Jewell Tweedt: Congratulations & a Giveaway!

Congratulations on seven years of blogging and on your wedding anniversary! I just finished reading your book, The Wedding Journey, and loved the adventures of Maeve and her sisters as they travel to America. 

To help you celebrate I'd like to offer a free giveaway of my western romance, Faith of the Heart, to one reader of your blog who then leaves a comment on my blog.  I will send that reader an autographed copy or the Kindle version.

Leave a message on Jewell's blog by clicking here

I found this Erica Jong poem I kept for years when I was thinking about writing. It spoke to me then and still does. I'll bet it will to your blog readers. My mother had typed it for me on an old cursive typewriter some 20 plus years ago. The paper is yellow and wrinkled, but I was happy to find it. 

Jewell


Woman Enough

Because my grandmother's hours
were apple cakes baking,
and dust motes gathering,
and linens yellowing
and seams and hems
inevitably unraveling-
I almost never keep house-
though really I like houses and wish I had a clean one

Because my mother's minutes
were sucked into the roar
of the vacuum cleaner,
because she waltzed with
the washer-dryer
and tore her hair waiting
for repairmen

I send out my laundry,
I live in a dirty house,
though I really like clean houses
as well as anyone.

I am woman enough
to love the kneading
of bread

as much as the feel of typewriter keys
under my fingers-
springy, springy,
and the smell of clean laundry
and simmering soup
are almost as dear to me
as the smell of paper and ink.

I wish there were not a choice;
I wish I could be two women.
I wish the days could be longer.
But they are short.
So I write while the dust piles up.

I sit at my typewriter
remembering my grandmother
and all my mothers,
and the minutes they lost
loving houses better than
themselves-
and the man i love cleans up the kitchen
grumbling only a little
because he knows
that after all these centuries
it is easier for him
than for me.  

        -Erica Jong