Sandra Lambert has given us another book of connected stories click, this time stories from her own life. Feminist bookstore owner, successful writer, outdoorswoman, nature photographer, and activist for lesbian, disability and other political rights, Lambert is a woman with many more abilities than disabilities.
Polio in early childhood led to hospitals, surgeries, body casts. Lambert grew up using crutches and leg braces, and much later in life graduated to first a manual, then an electric wheelchair.
In a built world designed for those who can walk, Lambert is attentive to her own body in a way many people aren’t. She devises ingenious work-arounds to physical limitations, and she is attuned to all her senses. Set apart by her visible disabilities, she was often lonely in childhood and adolescence, but as an adult lesbian has a large and loving community of friends, with whom she shares nature adventures, travel, food, dogs and writing. Though she doesn’t dwell on it, she mentions in passing her lively romantic life, crowned by a happy marriage in her sixties.
marrying at Payne’s Prairie
Lambert doesn’t suffer well-meaning fools gladly. She puts readers on notice in the second chapter: no pity, no sanctimonious phrases, no offers of help unless she asks. At first in leg braces, later in a wheelchair, she will always encounter strangers who feel entitled to comment, who offer pity, praise, prayers. She’s learned to ignore them – “There’s a mute button in my head for these moments” – unless they touch her. In the laundromat a babbling Christian woman approaches from behind and hugs her, whispers “Jesus loves you.” Her wrath explodes. The mildest part of her response is her threat to call the cops.
image: Facebook.com/mango coin laundry
From earliest childhood, Lambert has found joy and solace in nature. Sitting on the wet ground in the woods among lilies of the valley, “the white pearls of flowers about to open would perch on my fingertips, and they seemed to have no weight…the confusions of where to sit on the school bus or why no one sat with me…lost any substance. The honey perfume of the disturbed plants rose around me.” She enjoys wind, rain, dawn and sunset, rolling over bumpy tracks through green woods to riverbanks strewn with alligators. Her writing is as sensuous as her life. Sights, sounds, smells, tastes and touch, are all vividly there, and the words flow as smoothly as the rivers she loves. She relishes life.
image:visitgainesville.com
Kayaking, hiking in her chair – these bring Lambert into the wild. But she’s not close enough, and she seizes opportunities for direct contact with nature. As a child, “[w]ith braces and crutches left in a jumble…I’d crawl into snow-fed lakes with sudden, immense depths…These days I slip out of my wheelchair and into Florida waters. Spring-fed rivers, warm or cool depending on the season…Atlantic waves toss me until the seafloor scrapes against my skin.”
Briefly alone on the flooded Paynes Prairie she drops from her wheelchair, and towing her kayak, wallows in the wet sand among dry-land plants now wilted and rotting in the water. “And now I think about an alligator swimming and searching for dry land. …I lift onto my elbows and look around…[T]here are no alligators…I roll back into the new mud.”
one of many gator encounters
As she gets older she encounters new physical challenges, and increasing pain. Over and over she thinks through and solves the new problems. Here is an obstacle – here’s what she’ll do about it. When she makes plans, she accounts for the aftermath – a kayaking trip will be followed by days of exhaustion and pain, but is well worth it.
Lambert in her kayak.
Sometimes she realizes she can’t do anymore what she once loved, because of the expenditure of energy required. Then she’ll mourn the loss, and move on to other joys. But her writing is honest, and she acknowledges the times when she fears what the future will bring, the fear she calls her “personal image of the apocalypse,” that she has mockingly named, “the nursing home and bedsores panic.”
image:lazaruslaw.us
“…I can sense the deep sadness that will come, and I can’t yet see the other side of this, the part where something I couldn’t even have imagined comes into my life, where beyond fear and shame there is a grace of some sort. Is it even possible anymore? Do I keep trust that it will happen again, as it has always happened?”
Lambert shares her experience as an outsider, as a woman who must work harder than most of us to live a full life. But her memoir is much more than an account of coping with disability; it is the stories from that full life, stories of the happiness she has found or created. The writing is lyrical, and seasoned with humor, She doesn’t hesitate to laugh at herself. as when she discovers that the park ranger who seemed to be disturbed by her disability was in fact closely confronted by her naked butt in pants that had split down the middle.
image: fresnobee.com
What do I love about this book? The writing, the fierce wit, the remarkable woman who speaks from its pages. Disability activists remind the rest of us that we are only ‘temporarily abled.’ If we live long, we will keep encountering new limitations, and keep adjusting to them as best we can. If we are very smart, and very lucky, we may be able to hold on to joy and passion until close to the end, and face the challenges as creatively and intelligently as Lambert.
activist
nature photographer – night heron, spider lilies
unattributed pictures are from Sandra Lambert’s Facebook page, and used with permission
A Certain Loneliness is available now from University of Nebraska Press http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/university-of-nebraska-press/9781496207197/ and on Amazon.
The launch party for the book is September 14 at 6:30PM at the Matheson History Museum 513 East University Avenue Gainesville, Florida.