Ask anyone about a period of time or a specific event in their life that separates their conscious experience into “before” and “after” and they’ll have an answer. We are not always aware when we cross these thresholds in time, but the gift of retrospection brings such delineations into clear focus. For Hester “Lee” Furey, a Candler Park resident of nearly a decade, her house in Midway Woods defines the split.
“It’s hard to keep wood houses in the South,” she says to me. She explains further, mentioning the heavy rainfall and lack of notable winter freezes to stop the growth of mold in its tracks. For the years leading up to 2015, mold had been growing in the floor and attic of her Midway Woods home. While the mold presented a problem in and of itself, the real issue was the springtails – tiny bugs with barbed tails – that fed on the mold. The bugs would stab Lee’s legs and ankles, causing an itch that never seemed to
dissipate. She couldn’t identify the source of the itch, however, only its presence.
Friends began unintentionally gaslighting her, telling her it was all in her head. For a stretch, Lee felt like she was losing her mind.
Fortunately for Lee, after mold remediation completed in December of 2015 she found some kind of peace: “I walked into the house and sensed quiet.” Shortly after the experience, Lee had to downsize, selling the home and moving in with a friend in Reynoldstown. As for how Lee handled the mix of emotions that swirled around the bugs, the mold, and the move, she turned to a familiar tool: poetry.
“I think of [poetry] as a problem-solving technology,” Lee says. She began writing poetry in middle school as a way to make sense of her feelings brought on by a difficult home life. Then, and now, poems were a way for Lee to put her experiences into a container. “Put a problem over here and work on it in a text instead of it preoccupying my everyday consciousness,” she explains to me. Despite the personal, emotional nature of Lee’s approach to poetry, her work often takes on a biographical style. Reading one of her poems is like observing a person in a moment in time, snapshots of experience that may span ages or lifetimes, all from the third person. Whether the poem is about Oppenheimer, Gertrude Stein, or herself, many are recounting what the individual is doing, thinking, and feeling.
Lee explains that it is not her writing the poems, rather her “poetic alter-ego, ‘the Skeleton Woman’”. “I didn’t want to be a bore, a poet who always uses ‘I’ in everything,” she tells me with a wry smile. Perhaps we can thank Sexton or Dickinson, two inspirations for Lee that she says “gave [her] permission to write about [her]self and [her] life”, for giving her the courage to aim the Skeleton Woman’s lens at her own
experiences. Or maybe we can thank Yeats, who showed her that she could change and live many lives, and the Skeleton Woman is a parallel life observing past versions of Lee.
Either way, Lee tells me these days literary historians inspire her more than poets. This interest aligns with her own career as a literary historian and English professor (and explains the full bookshelves on the majority of her walls – although this sight is surely common in any poet’s abode). Lee tells me that in her research she discovered that William Carlos Williams, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict all had experiences with bugs that may have been their own before-and-after moments in life. Uncovering this
shared trauma gave Lee some solace.
Lee’s latest collection of poems, House of Jars, includes works that explore the conflicting feelings related to preservation and letting go she faced when choosing what to keep when moving from her Midway Woods home into the smaller house in Reynoldstown. When asked how she feels about having to let go of that house, now a decade ago, Lee shrugs. “I’m living the life I want to live. I wake up in peace each
morning,” she tells me.
Those interested in Lee’s work and stories may find her around the neighborhood, as she prefers to shop local and is very community-minded. She periodically hosts events at Bibliotech in Little Candler Park (with the next tentatively in April) and is planning an event for Women’s History Month in March of next year. You can also catch her at the Georgian Gallery in McDonough on March 28th. A sample of her work is included below.
Salve, Spider
More like Walt’s than Jonathan’s, and tiny herself,
she’s come to hunt the specks of water bugs
that enter through ungrouted cracks
of an old house in a nice neighborhood.
I’ve been pouring basil oil into the house,
heading them off her way.
Fearless – when I put my finger into the sink
to keep her from needless drawing, she
hops on board, ready to ride this possible disaster.
Gentle, I shake her away behind the drainpipe.
Dislocation and ephemeral suspension are her jam.
Weightless, still, she has a gravity, this guru.
Willa Cather had it right:
at times we travel fastest by storm.