Winter of '88

Copyright 2010
Judith J. Bentley

When I was 43 years old in the Winter of '88 for forty bucks, I took a seminar through the University of Richmond's Women's Resource Center.  It was titled "Nature, Literature and You."  It lasted 4 weeks from January 12 through February 2.  We met from 10 a.m. til 12:30 p.m. and our "classroom" was the out-of-doors--fields and forests, riverbanks and rocks, parks and wetlands.  The seminar provided an opportunity for us to explore our natural world and contemplate our place in it.   We read from Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, Jack London, Doris Lessing, Annie Dillard, Hermann Hess and Carl Sandburg among others.  Temple Martin, a sculptor with a Masters in Humanities who had taught at the Collegiate School, was the originator and leader of the class.  Her selections for our study and discussion spoke of our spiritual connection to nature and its gifts to us.  We were asked to keep a journal and invited to share our writing on the themes Temple assigned us -- essence, cold, perspective and connections.

We took field trips each Saturday around Richmond, including, of course, "the Rivah," Belle Isle and the Pony Pasture (both in James River Park), the Pipeline in downtown Richmond, and the Roslyn Conference Center in Henrico County.  On our last trek through one of Richmond's nature trails, Temple brought a big thermos of hot chocolate to share.  We all sat on logs in the woods and drank our hot chocolate in the freezing cold.  One of the women in the group was the wife of a Richmond Circuit Court Judge, Willard I. Walker, who had passed away several months before. She shared how she had chosen a huge boulder as a monument for her husband's gravesite.  It was an unusual marker for a grave site especially in Hollywood Cemetery where he is buried.  I had had the privilege of serving as his personal paralegal on a products liability case.  I remember how kind and quiet he was and I also remember his secretary telling me he didn't particularly care for the two plaintiff's attorneys I worked for.  He liked me though because I knew the difference between a pre-trial, trial and post-trial pleading unlike the other paralegals at Hunton & Williams.  I organized his court file for him in that case which my attorneys lost. It is strange what the mind remembers.  I even remember his middle initial after all these years.

During the class I was inspired to write a number of poems and one other member of the group, an excellent photographer whose name was Lucile Miller, took the most amazing photographs of places we had explored. She made the rocks and the water look sensuous like female anatomy.  At the end of the class, Temple had the bright idea to exhibit the poems and photographs along with her sculpture and paintings in the Women's Resource Center at the University.   I have saved the photographs I took though they are not as good as Lucile's and put them in a scrapbook with my poems.  Maybe you will find them one day.