Sarah T. Schwab
Observer Columnist

An English professor at the State University of Fredonia read the following quote by Nathaniel Hawthorne to his publisher William D. Ticknor in 1855: “America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash – and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed.”

This idea of scribbling women made me think of the writing in the woman’s lavatory at a bar in downtown Fredonia; “I love you is back,” is scrawled in sharpie pen on the newly painted powder-blue wall. Blooming around the phrase are sharpie-drawn flowers with “he loves/she loves (blank)” written inside.

While reading the phrase and looking at the wall flowers I laughed. It is odd though, because I could not decide if I was laughing because the idiom was sweet or superficial.

After seeing the notes, I walked into the main bar where the juicy air was thick with beer, liquor and sweat and watched women letting be done to them what is always done to them.

“You’re getting old,” my friends tell me when I criticize the jacketless women in miniskirts who try walking between the snowflakes in their three-inch heels, or seeing the coquettish flirting in the name of a free drink.

I am dismayed but realize that I was not so different at one time.

I am told that women have more options these days and that the early twenties should be the best time of a woman’s life, especially in a college town, due to the newfound independence, unrestricted dating, socializing and constant on-the-go capability.

But now, just a month away from my twenty-third birthday, the zest for these activities is dwindling down in appeal.

Possibly my cynicism is familial – three generations of scribbling women all trying to consider life on their terms and capture it on paper. Or perhaps my women’s studies background has shifted my focus towards the skeptical.

Whenever I tell my mid-age mother about my mounting cynicism she chuckles and recalls her life at my age. She reminisces about being a newly wed and moving into a new house with my father. The tone always turns somber.

“My love for your father is always there,” she said, unable to process that it has been over a year since his death. “Your dad could look past my faults because he knew me from when I was so young. Men I meet only know me as I am now. It’s hard to meet people at my age because they really don’t know you.”

She explains how older men are only looking for thin “waspy” type women that never go against the grain.

“It isn’t fair how single women are treated at my age,” she often tells me. I think of the half-starved, half-naked college wasps freezing and flirting while posing in the cold in the name of beauty with hopes of finding true love and realize that it is unfair how women are treated at my age too.

I consider the scribbled wall flower love and then think of my parents scribbling.

Before going to work every morning, my father left a short message to my mother always signed, “Love Jerry.” Getting misplaced or thrown away due to mundane life activities, my mother never thought to keep the notes.

A year before my father got sick due to the effects of Chemo Therapy he underwent during his first bout of cancer in 2002, she realized that this scribbled love might not last forever. So, she started keeping their daily notes in a plain three-ring notebook.

Filled with their own “he loves/she loves,” poems and little hearts, the book was meant as a memory for me after they both had passed away. Instead, it brought my father’s “I love you” back to my mother when she needed a reminder that love does exist.

Thinking of my parents, I understand that there is nothing wrong with being a scribbling woman who is apt to cynicism. Whenever I read the phrase on the powder-blue wall and the growing garden of wall flowers, I still laugh. But, I do so knowing that women of all ages are worth more than just being a scribbled wall flower.

• Originally published Tuesday, May 6, 2008