Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
By the spring, I'd been doing this meditation for a few months and felt adventurous enough one Saturday morning to drag myself out of bed at seven, wash my face, drink a cup of coffee, then head out for yard sales with the local paper in hand. I had only the set of table and chairs I'd dragged around with me since my teenage marriage home, the rocker I'd been glued to, a desk, a bed, a bureau, and a small advance to write a novel I hadn't even begun. So, I was really going on a furniture-scavenging excursion. My first stop was a contents-of-house sale, which usually means the owner has died. The place was a homely little aluminum-sided, post-Korean War affair, which I almost drove right by; but I made the decision to be open and not pass judgments. It was only seven-thirty and the sign said No Early Birds, but the husky little boy guarding the back door let me in. There were a few others already milling around the kitchen, whose cupboard contents had been piled onto the Formica table. I picked up a few shot glasses, because I had none, then walked into the living room.
While my house continued to fill with Marys (on a felt banner as the Virgin of Guadalupe, she stood at the top of the stairs; in a small bedroom I planned to turn into my shrine room, she was a regal queen wearing a jeweled crown, with all of humanity nestled in her cape), I went outside my third spring in Orient and started to dig. I dug a garden along the back fence and a plot twenty feet by six in the lawn. I pulled onion grass for so many hours that when I closed my eyes at night I saw the white bulbs traveling through the earth like sperm. The sun warmed the back of my neck as my fingers reached into the damp earth like they were roots themselves. I stayed out in the rain. I kneeled in the mud; I didn't answer the phone. I had new deadlines: a bed to dig, seedlings to transplant, mulching, watering, feeding to do.
That summer I grew a dozen herbs; Borghese, San Remo, and cherry tomatoes so sweet they gave me a sugar rush. I grew beans and peppers, lettuces, squash, garlic. My sunflowers grew taller than my clothesline pole; my basil plants were as high as my hip. The hollyhocks towered over my shed. And the Canterbury bells grew into the purple trumpet flowers from my meditations three winters ago. The purple trumpets grew so abundantly and for so long I thought that surely my envisioning them day after day had nourished the real flowers as much as the vision had nourished me.
In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin's name was Mary. And he came to her and said, "Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you." But she was much perplexed by these words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. Then the angel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will call him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High." . . . Mary said to the angel, "How can this be, since I am a virgin?" The angel said to her, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Highest will overshadow you; therefore, the child to be born will be holy; he will be called the Son of God. And now your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. For nothing will be impossible with God." Then Mary said, "Here I am, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word." Then the angel departed from her.
-The Gospel According to Luke
Mary did not just fall down on her knees and submit to whatever the angel from God proposed to her. She wondered what exactly this angel was saying, so the angel rushed to assure her that she would not be the only one giving birth under miraculous circumstances. The angel had visited Elizabeth too; Elizabeth had been barren but was now pregnant. The young cousin and the old cousin would have babies six months apart; their children would both be prophets. Elizabeth's was John the Baptist. When Mary hears that she is not alone, that her cousin will accompany her on this strange journey-and no doubt give her strength and support-she takes heart. She believes that this angel in front of her is no hallucination, and courageously finds the faith to accept her fate. And so Mary says graciously, "Let it be . . . ," then wastes no time in departing to visit Elizabeth.
—Reprinted from Looking for Mary by Beverly Donofrio by permission of Viking Books, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. Copyright (c) 2000 Beverly Donofrio. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
