About

You all know the myth. The one about pomegranates, Hades, spring, rape…Well in case you don’t it goes a bit like this:

Once upon a time when she was playing in a flowery meadow with her Nymph companions, Persephone was seized by Hades and carried off to the underworld to be his bride. Her mother Demeter was distraught at her disappearance and searched for her throughout the world. When she learned that Zeus (her father) had conspired in Persephone’s abduction she was furious, and refused to let the earth fruit until she was returned. Finally, Zeus, pressed by the cries of the hungry people, forced Hades to return Persephone. Before she was released, Hades tricked her into eating pomegranate seeds which bound her to forever spend a part of the year with him as his wife. It is said that, “after much protest, Persephone came to love the cold blooded king of the underworld but her mother, Demeter, was consumed with rage and sorrow.” Her annual return to earth is marked by the beginning of spring and the flowering of the meadows and the sudden growth of the new grain. Her return to the underworld is marked by winter and the dying down of plants.

So, who am I? I am Jennifer Elle Lewis. Why am I writing about all of this?

Since I was raised on mythology, I took to this myth from a very young age. I think it began with my childhood fascination with Autumn and pomegranates, and my father’s desire to educate me to the deeper meanings and history embedded in daily life. Every fall, we would eat a pomegranate, and he would tell us, again, of Persephone, while we all dug away at the labyrinth of fruit chambers, trying not to stain ourselves or the tablecloth.

Years later, after my father passed, I went to visit my grandfather. A ramshackle man who believed fully in the beauty of decaying aluminum car parts,  ancient metal farm equipment and basically all things tin and/or rusty. These icons were proudly kept in heaps on his lawn and were inhabited by numerous cats, about 30 at any given spring when they seemed to regenerate themselves in new batches. My grandfather always graciously offered me a cat or two upon each visit, and I always politely declined.

One spring I went for a visit, and as usual was offered a cat. But this trip was different somehow. You see, prior to the visit my mother mentioned a mole problem in her yard, and suggested getting a “barn cat” to remedy this. So when my grandfather said to me:

“HEy Jenny! Take one of ‘em cats, will ya!?”

I actually considered his offer. When he followed that statement with:

“‘…Cause I’m gonna die soon…I wanna give you sumpthin’ to remember me by. Take one of ‘em cats!!!” then proceeded to waddle over with cane in hand to pick up a cute gray cat by the neck and hand it to me, I couldn’t refuse. In fact, I was so convinced, I nervously took four.

To make a long story a bit less long, I named one of these scrapyard cats Persephone. Persephone, sadly, was hit by a car when she was only a few months old. That day I was digging fish heads into the vegetable garden to produce better tomatoes (Jersey pride) and I walked up to the road and found her. I carried her small body into the greenhouse and I sobbed and my cries echoed against the glass and back again to me.

Later we took her to the vet and had her cremated. We brought the ashes home and like most things in old Victorian homes, they seem to have gotten sucked up into the ether. When it came time to scatter them in the mole-free yard, they were nowhere to be found.

Call it clumsy. This is just a part of the “oh well” mentality that goes along with most things lost here. I suspect we will find all these things; my shells from Tonga, the spare part to the vacuum cleaner, my 80′s mix tapes, that essay Camille Paglia gave me an A+ on, and oh yeah, Persephone’s ashes, one day after a massive cleaning. They will just arrange themselves in a neat line, smirking.

One evening in Barcelona, in a scene that would live up to any sentence beginning with “one evening in Barcelona” we got on to the subject of my grandfather and his cats. While retelling the story, and with a glass of red wine I said:

“The ashes of Persephone are in my mother’s house, lost somewhere.”

And laughed.