Women history The City.
At the Museum of Women Plantman saw: The “Clothing Collection”: Silk and satin traces. Centuries-old skirts and dresses; Summer frocks of decades past. Wardrobes. Fashion. Chic aged to antique.
Pinned to every skirt dress blouse a brief descriptive card: Year, value. Year, value.
Clothing once alive with women, once women-animated clothes. Once women of The City. Anticipating nights, inhaling cricket air of parks and gardens. Exhale. City engine of oblivion. Gone lithe beauties; gone buxom matrons cherished secrets of their own.
Once moments lived, once birth to ash. Once striving, music of their day days women of The City.
“Memoir Exhibit”: Journals, diaries, letters, postcards, notebooks under glass. Read private prose: letters to lovers, friends.
Lock of hair from a famous poetess—age seventeen two hundred years ago—clipped, sent to her beau. Light brown flecked with gold, as if sheared off a teenage head just yesterday.
“Photographs Exhibit”: Moments of women living City lives. Dressing, undressing, walking, talking, working, loving. What thoughts thought before the flash and shutter-wink of lens, time before death left only ghost-shadows to ponder?
Other Exhibits: “Women at Home”; “Women at Work;” “Women’s Gardens”: profound relationships with plants and herbs.
Plantman left the place aroused, exhausted, yearning. His head spun images of women.
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