Rainbow Rivers?

Early last evening found me in the attic room busying myself with fabric, cotton and sewing machine as I played around with a design idea. The windows were wide open and the sky was blue tinged with fluffy clouds so it felt very pleasant up there amidst the birds.

Suddenly there was a thunderous knocking at the front door, which Mr Bryn responded to with equally thunderous woof. As I am two flights of stairs away from the front door when I am in the attic and both flights are steep in only the way a Welsh cottage knows how to produce - something to do with reflecting the slope that many a cottage is built on maybe, I went down one flight and put my head out through the bedroom window.

There stood a woman who I know by sight as she lives along one of the routes that Mr Bryn and I take regularly on our daily walks. I have spoken to her partner and even know his name but she and I have only exchanged the kind of ‘lovely morning or rain again’ type communication. She certainly looked agitated and I wondered what on earth was the problem. Before I could say I’d continue down to the front door she screamed up at me “ARE YOU A LESBIAN” in way that could only be described as reflecting the pain she felt having to say THAT word let alone possibly actually facing one of THEM! I thought that maybe it was a good idea that I wasn’t actually standing at my open front door but smiled sweetly and asked why she needed the answer so urgently. Let me say here that this woman and her partner have only lived in the area a matter of months and are from outside so will not have gained the knowledge that is common in the village that not only am I a lesbian but many other things besides and happy/out about who and what I am.

She then proceeded to tell me she had come to find out the truth because ‘someone’ had said the name of the lane I live on was not what the sign says but ‘lesbian alley’ at this I burst out laughing and asked who had said this as they needed to know it was certainly no alley but a beautiful lane. I did resist the temptation of saying, made all the more beautiful by the lesbian occupants of some of the cottages – yes there is more than one of ‘US’ here on this lane.

Well a gal wishes to share the bounty she discovers down a forgotten lane so invites friends to visit and talks about the place she lives in to anyone who doesn’t glazed over after three seconds and when cottages are left empty or go up for sale mentions it and those lesbians you know are pretty adventurous so the fact that roofs might need replacing, plumbing be found etc didn’t stop them in their tracks as it did some of my heterosexual friends, they took the opportunity and now three cottages have lesbian heads of households :0)

Anyway, back to the irate, upset woman at my door. What I quickly realised was not that she was here to clear up the matter of truth or not but that firstly she just couldn’t believe that the woman with the dog could be one of ‘THEM’, it must be the earings and pink dress and straw hat that threw her:0) that walking boots and shaved hair are joined to this sight and that the curves are more in evidence than the muscle shall we say just completely confused her image of a lesbian – goodness knows what that is but I can guess.

I was aware that all I really wanted to do was laugh but tried very hard to keep my face straight and treat her with the respect she certainly wasn’t showing to me. She blustered on for a while coming eventually to the real reason that had brought her thunder to my door. That SHE WASN’T a LESBIAN and that living within walking distance of the lane meant that she was ‘infected’ by some sort of virus or other. Ah isn’t association a wonderful word, cough. That it was all the others that would be coming…now why did Enoch Powell pop into my mind at that point and I suddenly saw rainbow rivers everywhere which made me smile in my heart but I also know by hard personal experience that the rivers of blood he refers to in his infamous speech have and are still formed from the blood of the ‘different’ being spilled by the ‘normal’.

I finally took the wind completely out of her sails when I said that I could understand how upset she might be if someone ‘accused’ her of being a lesbian by the association of living in the same area as me as I find it really upsetting and am appalled when someone ‘accuses’ me of being heterosexual by the association of me living in this ‘straight’ world. May I say that was said with tongue firmly in cheek I frankly don’t give a monkey’s fig what anyone thinks or doesn’t but knew that this woman wouldn’t be able to deal with the thought of anyone being appalled at her heterosexuality. The arrow hit centre target and as she gasped for air I asked her to kindly stop shouting outside my home and leave me in peace. She again demanded was I a lesbian, of course I laughed and said YES, Wonderful ISN’T IT! This was said in such a way that she knew this was a statement not to be argued with and she walked away from the cottage still speaking rather loudly about her not being a lesbian.

