bitters: the widow's ribbon.

Tarot Card of the Day: Death (in Reverse)

This morning, I placed a widow’s ribbon on my dresser. My altar, really. I think the top of every woman’s dresser is an altar—a small, sacred space for the little bits and scraps of life we need visible in the morning and evening. Mine holds a small knife, crystals, slips of paper with wishes scribbled on them—and now, the widow’s ribbon.

It once wrapped around curtain rods that came with the house. Small, lingering remnants of a former owner, now gone. Before her, her husband died. The neighbors still call her “the widow who lived here before you.” Why the ribbon? I’m not sure.

Recently, I listened to an audiobook of a hardback I first read seven years ago. In it, the author claims that every woman, somewhere between her late thirties and early forties, must face the choice of whether or not she will become bitter.

When I was in my twenties, bitterness felt inevitable—like taxes, old age, or death.

But so far, my thirties have read like a male redemption arc. I can name at least two men I like. More accurately: two men I consciously choose to tolerate. Am I bitter? Perhaps it’s a rational conclusion.

My horoscope today: “Now is the time to release the way you’ve been relating to 'the masculine' for the last 19 years.”

Nineteen years ago? When I was 18? I’m not sure I’d met a man yet, though I knew a couple of boys. It seems simple enough. I could keep one around. Something to talk about when I was with the girls.

Under a new moon in Taurus, I bathed in rose salt—not because I felt dirty, but because I longed for clarity. Earlier that day, I dusted the top of my husband’s dresser. My husband—one of the two men I consciously choose to tolerate. Love is strange that way. You can love and still need to tolerate.

I dusted his pocket knife, a baseball cap, a neatly folded American flag in a box, a flashlight, and spent gun shell casings. And I realized—we’re not so different, after all. Men have altars on their dressers too. What is the flag from his father’s funeral if not a very large widower’s ribbon?

Suddenly, I felt open—like maybe I’ve misunderstood men just as much as they’ve misunderstood me.

Alas! Perhaps? I am not bitter after all!

:-D