Mary Griswold Carter, Happy Woman's History Month

God, I can’t believe it’s early March and flowers are popping up all over the place.  Someone who lives a couple of blocks from me posted a picture of a daffodil coming up in his yard.

Daffodils are nice, snowdrops too, but the flower that always gets me is the violet. I never see it coming, then boom, suddenly a purple carpet covers the woods and changes the lens. Did you ever notice that the flowers that are natural and bountiful in nature never make good cut flowers? Like cornflowers or thistles.  I cut bunches of violets and prop them up in a little vase, but they never make it. I put sugar and Miracle-Gro in the water, but it doesn’t help.

Little weaklings. Fish out of water, I guess. I want to tell them to buck up.

I always get a laugh when I tell someone to buck up.  Especially after someone tells me their tale of woe, after they tell me they stepped out of their ordinary and fell down. I tell them to “buck up.” 

It IS funny.  Because no one is that demanding anymore. My intention must be irony because otherwise I would be cancelled and socially shunned, if not arrested, for telling someone who just fell to step up instead of giving them a hug.

My ex-long-departed-mother-in-law used to say it to me when I was whining.  I remember lying in front of the fire one snowed-in day at their country house and I was doing my Russian homework, complaining that it was too hard, and I thought I would quit the course.  I was taking it at the Harvard Extension School and it was one of the hardest courses I ever took—and I was resentful when I found out the students who were passing had already taken the course twice. I think that was the first time she told me to buck up.  “A hundred million Russians speak Russian. Buck up.”

Excuse me?

It wasn’t the last time.

She was a WASP of the sort my sort of Pollack didn’t run into often in those days. A rock-ribbed realist, she called herself.  Her official stance, "Wipe that gauzy Vaseline off your glasses and have a look at the world."

Her husband was an artist and in their early years, she modeled nude for him. When I came across the drawings and asked if they were indeed her, she shrugged off my pronouncement of them being sexy as hell. “I’m just a Yankee,” she said, as if that precluded also being sexy as hell. It certainly had nothing to do with the business at hand in her opinion. “He needed a model.”

She was a schoolteacher.  She had completed her master’s degree in English from Cornell University about the time most people are just starting college and at a time when women weren’t going to college, much less graduating master’s programs. 

When she and her husband moved to the country and she had nothing to read—this was before the miracle of Amazon Kindle—she started a public library in her little town in New Jersey. 

And when she found out that girls in this same town were having trouble getting gyno healthcare, she became a tireless worker for Planned Parenthood.   

You just buck up and get it done.

She listened, uncomprehending, when I whined about having to have a regular job and not being able to be the full-time artist I thought I was destined to be.  If you want it, she said, you’ll make it happen.

She knew all about art and literature and I asked her once—after we were admiring a local farmer’s irises and comparing them to Van Gogh’s paintings—if she didn’t think it was a waste that she was just an artist’s wife and wasn’t able to create art herself. She told me one of the biggest pleasures of her life was to be able to experience life through the sensibilities of great artists. That she couldn’t imagine having a richer life.

 A funny thing, I said, for a rock-ribbed realist to think. 

No, an artist makes things clearer, she said.  If they enchant reality, maybe it’s that reality IS enchanted, and artists help us see that.

I never got mother-in-law jokes.  Yes, she let me know how she would do things, or rather, how things were done—the usual complaint against mother-in-laws—but luckily I have a thick hide and had only a vague idea of how things should be done anyway.  

When she was sick, I picked some violets and put them in a tiny green vase by her bed. 

At that time, she was the only person who understood the part of me that wanted to make things happen. And she was one of the few people who could tell me how to get done the things that I had no business even trying.

And, she was the first person I was close to who died.  I found out what people meant when they said the hardest part of someone you love dying is when something great happens and you want to call them up and tell them. And lots of good things have happened that I never got to tell her about. 

Some bad things too. But I know what she would tell me.