<p>Maybe it&#39;s because I&#39;ve moved so much, or maybe everyone does this, but I tend to get very sentimental about the history of the places I&#39;ve lived in. What I don&#39;t know is why it took so long for me to figure out that I live smack in between the homes of <a href="http://www.wellesleywestonmagazine.com/summer08/hometown_poets.htm" target="_blank">Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath</a>. </p><p>Really, I should just return my B.A. in English and call it a day.</p><p>More specifically, I live and work and play near the house where a teenage Sylvia Plath attempted suicide (under the front porch) and the house where a defeated Anne Sexton put on her mother&#39;s fur, locked herself up in the garage and started the car. Pretty morbid, I know, but it&#39;s the truth. Of course, what&#39;s more interesting is what they did while alive. A lot of it was done around me.</p><p>The homes are still there. The bookstore that they both frequented is still there, but it&#39;s an antique store now. The Howard Johnson&#39;s is a fancy restaurant. But they still stand, and I&#39;ve been inside of them countless times. I&#39;m amazed that I swim at the same &quot;beach&quot; they swam at, I look at the same houses as I run my errands that they looked out as they lived their lives. </p><p>Yet, we&#39;re so different. Our lives are so different. They were unhappy, and for the most part, I am not. But I now feel a strange solidarity to them. (This snowy winter may have something to do with it.) Now that I live in one of those plain houses in <em>Her Kind</em>, I finally get it.</p><pre><em>HER KIND<br />I have gone out, a possessed witch,<br />haunting the black air, braver at night;<br />dreaming evil, I have done my hitch<br />over the plain houses, light by light:<br />lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.<br />A woman like that is not a woman, quite.<br />I have been her kind.<br /><br />I have found the warm caves in the woods,<br />filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,<br />closets, silks, innumerable goods;<br />fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:<br />whining, rearranging the disaligned.<br />A woman like that is misunderstood.<br />I have been her kind.<br /><br />I have ridden in your cart, driver,<br />waved my nude arms at villages going by,<br />learning the last bright routes, survivor<br />where your flames still bite my thigh<br />and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.<br />A woman like that is not ashamed to die.<br />I have been her kind.</em><br /><em><br />--Anne Sexton</em><br /><br /></pre>
