I have a name for a new character. Sometimes I start a story around a name, sometime a definite picture or an outfit. This new character is Anemone. At first she was going to be Anemone Davis, but maybe a more ambiguously ethnic name like Anemone Low will do.
Forgive me, but I'm going to do some free writing now. Feel free to skip over ... or comment!
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Mary Anemone Low is the daughter of Tom Low and Judy Delgado Low. Anemone's maternal grandmother insists on calling her Mary, but everyone else knows her by her middle name. When she was born, her deep dark eyes reminded her poet father of the black centers of the anemone flowers that grew outside their apartment building in St. Paul. Her mother, a biologist by trade, liked the name as well for reasons of her own. Anemone was raised on a healthy diet of natural science magazines and free verse.
When the time came to send Anemone off to college, they sent her to Michigan, near her maternal grandmother and where Judy had spent a few years pursuing a masters before finding Tom.
Her third summer arrived, and Anemone decided to stay and see what the town looked like when it emptied. On Fridays, because her grandmother wanted to keep Saturdays open for unexpected guests, and Sundays were for church and not for driving, Anemone would back her white Rav4 out of the blue shed behind the house and drive twenty miles to Chelsea.
She would sit and listen to her grandmother sizing up her son-in-law of over twenty years, as if he were still some young suspicious vagrant come to court her Boston-and-PhD-bound daughter away from her. "There is no sea in Minnesota," repeated her grandmother. And Anemone would explain once more how her mother studies the interactions of plants and microbes now, not underwater invertebrates. "Such a tiny science," grandmother would retort, as she scrapped the last of the uneaten rice into a tupperware for her to take home.
They ate dinner early so she could drive before the sun went completely down. She did not mind this so much. There usually something going on at the bookstore on Main Street that she wanted to check out, an author event, a band playing, a hands-on crafts workshop.
She was planning to take only Physics III, lecture, recitation, and lab, and but then she also signed up for a seminar with a poet her father had just started reading, mainly to buy the course readings that she would hopefully get the poet to sign and then send them back to St. Paul. There were probably cheaper ways to do the latter, but she thought she might give herself a little education in the process.
She also spent some time working in the university's Office of Development, helping write press releases and brochures for the fund-raising campaign for the new computer science building. When her father heard this on one of their Monday night conversations, he encouraged her to look into writing as a career. "I'm not writing 'Middlemarch,' you know." And she winced at how much she sounded like her grandmother right then.
Later, when she was folding socks that she had left unpaired from her last laundry day a few weeks before, she berated herself further for being so quippy. Of course, he didn't mean creative writing as a career. There was technical writing, grant writing. She stopped at those two because she was at a loss for more modified types of writing.
Her mother was a lecturer at a small college in Minneapolis. Her father taught literature at an even smaller, Catholic college fourteen miles outside of the city.
Her grandmother kept a large atlas under her dining room table, the one they didn't eat on. Anemone wondered if she used it to level things. She opened the book to the section for the United States. There it was, the Midwest. She saw that Minnesota and Michigan were separated only by Wisconsin and one Great Lake. Not far enough, apparently, for either of them. She looked across the rest of the country, trying to picture herself on the road. How far could she take herself?
