Traveling with Pomegranates by Sue Monk Kidd Read Free Book Online Page A

lips.
    I suppose I sought out this spot again in the hope I would have a revelation, like before—that lightning would strike twice and I would know what to do with my life. Or, that something inside of me would get completely rearranged and my depression would evaporate.
    None of this happens.
    The last thing I want is to seem ungrateful or make my mother feel like bringing me here was a mistake. How can I possibly tell her the whole trip feels mournful? And if I do tell her that, how can I possibly expect her to believe the other side of that truth—that there is nowhere else I’d rather be.
    “Let me take your picture,” Mom says. She focuses the camera. Click . I already know I’ll put the photo on my dresser and compare it to the one that was taken of me on this spot the year before, the one in which I am grinning with abandon while massive chalky columns beam up behind my head.
    I’m afraid of becoming invisible again.
    We walk in a dusty loop around the Parthenon toward the Acropolis Museum. There is a sculpture relief inside I want to see called the Mourning Athena . In it, Athena holds her spear upright with her head bent against it as if she’s mourning. The other name for the relief is Contemplating Athena . When I saw the image in a book, though, Athena did not appear to be in deep thought. To me, she appeared to be grieving, like the fight had gone out of her.
    The museum, we discover, is closed for renovation. I stare at the notice on the door, twisting the Athena ring on my finger.
    “Next time,” we joke.
    Mom glances at her watch. “Ready to go?”
    I nod and suddenly my eyes fill with tears.
    “Ann?” Mom says. “What is it? Are you okay?”
    “It’s—it’s just my hair,” I say, putting one hand on the back of my bare neck and managing a smile. “I miss it.”

Sue

    The Cathedral of Athens
    Ann and I wander through the Plaka, threading the convoluted tangle of shops and restaurants. The streets twist and coil, occasionally doubling back on themselves. I realize we’re lost the third time we pass the bearded young Orthodox priest in black robes standing outside a jewelry store.
    “If we loop by him one more time, he’s going to think we’re stalking him,” Ann says.
    I smile. Like her brother, she has always been funny, cracking us up with her wry observations. It’s a relief to hear her making a joke. Earlier today on the Acropolis she had been distant and pulled into herself, even tearing up for a moment when we left. As we walked down the path the word depression came to me for the first time. Could she be . . . depressed? I pushed the thought away. But now as we move through the narrow, stone streets of the Plaka, the word darts again at the edge of my thoughts. Depression .
    A corkscrew of alarm twists in my abdomen. I have a ferocious urge to swoop in like a mother hen, gather Ann under my flapping wing, and say, Look, I’m not oblivious. I’m your mother. Something’s wrong. Talk to me. Let me fix it . But I know my impulse to tear open the closed, secret place in my daughter comes from a need to stave off my own fear. When is the impulse to help an adult child a wise intervention and when is it self-serving and prying? I have an uneasy feeling I will have to carry the question around for a while like some grating pebble in my shoe.
    I tell myself Ann is a young woman who needs to find a separate sense of herself in the world, who’s trying to stand fully in her own life. Let it be. For now.
    As we pause before a shop window, a cluster of shining red baubles catches my eye. No, not baubles—what are they? Leaning closer, squinting into the glare, I realize I’m looking at glass pomegranates. They’re piled like ruby eggs into a nest of twigs. “Look,” I say.
    “They’re in a bird’s nest,” says Ann.
    It appears to be a real one. I imagine the shop owner finding the nest on a limb in her garden and thinking: Oh, perfect for displaying pomegranates!
    I think of