Traveling with Pomegranates (12 page)

Mother seemed happiest when making and tending home, the sewing machine whistling and the Mixmaster whirling. Her deepest impulse was to nurture, to simply dwell; it had nothing to do with ambition and achievement in the world. The bunny tin must have grown into an emblem of that in my mind, a kind of Hestian scepter. And yes, I realized now, it was the hardest thing about being my mother’s daughter, because it symbolized how we were
different
.

I once remarked to Mother that if the Easter bunnies were to live on, she would probably have to pass the cookie cutter on to Ann instead of me, and we both laughed, but there was a tacit judgment in my little joke, an unintentional refusal of her satisfied, unhurried labor. How had I come to believe that my world of questing and writing was more valuable than her dwelling and domestic artistry?

Standing in the deserted museum, Ann scrutinizes me, trying to figure out what the cookie cutter has to do with anything. I say, “Your grandmother’s gift has been different than mine. It’s not just that she makes the bunny cookies, but she finds the depths of herself in doing it. Do you know what I mean?”

Ann nods and I realize I’m only now understanding it myself. In some way her cookies remind me of the sand mandalas I’ve watched Tibetan monks spend hours meditatively creating then sweeping away—a sacred art that is more about process than product, more about being than doing.

“I wanted to go out and do things—write books, speak out,” I tell Ann. “I’ve been driven by that. I don’t know how to rest in myself very well, how to be content staying put. But Mother knows how to
be
at home—and, really, to be in herself. It’s actually very beautiful what she does—”

I stop, grasping that I’ve just articulated a split in the fabric of myself. My longing to meet my mother in a deeper way has never been a matter of love or closeness, but has come from an invisible rift in
me
, from my unknowing diminishment of Hestia and her world. My mother’s world.

“What
both
of you do is important,” says Ann, holding my gaze, and I see she is moved by my outpouring. This telling of secret things.

I look at Persephone in her mother’s lap. “I know,” I say. “I think part of me just longs for the way Mother experiences home.”

Ann has already explored the Plutonian, where the faithful memorialized Persephone’s descent and return, but she comes again with me since I haven’t seen it yet. As I step into the gaping mouth of a cave, cool, thick shade drops over me, then the smell of old, dank earth. Looking up, I inspect the stone arched over my head, crenulated in white, umber, and charcoal-gray colors. It’s not hard to imagine being swallowed and spit back out.

I try to focus on the reunion—not the one in the myth, or even the one with Ann, but with the more mysterious Persephone in myself. It occurs to me that Ann and I may each be searching for something that resides naturally in the other: Ann, seeking her true self, her autonomy and voice, her place in the world; and me, looking for the sap of spring, the ability to conjure a new dream of myself and bring it forth. Ann is new potential in search of ripening and I am ripening in search of new potential.

My initiation into my fifties seems to have as much to do with the Young Woman as it does with the old one. In the myth, Persephone and Hecate
both
show up at the reunion and become inseparable—the Young Woman accompanied by the Old Woman—suggesting a new coupling in a woman’s psyche.

I notice that several niches in the rock have been turned into improvised altars, holding offerings left by visitors. Standing on tiptoe, I examine a collection of dried flowers, snail shells, a pile of stones, bouquets of wheat, a small scroll of paper, and the peelings of a pomegranate.

This will sound outlandish, considering my age, but I’ve never tasted a pomegranate. Not in my entire life. I have no idea why this is so. It has simply never entered my mind to eat one. Now, in the space of days, I am wearing them, begging them off waiters, dropping them in the street, consumed with their mythological meaning and engrossed in their symbolism.

They are lavish symbols of fertility. When opened, they look for all the world like ovaries engorged with seeds, their insides bloodred. In some parts of Greece, a groom hands a pomegranate to the bride when they cross the threshold; in others, farmers break the fruit against their plows before planting. As I contemplate the fertility I hope for in my fifties and beyond—the regeneration of my creativity, the refinement of my spirituality, a new relationship with my body, the rediscovery of my daughter, indeed an inner culmination I cannot fully articulate to myself—I realize it cannot be plotted, orchestrated, controlled, and forced to bloom. It can only germinate naturally out of my experience . . . or not.

I retrieve the pomegranate from my bag and slice it open with my knife.

The pomegranate in the myth symbolizes both death and life. When Persephone ate the seeds Hades gave her in the underworld, she ensured her return to it, initiating what impresses me now as an astonishing process: dying and being reborn.
The secret of fertility
.

