunday paper, while “The Lark Ascending” by Ralph Vaughan Williams plays on the radio.
Every aspect of this scene seemed exotic and beautiful to me - naturally I wasn’t allowed coffee, and the scent was always beguiling me, and I had never had access to a newspaper. Sunlight did not come in our windows, and every part of our house was homemade, grubby, rough and never quite comfortable. There was ALWAYS mud on things.
Always.
But now I have given that beautiful scene to myself.
I get the Weekend Edition of the paper, and I have a luxurious bed with soft, lightweight bedding - nothing like the Army blankets of my childhood. I have wonderful coffee, sourdough toast, and berries or a fresh nectarine on the weekends, served to myself on a beautiful tray with a linen napkin.
This last Sunday, my kind and handsome lover Alex was with me, and we woke slowly, watching the light rise until it began to sparkle in the crystals hanging in my tall windows. I turned on my Sunday morning playlist, which begins with “The Lark Ascending” by Ralph Vaughan Williams and moves on to Delius, Grieg, Vivaldi, Respigi. We read the paper, trading sections as we sipped coffee.
We completed the Times crossword together.
Child Me, hang on, sweetheart. The love and beauty that you long for is coming.
I promise, it’s coming.
Really loved reading this, Rose. It's so delightful how you have created what your heart yearned for so long ago in the dark.
Destined to find 'la dolce vita' eventually...