Virginia “Ginny” Taylor 

Odds and Ashes: A Litany for Many Voices

           
Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return. It’s Ash Wednesday, and I, a relative newcomer to this ritual of ash and repentance, sit in a pew in my Protestant church. As a child I had grown up in the shadows of the neighborhood Catholic parish. For years, I had puzzled over the mysterious, sooty crosses on the foreheads of my Catholic girlfriends, girls who told me they were forbidden to wash off the mark created by a priest on this day that begins Lent. With a thumb coated in holy ashes and a bit of blessed oil, he had touched their pure white foreheads and warned, Remember, you are dust. Dust, as in nothing, as in barely existent, as if any of us back then in 1969 needed any reminders. We were children meant to be seen and not heard. Certainly, we were not to question the authority of adults regardless of what they might say or do to us.

Now decades later, I am the adult waiting the moment when I will hear the same words and feel my pastor’s thumb cross on my forehead the dark smudge, the ashy conglomeration. Strangely, I cannot think of ashes without tasting them and the cigarettes that created them, back when I was a statistic and didn’t know it, when I was in college and was…

One out of every four young women who smoked. I was among the twenty-five percent who got buzzed on menthols, who practiced the art of inhaling alongside girlfriends. Still, I…

Remember that the real reason Cindy, Kristi and I took up smoking was to lose weight. It was a lost effort when we discovered burning tobacco tasted horrible, and so we all gave it up and tried other diets—like Atkins, grapefruits, and salads—to shrink our bodies for the frat boys. We were sure they would notice us if we could just lose five or ten or twenty pounds. Maybe if we lost thirty, one might fall in love with us. But we weren’t the only girls wanting to lose weight, since…

One out of every four college-aged women tries unhealthy ways to lose weight like fasting, skipping meals, excessive exercise, laxative abuse, and self-induced vomiting. In college, we knew a girl who would chew up her meatloaf or hot dog or mashed potatoes but not swallow it. Instead, she spit it all out into the cafeteria’s clear plastic glasses. Of course she lost weight though not to the severity where she ever looked anorexic. Instead, it was just enough that one day you might notice her jeans seemed baggier, her shirt hung looser. We all said it was a disgusting way to lose the “freshmen-20,” while secretly wondering how we might do the same thing without grossing everyone out spitting bits of masticated bun and ground meat into glasses on a cafeteria tray.

In contrast, wearing a few ashes from our menthol cigarettes seemed less of a public offense, even if our mothers found out we were smoking cigarettes. Surely smoking was a sin. But did we really care whether we were sinning or not? After all, when you’re young, confessing sins or pondering mortality is far from your mind, which is what you should think about when you hear the words…

Remember that you are dust. Except in college most of us girls quit remembering, stopped going to church, except for Cindy who continued to go to Catholic mass on Saturday nights while the rest of us primped and sucked our bellies into tight jeans for the evening’s party. Cindy eventually would iron her jeans and go out with us. Cindy ironed everything including her bed sheets. And only Cindy would be the one on a wintry Wednesday night to have a cross of ashes on her forehead. Now I confess I never wanted to understand her religion any more than she did mine, like why the silver cross around her neck had a little man hanging on it and mine was empty, or why she had to confess her sins to a priest, and I just had to tell Jesus. Instead back in those days, I dismissed faith altogether, hers and mine. I dismissed even the possibility of discovering what we shared in common, like how both of our mothers had hauled us off to church every Sunday for catechism or Sunday School—how they had made certain we wore the right clothes and had gloves and hats for Easter, how they might have stayed up late stitching our dresses, and then ironing them, pressing creases into sleeves and pleats. It turns out we were the lucky ones since our mothers only pressed their irons into our Sunday outfits where in far-off Cameroon…

