My dear Mermaid Darlings,
I have had something upon my mind of late, and I thought perhaps we might sit with it together for a little while.
There were women I admired many years ago; women whose books, homes, gardens and artistic lives seemed to possess the very feeling I was longing to create in my own. I would look at the rooms they had fashioned, and the work they had made, and something within me would whisper, There, you see; it is possible to live that way.
I did not know these women personally, although I sometimes felt that I did. That is the curious intimacy of reading another woman’s books and being invited, through photographs and stories, into the small domestic corners of her world. You come to recognise the chair beside the fire, the flowers upon the table and the view from the kitchen window; and, after a while, it all begins to feel rather like visiting someone you have known for years.
I was a different woman then. The life I wanted was already alive inside me, but so much of it had not yet appeared in the physical world. I knew that I wished to write and paint. I knew that I belonged amongst old houses, weathered garden gates, embroidered linens and all the dear little remnants of another age. I knew there was a mermaid within me and an author too; although neither had yet claimed quite so much of the shore.
These women seemed to have arrived there before me. One lived in a beautiful old house that appeared to hold an entire world within its walls. Another had arranged her life according to an earlier time and seemed entirely untroubled by whether the modern world understood her. I watched from afar and admired what they had made; perhaps more deeply than I realised at the time.
Many years have passed, and their lives have changed. The old surroundings I once loved are gone or altered. The rooms no longer hold the same enchantment for me; the gardens do not stir anything within my heart. What they find lovely now is not always what I find lovely, and there is nothing wrong in that. They are quite entitled to live in whichever manner brings them comfort.
Still, if I am being perfectly honest with you, I have felt disappointed. It sounds almost foolishly personal when I write it down. These women did not promise to preserve their lives for me. They never agreed to remain forever inside the pretty picture in which I first discovered them. Yet when I see what became of those lives, I feel the oddest little sinking in my heart; rather like returning to a house one adored in childhood and finding that the old trees have been cut down and the windows replaced.
The house belongs to someone else; nevertheless, one grieves a little. I have wondered why it should matter to me at all.
I believe it is because I was never looking only at their houses or their gardens. I was looking at a possibility for myself.
Without quite knowing it, I had asked these women to keep a little piece of my dream safe for me. Their lives held the outward evidence of things that were still waiting to unfold in mine. When I saw the books, the artwork, the old rooms and the unconventional choices, I felt less peculiar and less alone. Somewhere in the world was another woman who understood that beauty was not frivolous; that a home might be part shelter, part storybook and part declaration of who one had chosen to become.
There was another little sorrow tucked amongst all of this. One of the women I admired was once terribly discouraging to me about my own art and my hopes of becoming an author and artist. I was younger then, and her words found a tender place to settle. She may not have remembered them for more than an afternoon; I remembered them for years.
It is a painful little thing when someone whose work helped you believe in your dream appears unable to recognise that same spark when it begins glowing inside you.
I do not dwell upon it now, nor do I wish to make her unkindness the centre of the story. It simply belongs there as part of the truth. Perhaps I had given her opinion such weight because I had already given her life more authority than it ought to have possessed.
That is the part I understand differently now.
I thought I was admiring these women; in some ways, I was recognising myself before I had fully become her.
The longing I felt when I looked through their windows did not belong to them. It belonged to the woman within me who already knew what she wanted. She was gathering clues wherever she could find them; an old house here, a painted page there, a woman brave enough to live differently. She was quietly collecting the pieces of herself.
Perhaps we all do this for a time. We find someone who appears to possess the freedom, beauty or confidence we desire, and we place her a little above ourselves. We begin to imagine that she knows something we do not. Yet she may only be showing us what our own soul has been trying to say.
When her life changes, or when she disappoints us, we feel as though something beautiful has been taken away. But perhaps nothing has been taken at all. Perhaps the beauty had already done its work.
I can be grateful for what those women once awakened in me without pretending that I still wish to follow them. I need not criticise the lives they have chosen; neither must I convince myself that I find those lives beautiful. Their tastes are their own, just as mine are mine.
There is a freedom in admitting that.
I once needed to see another woman make books, create art and build a life around the private language of her imagination. I needed to know that such a woman could exist. I no longer need her to remain unchanged in order for me to continue.
I have my own painted pages now. I have written my own little books. I have my Scarlette Rose Cottage, my old-fashioned dresses, my animals, my peculiar treasures and a life that could not have been designed by anyone but me. It is not yet every single thing I see in my mind; but it is mine, and it is becoming.
The women I once admired were little lanterns along my road. I am thankful for the light they gave when I needed it, even if one of them was not especially kind when our paths briefly crossed. Their part in my becoming need not be perfect for it to have mattered.
But I no longer stand outside another woman’s window wondering whether my own life is possible.
I have come home and lit my own lamps.
Most affably yours til my next enchanting swim, Lady Raquel
