BECOMING EMILY - Emily D Tea Traveler

I live in a tiny 1930s Tudor, on a small bit of property that I am slowly turning into my own secret garden.

It’s not hard to make a secret garden if you begin with the existing hedges and let them start to reach for the sky and dance in the wind. I only clip the hedges on the sidewalk-side now, as a courtesy to people who might actually want to walk on the sidewalk past my house.

The higher the hedges grow, the happier I become. For more reasons than I expected.

For one thing, the birds have returned. I imagine this place, before houses were raised too close to one another. I imagine the way the trees must have covered the landscape. Fir, maple, beech. The Hudson River in the distance, and the mountains beyond that, where a glacier came through long ago, before the birds first arrived.

Now my hedges, in their new softness of shape, invite cardinals, chickadees, sparrows. The birds rustle the little leaves as they play in and out, deciding where they will go next. The red maple at the top of the hill? Or the hemlocks lining the slim driveway? I delight to watch the birds from my second-floor bedroom window, where I feel a bit like a modern Emily Dickinson.

Emily and I have our differences. She wrote short poems; I write short and long. She wore white dresses. I put on black Lou & Grey casual wear. She was also frail of constitution, which caused a certain level of interruption in her life, as you can imagine. I have raised two children, which is not quite interruption, but it’s not smooth solo sailing either.

The Amherst poet and I also have our similarities, at least as far as “the lore” surrounding her goes. Emily did not like doing laundry. She liked to be alone. She wasn’t much of a traveler beyond her own door. But she seemed to be a passionate and curious being. And she loved her friends deeply. She lived in a setting that was a bit like her own secret garden.

I actually don’t (yet) know Emily’s stance on tea (not even the literary Mark Twain House “Twain Tea”). (Sorry, Emily.)

I do know she liked to bake cookies for the neighborhood children—cookies which she would supposedly lower out her window in a basket. She sometimes penned poems on chocolate wrappers. (I celebrate this by being an endless fan of Chocolove, with its poems in the wrappers, though admittedly I am there less for the poems than for the 55% dark, with almonds and sea salt.)

Once upon a time, I thought I was an extrovert. I even wrote a book that contains declarations about my extroverted tendencies. (Sorry, Me.) Now I understand that though I can be a very outgoing person, my true nature is one that loves solitude—and secret gardens.

My daughters, who I have had a rich life of learning and writing and creating with, are making their way in the world—trying to figure what they will “do with their lives.” I feel like I am on that journey, too, even though I already have things I do, like being a writer and publisher.

So I’ve decided to travel with my daughters. (Like Me). Or to travel alone. Mostly at home. (Like Emily.)

Our first exploration is Morocco. (I can’t even believe I didn’t know that Casablanca is there!) We’ve been learning about the history of the place, the art, the music, the food. Another discovery: apparently the Beat poets hung out in Tangier.

Because I also love my friends deeply, I’ll sometimes travel with them, too. I’m taking tea for the journey. I invite you to come along.

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L.L. Barkat

L.L. Barkat is the Managing Editor of Tweetspeak Poetry and the author of six books for grown-ups and four for children, including the popular Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing. She has also served as a writer for The Huffington Post blog. Her poetry has appeared on NPR and at VQR and The Best American Poetry. Her favorite Emily Dickinson poem is Wild Nights! Wild Nights! and she loves a fine jasmine tea.