Shannon O’Donovan
Writing for LVMM/Muncy
Spiritual Autobiography Exchange
6th April 2022
Dear Heather,
When I said to my husband I was going to be doing a spiritual autobiography in partnership with a woman incarcerated in Muncy Prison in Pennsylvania, he said to me, “Why? So you can tell her how great your life is out here and make her feel bad about her life in there?” My husband is from Cork and, well, they're plain speaking people (e.g. completely tactless and rude). After giving out to him for being “plain speaking,” I also reflected that he had a point: Because no matter how rubbish I think my life is, and no matter how gracefully and purposefully you live yours, there is an inherent imbalance in this exchange.
So I am going to need your help in telling me when (not if, it will be a when) I stick my well-meaning foot in it about absolutely anything. Like now, for instance – too much honesty? But I really do value honesty over polite seething and gritted teeth any day of the week, and I hope you do too.
Also, just a heads up: my spiritual autobiography should probably come with a health warning. It is pretty grim at times because that's how childhood and adolescence was for me – a time of surviving a lot of crazy and inappropriate adult behavior and then getting out as quickly as I could. Lots of therapy and many years later, I find that speaking about this and them is still a difficult and wrenching experience – as I discovered when trying to write pieces and share them with my fellow Quakers for this spiritual autobiography. Their stories were a lot more upbeat to say the least! But at the end of the day, this is who I am and this is where I come from and this is what has made me into me and I'll not apologize for that, because at the end of the day, I actually quite like the me I am today, warts and all.
So after that build up, it better be good, eh? Here goes!
The Poem of Me
I am from Joan and Butch, Orla and Milton, Margaret and Frank.
From the swamp of South Florida and the live-oak Spanish-moss covered trees of North Central Florida.
From the bridges that split in two to let the sailboats through and leave traffic tangled up for hours.
And the giant flying palmetto bugs hiding in the sawgrass, cottonmouths, rattlers, black widows, brown recluse, the intracoastal, the intercoastal, canals, rickety fishing boats and fancy sea cruisers.
I am from cream of mushroom soup casserole eaters, fresh off-the-vine watermelon, honeydew and cantaloupe eaters, and Pepperidge Farm microwave meals eaters.
I am from book and music lovers, alcoholics, middle-class racists, atheists and Southern Baptist evangelists.
From family secret keepers and ancestral evil deeds never talked about openly.
I am from “Bless your little old heart.” “Come here and give me some sugar.” “Pretty is as pretty does.” “That school made you think you were smarter than you are.” “You're trying. You're trying all right. You are the most trying person I know.” “I know why you don't come home anymore. Marriage is a serious institution. Don’t expect anyone in the family to talk to you again if you leave him.”
I am from “We go to church but we don't believe in God” Methodist, “You're going to hell if you don't believe like a Southern Baptist.” From doctors, dentists, teachers, engineers, dieticians, shop owners, house wives, the Junior League, Daughters of the American Revolution and Daughters of the Confederacy, women who proudly erased themselves, even their birth name, when a man put a ring on their finger, and Southern men who believed women, children and property were one category.
I am from a tire swing hanging on the giant live oak by our house, Dorothy my imitation Victorian china doll dressed in the scraps of mother's pink floral silk dress, seven rescued white cats with yellow eyes and ears that burned and bled in the Florida sun, Christie my miniature black-and-gold hen turned feral and living in the woods with her illicit brood of savage chicks, fireflies, skies of the deepest sapphire blue, heat lightning flashing and thunder booming so loudly I hid in the pantry with my sister because it was the only room without windows.
My own sweet dance unfolding against the cast of tubing down the Crystal River, sitting in the sinkhole making mud cakes and little grey clay pinch pots, watching the humming birds at dusk sip from the hibiscus flowers growing by the front porch, everyone voting Democrat for the Georgia peanut farmer Jimmy Carter because he was “one of us,” reading Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, The Bobbsey Twins, Gone with the Wind, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, All Creatures Great and Small, listening endlessly to mother's music, Johnny Mathis, Gilbert and Sullivan, the Kingston Trio, Simon and Garfunkel, Abba, hymns and old folk songs pounded out on an upright piano and shouted out by a tone deaf mother with great enthusiasm .
My own sweet dance unfolding against a cast of bitter, rigid women, kind neighbors and absent but well-meaning men.
Take care and hope to hear from you soon.
Shannon
Postscript: I posted this letter to Heather through the mail but unfortunately she never received it. We tried again after a month had passed and Joyce kindly facilitated communication through the prison texting system. It was expensive and fiddly to try to do from Ireland via Pennsylvania so after the first lovely text I received from Heather via Joyce, I didn’t hear anything again. It made me reflect on how much I take for granted the simple act of connecting and communicating with anyone I choose when I choose and the frightening power of the state to make communicating for those serving prison terms an expensive, time consuming, uncertain process.