The First Lady of the Land

Or, How to Build a Beautiful Future While Lghtly Crumpling It

An essay by LANNIE, narrated in audio by her favorite English lady

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A little backstory first

Hi! It’s me.

Before my favorite English lady takes over, I should probably give you a little backstory on where Ladies of the Land came from.

Part of it comes from my own family.

My Mama and her sisters grew up poor.

Really poor.

And somehow, in the middle of circumstances that gave them very little reason to expect much from life, they imagined more anyway.

Better homes.

Better lives.

Beauty.

Education.

Travel.

Possibility.

They were, in their own way, some of the first women I ever knew who looked at what they had been handed and thought:

Surely this cannot be the whole story.

And then there is another, considerably stranger piece of family lore.

There’s an old movie called The Snake Pit, from 1948, and in it there is a woman in the psychiatric hospital who believes she is the “First Lady of the Land.”

That phrase somehow lodged itself in my family vocabulary.

Lady of the Land

And the older I get, the more I realize I’ve given it an entirely different meaning.

To me, a Lady of the Land is a woman who looks at whatever patch of life she has been given—whether it is actual land, a kitchen, a studio, a business, a family, a garden, an idea—and dares to imagine something more there.

My Mama and her sisters did that.

And lately, I’ve realized I have been looking for women who did it in their own lives, too.

So that’s where this begins.

Ladies of the Land.

Okay.

Favorite English lady, you’re up.

The other day, a reader told me that something I’d written about grief had helped her.

Which is lovely.

It is.

I’m not being sarcastic.

Not yet, anyway.

She said she had taken actual advice from it.

Advice.

From me.

A woman who, approximately eight minutes earlier, had nearly died from saliva.

My own saliva.

Not a foreign object.

Not a grape.

Not a chicken bone.

Nothing dramatic enough for a cautionary tale.

Just spit going the wrong way.

I was alone in the kitchen, coughing like I’d been poisoned, thinking:

Well. This is humiliating.

Imagine the obituary.

She survived thyroid cancer, a heart attack, divorce, caregiving, grief, and several decades of being a woman in Texas.

In the end, however, she was defeated by moisture generated inside her own mouth.

I have to remind myself of the basic instructions now.

Breathe air.

Swallow spit.

Different pipes.

Come on!

It’s like lefty loosey, righty tighty, except one mistake means the shelf falls down and the other means they find you beside the refrigerator.

And yet people read my work and occasionally mistake me for someone who knows things.

This is the danger of writing in complete sentences.

It creates an impression of competence.

You put a full stop in the right place and suddenly people think you have emotional architecture.

I do not have emotional architecture.

I have several baskets.

Some receipts.

A working knowledge of grief.

And an elaborate imaginary property development.

Most days, I don’t feel like I’m crushing it.

People say that, don’t they?

You’re crushing it.

She’s crushing it.

Absolutely crushing it.

No.

I am not crushing it.

I am lightly crumpling it.

There is a difference.

Crushing implies force.

Momentum.

Possibly a blazer.

Lightly crumpling is quieter.

It’s standing in a room holding the same piece of paper for twenty minutes, gradually damaging it without making a decision.

That’s where I am.

Not collapsed.

Not thriving.

Just slightly misshapen.

Still technically useful.

Probably shouldn’t be presented to a bank.

Meanwhile, I have a vision.

Of course I do.

This is the problem.

I am exhausted, but unfortunately I remain imaginative.

I have imagined Harp Weaver Manor in excruciating detail.

The cottages.

The gardens.

The long tables under trees.

The artists.

The flowers.

The dinners.

The women arriving with endless creative output and meaningful projects.

There will be music at dusk.

There will be beauty.

There will be an orchard.

Apparently.

In this fantasy, I move slowly through the garden gathering flowers.

I am never sweating.

I never lose my phone.

I know the names of each plant.

People ask me questions and I answer without first staring into the middle distance.

I say things like:

“The dahlias did beautifully this year.”

I do not currently own dahlias.

Or land.

Or a functioning business account.

But the dahlias are thriving.

That is how advanced the delusion has become.

In real life, I live in Texas.

For the last couple of weeks, it has been one hundred and something degrees.

