Milk Stones
archaeology, midwifery, words
I’ve always said that if I hadn’t become a writer, I would have been an archaeologist. I had a very close friend as a little girl who shared this passion with me. At age 7 we were begging our mothers to take us on what to us was an ideal day trip— a journey to the Egyptology museum in San Jose. I remember nothing of the chaos and traffic of Bay Area highways, only the cool corridors, flashes of lapis, little black Bastet cats, headdresses of gold-foil beauty I could hardy bear, and the rituals my friend Becky and I created afterward in the garden to ask the rain to come. Once, it really did. That made us scream with terror and run inside, and I’m not sure we ever visited those altars in the side garden again. Midwife came in close second as my other dream profession— I hunted down books with midwives as main characters or herbalists who knew the plants to stop hemorrhage or encourage breast milk, and tried to plant a garden full of them near my mother’s roses. I wasn’t the most attentive gardener at age 13, and Lady’s Mantle much prefers an English climate to a Californian one, and to be honest I was at that age a raging hypochondriac who fainted when she had to get a shot, so it wasn’t exactly in the cards.
But I wonder now if all three pursuits— writing, archaeology, midwifery—share a certain language. A devotion to portals between realms, to thresholds of mystery beyond which we cannot see but we can study the motions of, and watch, and wait. Each is a kind of excavation into darkness, where what is hidden in the far interior comes to light: stories, ancient civilizations, babies.