Us and Ella Mason

It was a typical day in the life of two young bitties: we fed our stray cat, poured glasses of wine, and began to read aloud some poetry. A little poetry reading, if you will. It was an evening for Sylvia Plath. Now one can not truly call Sylvia a "spinster;" she was married with two children. But her poetry gave away the isolation she felt and perhaps that isolated life she longed for. It was too coincidental that I stumbled upon this poem: 

Spinster

by Sylvia Plath

Now this particular girl
During a ceremonious april walk
With her latest suitor
Found herself, of a sudden, intolerably struck
By the birds' irregular babel
And the leaves' litter.

By this tumult afflicted, she
Observed her lover's gestures unbalance the air,
His gait stray uneven
Through a rank wilderness of fern and flower;
She judged petals in disarray,
The whole season, sloven.

How she longed for winter then! --
Scrupulously austere in its order
Of white and black
Ice and rock; each sentiment within border,
And heart's frosty discipline
Exact as a snowflake.

But here -- a burgeoning
Unruly enough to pitch her five queenly wits
Into vulgar motley --
A treason not to be borne; let idiots
Reel giddy in bedlam spring:
She withdrew neatly.

And round her house she set
Such a barricade of barb and check
Against mutinous weather
As no mere insurgent man could hope to break
With curse, fist, threat
Or love, either.

This poem exemplified, yet again, the choice of indulging in solitude. It also was relatable  in its sense of youth, as the poet's diction implies this by "this particular girl"  and "during a ceremonious april walk"--april representing spring therefore signifying the beginning (or the youth) of a new season, a new year. The idea of isolation (spinsterhood) as a choice is conveyed through lines such as  "How she longed for winter then! -- Scrupulously austere in its order." Where the poem hits this old heart heart the hardest, though, is the last stanza. Although it evokes a sense of bitterness, it truly unites all the spinsters of the world, and so this blog goes out to all the bitties, young and old. It seems silly, but there should be a community within the barriers of spinsterhood. How else will we cope? If we do not have another fellow bitty to gripe with and at. So my spinster-mate and I continued to read the cold and daunting lines of Plath and nearly fell off the couch when we stumbled upon a poem called Ella Mason and Her Eleven Cats. Please, if time allows, give it a read. It really touches on the life of spinsterhood, quite comically. 

I was thinking of ways in how to reach out to my fellow lonely ladies and it hearkened back to a time when I sent an anonymous letter to an anonymous woman. I randomly thumbed through the yellow pages looking for a single woman--older, preferably. At first it was a game of closing my eyes and pointing to a place on the rumpled, yellowed page. After countless attempts, I landed on a woman who I will give the name Beatrice. It was apparent she lived alone, so I scrawled down her address, and began to write her a letter. I wrote to her about all the small mundane lovelies that crowded my heart. I wrote to her about the poppies blooming in my apartment complex, how that small patch of dirt in an overwhelming concrete jungle just didn't serve them justice. It was all jabber, but I wrote away and ignored every sentimental sentence couched in broken syntax and marked by dashes or scribbled out words. I folded the letter, sealed it, stamped it, and slid it through the mail slot, with no return address. I sometimes wonder how she received that letter. Perhaps it was a good thing to put no return address--she may have sent me a letter back telling me to shove off. But regardless, this made me feel a little more connected to my side of humanity: the side us independent, lonely ladies pull to. So if you're a young bitty, and you're reading this, reach out to your fellow spinster! If you happen to be a solitary man reading this, you're considered a bachelor, and I don't feel as sorry for you. 

P.S. This is what I would imagine Ella Mason, who has eleven cats, to look like:

or maybe this: