Littleneck clams out of season.

This is a picture of Assia Wevill. She stole Sylvia Plath's husband. I'm neck-deep in Lover of Unreason,the book about her life and all the attendant mythology of the tragic poetesses. I've never been much of a Plath woman, preferring to identify with the brunette and green-eyed Sexton. I like the ferociousness of Sexton's poems, and I find Plath to be a bit chilly at times. I do, however, like the suicide-bound Plath, and I am LOVING this crazy-ass Assia woman, her beauty, her incessant marrying and remarrying, her feigned elegance.

She's perfect. I also really like the authors' stance on her, sometimes sympathetic, sometimes critical, but always honest and clear...neither defending her nor reviling her as people often do who are in the Plath thrall.

I've spent so much time in my life identifying with The Other Woman, the watercolor woman, the exotic. And now look at me, a wife. Solid, loving, unyielding, and steeped in the home.

It's one thing I always knew, though. No matter what happens between us, we always have that turbulent beginning. Our love will remain a gift that we give to one another, something salvaged from the wreckage of our young adult lives and pieced back together into this wonderful, complex, and entirely real life. Every moment we spend together, no matter how messy, is a gift.