Women of Power

Posted by Christine

Okay, I don’t really mean Cat Woman. Though I do love that black patent leather outfit. That dominatrix thing. Gets me every time.

Yes. It’s true. You do not want to be here inside my mind. Mwahaha.

And while I’ve got my whip out, don’t forget to check out Kate’s entry at American Title III. And vote on the best first line. *ker-snap* Oh, yeah. That is the sound of my whip cracking…

Where was I? There is always altogether too much digression in my posts…

Ahem. Women of Power…

Actually, I was thinking about my grandmother. She was born in the 1890’s and she didn’t look a thing like Halle Berry. She never in her life wore black patent leather. Well, maybe patent leather shoes at some point. Though not that I remember.

She was downright amazing. No other word for her. Born a Philadelphia Quaker, she finished normal school and, at age sixteen, headed to the Alaska gold fields to take a job as a teacher. She met my grandfather there, in the goldfields. He was over a decade her senior, a gold miner, as taciturn as she was talkative. They married and headed for the mountains of Northern California where he’d been born and raised.

She brought up three kids during the depression, including my mother, the youngest, born at home, midwived by my grandmother’s mother-in-law. My grandmother taught school well into her seventies. Her small house was always full of books. Walls full of them. She loved double-crostics and Scrabble.

Boy, could she slaughter the unwary at Scrabble. I swear she cheated. But every time I’d challenge her on some obscure word, there it would be in her Webster’s International Dictionary, a tome so enormous, she had to keep it on a special stand.

She played the mandolin. Badly. She always kept a garden and she fed all of us from it. An organic garden, which required a compost heap. A big one, up in the corner of the yard…

And her power? It was in her belief. She believed in God. And she believed in the power of goodness. In the light at the end of a long, dark tunnel.

In me. My Granny believed in me. She always told me I would be a writer. Eventually. I wanted to be an actress for years and pursued that dream passionately. My Granny would say, “Well, when you get this theater bug out of your system, you can settle down and be the writer you were meant to be.”

She died sixteen years ago. But her spirit is so strong, I still feel her with me. Supporting me. Believing in me.

That’s a woman of power.

All that to say…

I don’t know, really. Just that it makes me feel powerful to remember her, makes me newly aware of how much I love my job, reminds me what romance is all about: Women of power who know what they want and then go out and get it against all odds.

I'll raise my cosmo to that!