I wonder how many people she has had seemingly trying to knock her front door in to demand ‘ARE YOU A HETEROSEXUAL’ with no hint that the affirmative would elicit a hug, a well done slap on the back but rather more probably a fist in the face or a knife to the heart. I wonder if she will have gone to her car later that night and cleared it of notebook, pens and other knick-nacks she’d rather not ‘lose’ and then wonder about the paint spilled quite deliberately across the top of the lane so as to cover dogs paws or spatter car if they had gone that way after dark. I wonder if she would have placed her bag, dogs harness and lead near door that doesn’t open on to public lane but offers escape through garden. I wonder if she turned the light out last thing and wondered….I doubt it. But I doubt that she has the peace of heart that is mine and that sleep is not disturbed by nightmares about rivers of rainbows :0).

I do not run, I am not a victim, I will not lie but I am pragmatist enough to know that living to breath in another day requires honesty, being prepared and letting go.

This morning as I welcomed the new day and celebrated the suns rise I turned to a favourite writer, Adrienne Rich, and found myself reading this –

I Dream I’m the Death of Orpheus

I am walking rapidly through striations of light and dark thrown under an arcade.

I am a woman in the prime of life, with certain powers
and those powers severely limited
by authorities whose faces I rarely see.
I am a woman in the prime of life
driving her dead poet in a black Rolls-Royce
through a landscape of twilight and thorns.
A woman with a certain mission
which if obeyed to the letter will leave her intact.
A woman with the nerves of a panther
a woman with contacts among Hell’s Angels
a woman feeling the fullness of her powers
at the precise moment when she must not use them
a woman sworn to lucidity
who sees through the mayhem, the smoky fires
of these underground streets
her dead poet learning to walk backwards against the wind
on the wrong side of the mirror.

It made me smile, it made me glad to be a woman in the prime of life, it lifted spirit and heart and I smiled welcome at the day which may or may not hold such excitement as yesterday evening but I know it will hold one thing and that is love.

Some other words of Adrienne Rich popped into my mind, I’m sorry I cannot remember where from, and explain what the core reaction to the encounter last night was and will continue to be –

To Have loved you better than you loved yourself
-whover you are, to have loved you-

Comments

[melanie]

"YES, AREN'T YOU??" :)

[butuki]

Daisy-Winnefred, what a hilarious and heartfelt story.

Good grief. It's 2004. You mean to tell me that there are STILL people out there who fret about which side of the see-saw someone else happens to sit on? I felt I was reading from a scene in Wuthering Heights, except the woman must have been awfully disappointed not to find Heathcliff at the door. What if you had told you were BI?

Your sunny outlook certainly gave the encounter the grace that understanding needs.

[pericat]

"and that living within walking distance of the lane meant that she was ‘infected’ by some sort of virus or other."

Oh, dear. Perhaps you and all the other lesbians on the block should arrange for large quarantine signs on her gate. Purely as a public service.

[bill]

fantastic.

[Beth W.]

Your reaction says so much about your excellent character. . . . as your neighbor's action says about her lack thereof. (I have to admit to giggling, though, because you wrote this so well. I just have this image of a very small person shouting up to you. . .) Continue on in your joy.

[maria]

What a graceful lesson to be had in your wonderful account of the appalling rudeness of people who are puppets to the short strings of ignorance and fear.... I wish we all could have seen that woman’s face when you turned her ‘distress’ inside out and – let’s hope – inspired her to face and learn from the absurdity of both her concerns and her knocking at your door with such questions in the first place.

[Coup de Vent]

Hmm. Grace is something which I strive for in those kind of offensive circumstances but, articulate as I am in some situations, I often just get as far as fuck off and here's a helpline number. It's also hard sometimes not to be caught so off guard by mad and hostile communications that one could spend too much time just pinching oneself and wishing others were present to witness the bizarreness of what is going on.

I live in a Yorkshire village but my partner and I are most likely the only lesbians at present though I do keep thinking I must get the Hackney Gazette to do a special feature on my village and send all and any lefties up north. Ironically, it was only recently in London that I was personally threatened for being a dyke which funnily enough I just blogged about.

