She took piano lessons when she was nine in Blacksburg; the teacher talked about how language is like music. That’s when the serious little girl first began toying with writing poetry. It was the medicine that helped her get through a childhood so tragic that she can’t talk about it now.
“Later I read E.A. Poe, and listened to Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen,” said Laura Washington, 51, whose pen name is Rose. Cohen’s “The Stranger Song” struck a real chord with Washington, who has felt like an outsider since she suffered from a nervous breakdown in her twenties. She attended Virginia Tech for several years (studying philosophy and business) before the panic attacks became so severe that she had to drop out.
Some thirty years later she is the mother of a fine, red-haired, accomplished son. “George is a senior, graduating in the spring from the School of Chemical Engineering at the University of Virginia,” Washington said, her china blue eyes dancing with pride. She is now a philosopher and a published poet, a rummy player and most recently — a bride — as of the fourteenth of November. But she also lives in a shadowy, assisted living facility for mentally ill adults, where she will continue to reside with her new groom.
“I’ve been in and out of mental hospitals and adult homes since I was in my twenties,” admitted Washington. There’s a brilliant, light quality to her smile that unleashes itself when she launches into soft, undulating ripples of laughter. A reporter recently asked her if she was at all mad at God for the fact that she is a brave and bright woman who, in a sense, fell through society’s cracks. She answered with part of one of her poems entitled “Everything’s Okay.”
Everything’s okay in an ultimate way,
Everything’s fine, thine and mine,
The course thread,
The crust of bread,
The fingered tear, the Savior fair.
Her work in The Snow Child, Selected Works of Lala seems inspired by other greats ranging from Shakespeare to Gertrude Stein. “I started writing, in earnest, after a tumultuous divorce,” said Washington; “I wrote four volumes of my anthology by the time I was forty.”
An ongoing struggle for the bride/poet now is the onslaught of environmental stimuli that fills her head all at once, resulting in anxious, depressive episodes and headaches. That’s when she finds her identity as a poet as cathartic as the work itself. “The poet becomes a friend somewhere in time and space, a kindred spirit, with recognition of a lonely circumstance,” said Washington.
She was living in the Richmond area when her son was small and another serious depressive episode hit. “My ex-husband (George’s father) was rich, so I let him rear George, but I visited twice a week,” said Washington, who is still friends with her son’s father.
Washington moved back to Blacksburg after George had grown tall as a sturdy, oak tree. But the talented Rose had seen better days; she moved to an adult home in Southwestern Virginia soon after. It’s fitting then that one of the poems in The Snow Child is entitled, “When That Light at the End of the Tunnel is an Oncoming Train.”
Yet, on the back cover of Love Shows, The Collected Works of Lala, Washington writes: “Finding love is like finding a waterfall in a mountain forest. Words are like a handful of leaves to prove there was a forest with a waterfall.” Washington believes that her illness is not separate from her writing, or her creativity. “The love of the language makes it possible to describe an experience in such a way that one does not feel alone, like a strange, ethereal creature,” said Washington.
These days she sees a different kind of light at the end of the tunnel; Washington was married to Bill Schriner recently at the historical Enon Baptist Church. She was as radiant as any happy bride. There were candles galore, and pink roses; son George was there and a few friends who had come from afar. The writer’s journey was finally on track with her dreams, but there were no trains whistling in the distance – only the sound of wedding bells.
By Mary Ellen Campagna [email protected]