Anyone Know Astrology?
My mother was a Gemini. Her chart turned up in the loft.
Two Houses is a newsletter of stories about art, feminism, grief, and Time excavated from the Soho loft where I grew up. Posts are free and illustrated with the work of my long-divorced parents, the painters Mimi Weisbord and Lennart Anderson.
Can I crowd-source a reading? The chart below was prepared by Jane Draimin, who I find listed online as a Professional Astrologers Alliance-certified level 4 astrologer.
That seems like a strong start.
I know practically nothing about astrology. I do know my mother was an old soul with unfinished business. Evidence includes handwritten recordings of past-life regressions, dream journals for psychoanalysis, and the stack of black-and-white photos of my parents she’d kept in a firebox, despite their decades of divorce.
This is one I’d not seen before.
I presumed it was taken in Greece, but that hillside looks North American. Still, I like to pair it with a letter my father wrote my grandparents in 1959:
“Mimi is just gingerly feeling her way into the Aegean ocean. The water is very blue […] She finally made up her mind. All I see is a white bathing cap and feet.”
Such tender reporting, so Lennart! He loved tiny details and observations.
Does her chart predict their breakup? How much of living is predestined? What, exactly, is written in the stars?
A long time ago, I was a part of a family of four. And after it blew apart, the pieces remembered the whole for a while. Once, after the separation, my father taught my brother and me the rule of our birthdays. If June 13th, Mom’s birthday, fell on a Saturday, that meant that all of our birthdays, August 22nd, October 24th, and December 5th, would fall on Saturdays that year. Every year, and after we are all dead, in perpetuity, this is the rule of our birthdays—the mysterious astrophysics that binds us.
I look forward to your insights.