[I'll warn you, I have recently finished Cry the Beloved Country by Alan Paton, which is brilliant, am reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon, and finished watching the last scenes of Emma not twenty minutes ago, so this post may have a Paton/Haddon/Austen sound to it.]
Sometimes I think I should like to be a shepherdess or a pirate or maybe a farmer's wife.
For starters, I just like the word shepherdess. It goes in my file of great words that mean you're the girl version of something, like duchess, empress, princess, baroness, etc. Think of all the things you can get away with as a shepherdess. There's going barefoot and carrying a tall staff with a sprig of wildflowers at the top like Zipporah on Prince of Egypt. There's having fabulous long hair and singing to your sheep and being outside and possibly having a very intelligent and well-behaved dog. There's lots of time for thinking and reading great books, but there's also things like baby lambs and green pastures and feeling brave protecting your sheep from sinister predators. Nevermind that it also means the smell of sheep and running after the one, when the ninety-nine are placidly munching their morning grass.
Or how about being a pirate? I don't mean, of course, modern icky pirates who hold shipping cargo hostage and have no eye patches. I'm talking about wooden ships with billowing sails and crow's nests and things. If you're a pirate, you probably get to be barefoot too, if you're careful about splinters. Don't forget big golden earrings and bandanas and flowy cutoff pants, and you could have short cute piratey hair or a long braid of piratey hair. You'd get to visit islands and go swimming and eat tropical fruit. You might even be able to keep a chicken instead of a parrot. Chickens are much more practical, but I don't know if they like ships. Nevermind being seasick or import taxes or mutinies.
Farmers' wives may not be considered among the usual romanticized occupations, but I think it sounds nice. All kinds of great things happen to farmers' wives. They get to spend lots of time in the kitchen doing things like making apple sauce and cherry pie and loaves of bread. Usually there are half a dozen children running around getting into trouble. Chickens and horses and a nice obedient dog and if you're lucky a Jersey cow live on farms. Farmhouses have quilts and long wooden tables and fireplaces to hang stockings at Christmas. There are tulips in the spring, geraniums in the summer and pansies in the fall on farms. Nevermind that farming borrows your husband from sunup to sundown, irrespective of Christmas or anniversaries because cows must be milked, and horses must be fed, and there's no getting around that.
As for Mr. Knightley, who is wholly unrelated to the preceding paragraphs, except that he's also wonderful to think about, he makes me sigh great floaty sighs. It has taken SG and I three days to finish Emma (the one with Gwyneth Paltrow, who is so beautiful but probably has the longest neck I've ever seen except an assistant dance teacher I had once…). Romantic comedies are alright sometimes, but I much prefer old romances. Their greatness owes itself to their witty dialogue and intricacy of plot. I haven't read the book, but seeing the movie makes me want to because Gwyneth Paltrow plays such a meddlesome and sometimes ridiculous heroine, that I wonder if the character isn't misrepresented from Jane Austen's original intentions. She redeems herself in the end, but it takes some doing.
But Mr. Knightley. Oh. Mr. Knightley. He hasn't Mr. Darcy's introverted brooding, nor Mr. Bingley's jovial good humor. He's… even now I can't fit him into one word. He's considerate and honest and admirable and discerning and he is why I don't watch romances with regularity. I get all floaty and sigh and smile dreamily. Then I remember I have schoolwork to do and paperwork and things like budget balancing… because that's what grownups do and I jolly well don't want to fail at being a grownup. Failure is terrifying, although it's a perfect opportunity for resilience which is kind of my word of the year, along with buoyancy.
Much love,
Little Miss Sunshine, who fears she missed her era by a century and a half or so.
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