One out of every four girls has her breasts ironed by her mother. Yes. A woman will grasp, not an electrical iron, but rather a heavy stone heated by a wood fire and press it against the developing nipples and breasts of her nine or ten-year-old daughter. The mother hopes by doing this the growth of her daughter’s blossoming bosom will be stunted so as not to attract men, men who will make the young girl pregnant, men who will cause her to drop out of school. This mother, like the thousands of other mothers in Cameroon, means well. They all want their daughters to be educated and maybe go off to college. So the mothers repeatedly apply hot stones to the chests of their daughters who cry with pain and shame, and in the end develop breasts anyways, but ones that are painful, scarred, deformed, marked. But, I say as I shake myself back to the present…

Remember that you are not living in Cameroon and never did. Your developing breasts were never subjected to being ironed with hot stones. You cannot imagine the pain, the blunting of what should naturally enhance your sexuality as a woman. Hot stones—a failed therapy leaving visible scars that you know must embarrass these girls when they undress in front of girlfriends, or boyfriends, or husbands. And, you wonder, what is more painful, the visible scars or the invisible ones?

For you know how hot the stones circling a wood fire can become. Once, as a child of ten, you were sent off to summer camp by your Presbyterian church where you sat around a campfire encircled by hot stones, telling ghost stories, singing songs, blackening hot dogs and marshmallows in the flames, mindful not to touch flesh to the fire or to the stones themselves because hot things burn. You remember how you once slid the point of your mother’s iron into the side of your finger, and a perfectly round, fluid-filled bubble erupted, like a white nipple. You touched it, felt the give and take of it, felt the stinging pain of it until it broke one day, and watery tears ran down the side of your finger.

But back at that summer of campfires when the man stroked you between your legs, there was no blister, there was no pain, there were no tears the moment you became a statistic, when the odds played you, and you became the…

One in every four girls sexually abused before turning eighteen. Of course my mother didn’t know this would happen when she drove away with tears in her eyes after dropping me off at camp. And here’s something else she didn’t know: girls who are molested more often than not know their molester well. It’s rarely the strange man in the car who offers you candy or a ride home. I was warned against those men, stayed away from them in parked cars, never took rides.

Instead, young girls should be warned about the men they trust, like a camp counselor with a grandfatherly face I called Uncle Jim, who completely forgot he was…

Dust, and to dust he would return, like the ashes of the campfire that possibly still smoked a bit that summer afternoon, the tendrils of gray drifting up to the sky while the ashes caught the breeze. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Ashes, ashes, we all fall down. In the cabin that afternoon, Uncle Jim forgot his vulnerability while taking advantage of mine, the same thing legions of other men forget or ignore. These men may not be greedy or commit murder or covet their neighbor’s wife. Instead, they will covet their neighbor’s daughter, and will sexually abuse…

One out of every four daughters by the time they reach womanhood, women who will also have a one in four chance of contracting herpes, or HPV, or gonorrhea, or other STDs. If young women are lucky enough to be sent off to college by well-meaning mothers, one in four will report surviving rape or an attempted rape. And on it goes throughout our lives until one out of every four women, whether near or far, will be mentally or physically abused during pregnancy.

Again and again, I scold myself for making too much of my sexual abuse, as I sit in the pew on this Ash Wednesday and…

Remember that I wasn’t raped. For decades I have told myself this over and over: I wasn’t raped, I wasn’t raped. I was only molested and should just get on with it. But the memory of a man’s hands pressing on my body has been burned into my soul, though at times the image of it blurs, grows smoky, almost disappears. And, then without warning, it suddenly flares, drifting up through gray matter into consciousness. I wish I didn’t remember. I wish I didn’t return again and again to the scene where I am the observer, hovering near a cabin ceiling, looking down on a little girl who stands awkwardly in front of a man who perpetually…

Returns to me as a presence, a phantom whenever I walk in woods smelling of pine or when I see a group of young girls. Even now, as I sit in this church pew, I see them—four teenaged girls in a skit just begun where a young adult male playing “God” chips away at their “sins.” Using a hammer and chisel, metal strikes against metal next to vulnerable, tender, female shoulders and arms and backs and legs as “God” like a master sculptor chisels away at the stone-like skin cells of greed, lust, anger. The invisible sins fall away like invisible dust.

