Rereading My Most Beloved Book, Colette’s “Earthly Paradise,” My Prose Bible, and Her Mother Sido and the Pink Cactus…

My eyes filled with tears as I pulled this book you see above off the shelf. I have had this book for over 40 years. It is worn and tattered and the binding is coming apart so I will fix it again. It survived the housefire. The pages are filled with underlinings and highlighting and notes in the margins. I have read and reread and studied this book all my writing life, and there is a little secret fantasy I have carried in my heart all these years. I was born in April 1954 and Colette died in August of that year. I believe as she left this earth she touched me in some invisible way, for I have always felt her with me, and she is a spirit guide for me. I believe she is here now.

I don’t believe there has ever been any other writer in all of time whose writing was so beautiful or deeply moving, who really saw life as it exists, from the tiniest wildflower, to a good meal with crusty bread, a good cheese, and wine, to love in all its forms, especially for animals, but perhaps that is because her worldview, her ethos, matches mine so closely. We both loved both men and women, we both lived, as I still do, a very sensual, sensory life — I move through life with my 5 senses ever alert, and must have my dear animals close to me, and lush color and texture all around me, and sensual meals with a good glass of wine, and as I grow older I do not get around so easily anymore, but I spend my days writing and musing surrounded by flowers, staying, always, as close to the natural world as possible.

As I pulled this book out again I immediately knew why I had needed to, just now, because I have been dealing with the many losses that come with age and disability which has brought me, by necessity or choice, to let go of many things, to concentrate on the things that are deeply important to me for however long I am here on this earth. My writing, my art, my garden, taking more time to create lovely, sensual meals, to take time just to sit and think, to meditate, continually recording it all, and to create a world of magic and enchantment all around me as much as I am able. To turn off all the lights at night save a couple of candles and write what my heart is so very full of. So I opened this book to one of the passages that moves me so deeply I cannot read it without crying.

It is Colette writing about her mother Sido who wrote a letter to one of her husbands about why she couldn’t come for a visit, and is the epitome of the beautiful sense of grace and depth of understanding that only someone growing toward the latter part of their long life can know or understand…

“Sir,

You ask me to come and spend a week with you, which means I would be near my daughter, whom I adore. You who live with her know how rarely I see her, how much her presence delights me, and I’m touched that you should ask me to come and see her. All the same I’m not going to accept your kind invitation, for the time being at any rate. The reason is that my pink cactus is probably going to flower. It’s a very rare plant I’ve been given, and I’m told that in our climate it flowers only once every four years. Now, I am already a very old woman, and if I went away when my pink cactus is about to flower, I am certain I shouldn’t see it flower again.

So I beg of you, sir, to accept my sincere thanks and my regrets, together with my kind regards.”

“This note, signed ‘Sidonie Colette, née Landoy,’ was written by my mother to one of my husbands, the second. A year later she died, at the age of seventy-seven.

“Whenever I feel myself inferior to everything about me, threatened by my own mediocrity, frightened by the discovery that a muscle is losing it’s strength, a desire its power, or a pain the keen edge of its bite, I can still hold up my head and say to myself: ‘I am the daughter of the woman who wrote that letter — that letter and so many more that I have kept. This one tells me in ten lines that at the age of seventy-six she was planning journeys and undertaking them, but that waiting for the possible bursting into bloom of a tropical flower held everything up and silenced even her heart, made for love. I am the daughter of a woman who, in a mean, close-fisted, confined little place, opened her village home to stray cats, tramps, and pregnant servant girls. I am the daughter of a woman who, many a time, when she was in despair at not having enough money for others, ran through the wind-whipped snow to cry from door to door, at the houses of the rich, that a child had just been born in a poverty-stricken home to parents whose feeble, empty hands had no swaddling clothes for it. Let me not forget that I am the daughter of a woman who bent her head, trembling, between the blades of a cactus, her wrinkled face full of ecstasy over the promise of a flower, a woman who herself never ceased to flower, untiringly, during three quarters of a century.”

~ Colette, Earthly Paradise ~

I absolutely wept as I typed those words. It hits me hard every time. For our lost mothers, and our failing bodies, still filled with hope and fiercely protecting our ability to still experience all that we can. Sometimes in the middle of the night when I cannot sleep I snuggle in the dark with my tiny Molly who is so little and so soft and warm and sometimes I am so overcome with love for her tears run down my cheeks. And I always sleep at night with one hand on her. Nothing is more important to me than being here with her, and those who know and love me understand, as well as they understand that I have created a secret private world that I do not, or rarely leave, and that the people I allow into my life are few and far between, and that those who think they know me seldom do. I am a woman who lives with lingering terror every day of my life, at the same time being in awe of tiny flowers coming up in my garden, and, while living on little money these days, I would give up grocery money to get help to keep my garden going, because without the garden I’m not sure how I could go on. My animals, my garden, this world I have created here, my own earthly paradise, I am not keen to leave and rarely do. I only feel safe here, my flowers are blooming here, my tiny one-eyed girl is here, and my parakeets, and all of the wildlings I care for around the cottage, and my books are here and my journals, and my art supplies and the things that really matter to me. And the things that matter to me grow fewer and fewer, and my relationship with those things I do keep around me goes deeper and deeper. And I, too, would not have hesitated for a moment to decline such a lovely invitation (And I have, and I still would. It used to hurt my out of town children’s feelings but now they know I won’t travel, I can’t, and they understand. I, too, would have stayed home to watch the cactus bloom.)

I am so overcome with emotion writing this that I have to stop here. I am a woman of a mother who bore more than I will ever understand, and it breaks my heart that we never, really, found our way to each other.