I’m here for a day-long poetry workshop with twenty other women, in a historic casa with soaring ceilings and hardwood floors. Windows open to a vista of southern California ocean and beach. “Explore,” our teacher says. I wander through the rooms and stop at one. Mahogany glass-fronted cases display the wealth of 19th Century Californians and the treasures they brought back from their travels abroad. One case is filled with carved ivory including a tiny pair of embroidered Chinese slippers, as small as a doll’s shoe. The card says the shoes were used to bind infant girls’ feet—elephant ivory, the tiny shoes. Every culture has its sad artifacts. 

I move to the next case—Delft plates, Rookwood pottery. My grandmother collected Rookwood. She made beautiful quilts, one with a patch for each state and the state bird and flower embroidered in it.  She crocheted intricate doilies that resemble mandalas. I framed them on velvet and hung them on my walls. 

The skills of women in my family were taken for granted, assumed. Of course, they could upholster a sofa using a small Singer sewing machine. Or have their children sketch a shirt or dress they liked in a department store window and sew an exact copy for them in a day. A beautiful meal for ten, last-minute?—no problem. I wonder what these women could have accomplished if advanced education had been provided or encouraged.

Many years ago, I went to a convent boarding school in St. Louis run by an order of nuns that so excelled at business they operated schools and hospitals throughout the state, like CEOs of large companies, while all the while teaching us Latin, Chaucer, Art, and Algebra, and, of course, typing in a class highly recommended as sensible. They had no husbands or children to care for—a trade-off, I guess. I’m old enough to remember how exciting it was when things began to change for women in the ’60s. I was in a consciousness-raising group in West Los Angeles one evening back then when a woman my mother’s age stood and said, “I want a raise, not a rose.” I was impressed at how outspoken she was.

Home from the poetry workshop, I take note of my own artifacts: the handprint of my daughter pressed into clay and dated, her kindergarten gift to me. The picture of her dismounting a horse at her first riding lesson. The photos she takes of hawks, ospreys, herons, and snowy egrets in the reserve near her home. My album of old pictures and fading Polaroids: Mother dressed in overalls, patriotic, working in a factory during World War II as many women did then. When the war ended so did her working career, and she returned to cooking, sewing, raising children. Those nuns in their stiff white wimples, black robes, rimless glasses, taught us to be future wives and mothers, although they denied those roles to themselves. Having it all wasn’t spoken about by that generation. As I’ve grown older, my understanding of their lives has deepened. That day at the Casa, wandering through rooms of memories, brought it all forward.