I can appreciate the support(?) which reading Adrienne Rich lends to one's sanity. She so understands the madness lesbians and other conscious women have to wade through on an hourly basis.

But also importantly, should we, the readers, assume that all this was conducted in Welsh accents? Because that reads quite differently then.

[Daisy-Winifred]

Thank you all for your comments. I am never very good at responding to the comments though I always read them and am grateful for the time and energy it takes each commenter to post feed back.

I do tend to write back individually if I do anything but at present because of less ease using this technology because of bodily blip I hope you will accept a response back to you all as a group.

I am glad if my account made you smile because the situation made me smile too and trying to recount the absurdity of the moment as you say Coup de Vent was way to hold it up for witnesses even though there was no one else there at the time.

As those who know me in the flesh so to speak will attest the F word often passes my lips but not often aimed at an individual, though it is known:0) That doesn’t mean I cannot be forthright and vociferous in my defence of my life and liberty or of another’s for that matter. I have the ability to come up with some grand one liners even in the most inopportune moments which comes back to my sense of the ridiculous I suppose.

I can only say that life is about joy as far as I am concerned and though I wade through shit I still find perfume of roses permeating the moment.

I think the interchange with ‘the woman at my front door’ became more Welsh accented as time went on. Especially when I came to exclaim I was a lesbian and it was a wonderful state of affairs. The “isn’t it” is rarely a question when used in Wenglish but statement of intent or fact. As I speak Wenglish much of the time the accent was definitely on the statement of fact rather than question emphasis.

Of course things are complicated when I speak because I went and left Wales and got Edjucated not only in the needs of English people and others who couldn’t understand a fast speaking heavily accented 17 year old, even though she spoke perfectly good English, but in my need to communicate. So put me in the heart of the Royal Welsh Agricultural Show and English friends think I am actually speaking in Welsh to farming friends, put me in lecture hall addressing a broad spectrum of people and words like Eweniversity will still be ‘wrong’ and r’s will still get rolled but there will also be traces of many of the other places I have lived. Growing up with a lilting musical language all around me both Wenglish and English as well as Welsh means that the accent is always part of the equation when it comes to communication.

I have also been told that my lack of punctuation is certainly a reflection of how I talk. Hey why breath when you can speak is what I say:0)

[Paul Tomblin]

Ok, I'm neither a lesbian or a gay male, but wouldn't the best response to a question like "ARE YOU A LESBIAN?" would be "Sorry, but I don't fancy you"?

[D-W]

Possibly your repost would be fine Paul if I thought being a lesbian was just about sex / fancying someone or that it is common occurrence to bang on a strangers door and demand they tell me their sexuality because there is some hidden law that demands everyone has the same sexuality as me.

Her question was neither invite or question not laced with negative connotation and accusation. Don't you think answering her question with your repost might have fed into her already badly informed mind and fed the fear she was so clearly demonstrating.

When was the last time someone screamed at you 'ARE YOU STRAIGHT!' and you answered 'Sorry but I don't fancy you?' I'd guess probably not recently or at all and I wonder if it has happened or were to happen without any connotation that it is a sexual enquiry whether you would respond with any allusion to 'fancying'.

You see, me being a Lesbian is not just a sexual thing, frankly if it was supposed to be I'd have left the 'ranks' with a dishonourable discharge for lack of active service but like you my sexuality informs my whole life, my view on the world and my interaction with it. It is not a coat I put on to go out on the prowl it is the who what and why of me. So, when someone questions that 'me' so vehemently even if it is absurdly, my only response can be one that emphasis the real joy, truth and enjoyment it is for me to find myself able to hold my hand up and my head for that matter and say 'Yes I am a lesbian, Great isn't it'

What I would wish for is not tolerance of me being 'less than normal' but acceptance that I am 'me' no more no less than the person who asks the question. A human being whose identity is bound up with her sexuality but this does not mean that lesbian spells sex.

[Rachael]

Just catching up. This post killed me.

I'm going to buy a condo and name it LesboCondoRow, and invite all my friends. oh, yes! S, this is WONDERFUL stuff. Good for you.

still giggling....

[wendy]

Oh my heavens .... it IS 2004! I wonder what she will do when she crosses your path while out walking in the future?