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girl of eighteen on the Maine coast is
fetching back to early childhood—Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950).
Beside me are two long, slender white wands from which I have been peeling
the bark for ribbons (with primitive implements of sharp teeth and nails). I
taste again the sweetness of the smooth round stick in my mouth. I see again
the moist, delicate green of the bark’s lining. And into my nostrils I breathe
the hot spicy fragrance until my very soul is steeped in it.Instinctively she goes into present tense to bring past time and place alive,
overlaying that memory with the moment of writing: “I taste again ... I see
again.”
As she verges on adulthood, this journal journey takes her back “Through
a meadow where at every step I had to pick the violets to clear a place for my
feet,” and up a “path to a secret spot where fox-berries grew bigger, sweeter and
more plentifully than anywhere else in the world” (she knewthat, did she?). “I
liked the old white house and the vivid grass around it. I loved the blackberries
and the hill.” On finding this once-loved place, “I caught my breath in an ecstasy
of recognition.” This is the woman now remembered as a 1920s Greenwich
Village libertine.
Nineteenth-century Camden, Maine, on Penobscot Bay, held plenty for any
child: the sea for sailing, rowing, canoeing, swimming, Megunticook River and
Lake, woods and fields rife with trees, flowers, berries, all ringed by hills that
“There, there where those black spruces crowd”
To Steepletop and Ragged Island
with Edna St. Vincent Millay
It is a hot summer afternoon. The air is drowsy with the sweetness
of the tiny trumpet-shaped flowers above my head, and, save for
the monotonous droning of many bees, there is no sound anywhere.A