One hundred and something is not a temperature.

It is a threat.

First of all, no.

Second of all, no.

There is no good reason for the outdoors to feel preheated.

You open the door and the atmosphere attacks you personally.

It gets inside your clothes.

It climbs into your sports bra.

It removes your will to participate in commerce.

The forecast says 105 as though this is weather and not a municipal failure.

I check it every morning anyway.

I don’t know why.

Hope, presumably.

Maybe the meteorologist will appear and say:

Good news. We have located the problem. Texas was accidentally placed six inches from the sun.

We have corrected it.

Today will be 82.

You may resume having a personality.

But no.

It is 104.

Then 106.

Then 103, which they describe as cooler.

Cooler.

That is like being told the second tiger is slightly smaller.

And I keep thinking, if I can just make it through this month, I only have one more month to get through before I need to get through another month.

This is my current motivational system.

Endure August.

Then endure September.

Then, with luck, experience three pleasant afternoons in late October before winter arrives and everyone loses their minds because it is 71 degrees.

It is difficult to feel like a visionary in this climate.

It is difficult to build a cultural destination when you’ve just peeled yourself off a vinyl car seat and discovered you’ve given yourself third-degree burns on your vulva.

It is difficult to overcome imposter syndrome when you are wearing the same shirt for the third day because all other fabric feels aggressive.

The women in the middle

I keep researching women who built things.

Extraordinary women.

Women who founded restaurants and gardens and schools and artistic movements.

Women who restored houses, cultivated land, gathered people, made art, opened doors, and somehow convinced the world to take seriously the thing that had first existed only inside their own heads.

Women who began late.

Women who survived loss.

Women who turned pain into beauty.

I read their timelines very carefully.

I am looking for the bit where they spent fourteen consecutive days feeling vaguely poisoned by summer.

I want the footnote.

1946: Experienced a major creative awakening.

1947: Produced groundbreaking work.

1948: Lay under a ceiling fan eating walnuts and dried cranberries while doubting every decision.

There must have been walnuts and dried cranberries.

Right?

History leaves out too much.

It gives us the exhibitions and the houses and the awards.

It gives us the restaurant after it became famous, the garden after it grew in, the book after it found its readers.

It gives us the finished woman.

That is no help at all.

I need evidence from the middle.

From the years when nothing had come together yet.

When the vision was still embarrassing.

When the money was unclear.

When the woman herself was unclear.

When she was not crushing it.

When she was lightly crumpling it in private and hoping it still counted as progress.

So I have decided to go looking for those women.

Not only the polished versions preserved in museums, biographies, and flattering black-and-white photographs, but the women they were before anyone knew what to call them.

The women in the middle.

The women who had land, or longed for it.

The women who built gardens, houses, businesses, communities, movements, and lives that did not exist before they imagined them.

The women who made places where other people could gather.

The women who began again.

I’m calling them Ladies of the Land.

Some literally worked the earth.

Others claimed a patch of the world through paint, food, architecture, writing, hospitality, preservation, or sheer force of imagination.

They interest me because I am trying to build something too.

Harp Weaver is still mostly a beautiful future with terrible timing.

There are no cottages yet.

No orchard.

No long tables beneath the trees.

No artists wandering thoughtfully through the garden in linen.

At present, there is me.

A notebook.

Several questionable financial projections.

A collection of saved photographs.

And some imaginary dahlias that are doing extremely well.

But perhaps that is where every place begins.

Not with land.

With longing.

Not with certainty.

With a woman repeatedly returning to an idea that refuses to leave her alone.

So, in the coming weeks, I’m going to tell you about some of the women I’ve been studying—their work, their landscapes, their failures, their strange turns, their late beginnings, and the pieces of their lives that make me believe I may not be entirely delusional.

I’m going to look for the part before the legend.

The lightly crumpled years.

And because some stories need more than words on a page, I’m also beginning to explore them through film on Curated Chaos, the video arm of Love, LANNIE.

Which sounds impressively intentional.

Please remember that I recently almost died from choking on my own spit.

Both things can be true.

Keep an eye on this space.

I’ve gone looking for the women in the middle.

I’ll be back soon.

Love, LANNIE ♡