Mount Modjeska

Posted on May 24, 2003 in Book of Days

Note: This is part of a series based on exercises from A Writer’s Book of Days. It’s something of a rebellion against the Friday Five and similar tupperware content memes.

Today’s topic: Write about something you see every day.

I’m a hermit. What I know best are the desk where I work on the computer, the smoke blue carpet stretching the length and breadth of the condo, the oaken kitchen table with its round-topped arm chairs, and the off-white interior side of the front door. I’ve been known not to go out for days unless provoked by Lynn, a knock at the door, or a schedule that I have to keep.

Sometimes, though, I make myself go out on the deck to look at the dark golden pyramid of Mount Modjeska which I can see between the condos across the street. I love to trace the steep ravine that drops from the sharp peak down the side like the frontal creases of a woman’s hips and thighs. A road stretches through it like a low, insufficient chastity belt. She’s brown and tinged with aphrodesiac green and red, now, but I have seen her, too wearing a modesty veil of light snow.

It is appropriate to call this mountain a “she” because the summit is named for Helena Modjeska, a Shakespearean actress of the 19th Century who made her home in the womb of this range, in a live oak and alder woodland that she called the Forest of Arden.

My mother once referred to her as a “courtesan”. I was indignant. It is no more fair to a woman of the stage to call her such than to call every woman who models nude a whore or a slut.

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Tomorrow’ topic/prompt: You are listening to the radio.