The irony of a man playing God is lost on me while I sit here watching. I actually want to raise my hand, want to yell out: Me next! Chisel me! But instead of chipping away sin, chip away the ugly memory, the depression, the PTSD, the STD, the years of self-loathing. Chisel me away until I am close to dust, until there is only the barest heartbeat of an innocent ten-year-old child left, a child who will never have a memory of being molested. And then, I suddenly remember again that…

One in every four girls will be sexually abused by the time she is eighteen. And I look at the four teenage girls before me draped in their angelic white t-shirts, flinching under the chink-chink of the chisel. They are so young and so vulnerable. And I transpose the woundedness of sexual abuse onto one of them. I can’t help it. I can’t stop myself from thinking how one of them has the chance of having probably someone she knows—a counselor, a teacher, a coach, a minister, her father, her brother, someone playing God—who will sexually hurt her. Maybe she, too, in the future might sit in a pew, or in her car or on her bed, depressed and ashamed, yearning for a release from memory, wishing for the pain to be broken off into pieces of dust, waiting for the dust to drift away. Perhaps if the sexually abused bore physical wounds, like the girls from Cameroon with their charred and blistered breasts, we, too, could no longer be silenced and ignored. We, too, might receive international attention, or a campaign pledge, so that we too might gain some feathery ounce of hope that such odds would not continue against girls and women, our sisters, our daughters.

My pastor calls those of us wishing to receive the ashes to come forward. I stand in line as all of us make our way towards the front of the sanctuary to receive this mark of feathery gray dust, of nothingness, really. The pastor takes his thumb, dabs it into the sooty mix, and then presses thumb, ashes, oil, and words into my forehead, saying…

“Remember, you are dust and to dust you shall return.” I watch him make the same mark on the tender foreheads of the four young girls in their white t-shirts, of the young man who played God, of other men, women, children. A hymn begins and I try to sing. In a subconscious gesture, I brush hair off my forehead and bump the cross. Crusty ashes flake off and tumble down onto my shirt next to dark, wet spots. Ashes, ashes, we all fall down in a world where the odds on the journey to happiness and wholeness appear weighted against women as if stones have been tied to our ankles, or put into our pockets, and we have been asked swim the ocean.

Yet, tonight something shifts somewhere in a place I can’t quite name. Maybe it’s in my soul or in my bones or heart. It’s ever so soft and light—the heft of a single ash itself—yet ever so sure and true. With it comes a resurgence of weariness, but this time not the weariness of depression, but a new weariness over the time I’ve lost while seeing myself as a victim, a statistic. Is this feeling, this still, new voice asking me if I’m ready to burn the odds themselves to ashes? Is it asking me to really look at who I think I am with fresh eyes, ones that will look beyond what I’ve done or had done to me?

Now, look now, and don’t stop looking, the voice seems to urge. Is the voice from Him, the old stereotypical Him, chipping away at my old self? Or could it be from Her, soothing, nourishing, encouraging me to take this grace that is being offered, to heal, to move on? Years later, I’d like to think its origins feminine, but the truth is I still don’t know the answer.

The service ends. I sit in silence for a few more moments before walking through the church doors out into the cold winter night. In the morning, my pastor will walk through these same doors, taking the unused ashes outside to return them to the earth. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Here, against the dead grass and frozen ground of winter, the ashes will settle into the darkness of Mother Earth. It’s here in this mysterious and holy place where the ashes from last year’s Palm Sunday palm branches will finally return to the dust from which they sprang.

And it’s here where the melting snows of spring will nourish and softly whisper to the tender shoots of grass: Grow. Grow through the ashes and dirt and stones. Grow beyond it all. Grow towards the light.




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Virginia “Ginny” Taylor graduated from Ashland University with an MFA in creative nonfiction, August 2011. Her work has appeared in Soundings Review, This I Believe: On Love, Hiram, U.S.A., and is forthcoming in the 10th Anniversary edition of Kansas City Voices. She has been accepted to a residency at Writers in the Heartland where she plans to devote her writing energies on a manuscript tentatively titled Song for a Castrato.