Maybe it is a feminine thing, I don’t know—but whenever I’ve managed to find new consciousness and renewals of my work, my relationships, and myself, it has been by going down into what seemed like a holy dark. It has come through a deep metabolizing of my experience and moments of metaphoric dying. The old cycle: life, death, rebirth.

“I’m going to eat some of the seeds,” I tell Ann. “Do you want some?”

Of course, this is what I’ve had in mind all along, ever since I spotted the leather-skinned fruit on the breakfast buffet. The idea was more innocuous then, an interesting thing to do at a sacred site. Now, it is personal, serious, and makes my heart thump in my chest. I feel like Eve in the garden about to bite into an undreamed-of hazard. I will look up the word pomegranate when I get home and discover it comes from the Middle French
pomme grenate
, literally “seedy apple,” and I will wonder if maybe the fruit in Eden wasn’t a pomegranate all along.

I pick out a handful of seeds and eat them one by one. I let the tart, acidic sweetness saturate my tongue. It becomes an initiation. A ceremony of consent. Traveling now with bones. Traveling with pomegranates.

As we leave, a single sheaf of wheat lies on the ground, blown from the cleft in the rock. Demeter’s wheat.

Ann picks it up and hands it to me. “Happy birthday,” she says.

Walking Walking toward the Plutonian at Eleusis, I stop to take a picture of a column that lies on the ground like a fallen tree trunk, arranged evenly in seven pieces. If a column falls in a Greek ruin and there’s no one around to hear it, does it make a sound? This is the kind of thought I distract myself with.

I love how remnants of the past overlie everything here. I am moved by the way history is folded right into the present, where it can remind people of who they are, where they come from, and how they were shaped. My feelings for Greece haven’t changed since I was here before, only the question of what I will do with them.

I flip my journal open to the photo log I’ve created and write “Eleusis” at the top of the page, then list everything I’ve photographed so far: cypresses growing between power lines; a Greek flag hoisted on a clock tower; four smokestacks puffing behind the ruins of a temple dedicated to Artemis; the bust of a man who has lost his forehead but not the curl in his beard. Finally, I scrawl:
marble column in seven slices
.

I left Mom beside a well, a journal in her lap and a pen behind her ear. Somehow I know she came here to sit by that well. What I don’t know is why, and I can’t help but wonder if it has anything to do with me. I don’t want it to have anything to do with me, seeing as how she’s at the spot where Demeter grieved for her daughter.

“I’ll be in hell,” I told her, pointing toward the Plutonian with my site map. It was an obvious joke about the entrance to the underworld, and I manufactured a smile to conceal how much my joke had revealed.

“You’ve been dying to say that, haven’t you?” she said. Her laugh sounded as put-on as my smile. I look back now to see Mom still by the well, and I lift the camera and take her picture. I label it:
Demeter Sue
.

I can’t keep her in the dark much longer about what’s going on with me, and I don’t want to anymore—well, more or less. Once the words are out there, they start to live and breathe in unpredictable ways. Another person will know what I do, and that will make the whole thing somehow truer and irreversible. It will crush my mother to know how unhappy I am. Besides, this is her birthday trip, so why would I lay all this on her now?

If a column falls in a Greek ruin and no one is there to hear it
. . .

I move along the path, consulting the map as I walk, tripping on clumps of grass which sprout from seams in the pavement, passing steps that once led to the threshold of a temple but now end in midair, a capital ornamented with winged lions and bulls, and the
Agelastos Petra
or Mirthless Stone, where Demeter supposedly took a rest, apparently without delight.

I don’t need the map to tell me I’ve arrived at the Plutonian. A cave is hollowed into the rock, its entrance bulging with deep blue shadow. When I step into it, chill bumps break out across my arms. Several clefts and cavities are lined with flowers, stalks of wheat, pomegranates, buttons, and ribbons—little altars scooped in the rock. I photograph them from different angles.

The holes seem to tunnel back endlessly, disappearing into darkness. I put the cap on the camera lens and force myself to sit down on a stone ledge inside the grotto and take in the fact that I’m at the mythical spot where Persephone returned.
I should do something
. Pray for answers. Make an offering. I lift the pomegranate charm on my necklace and roll it between my fingertips, thinking for a second that I’ll make a grand gesture and leave it at one of the altars. But gazing at it around my neck, I notice it gives off a tiny glow against the skin of my chest, just a smudge of rose light, and I decide I can’t part with it.