Jodi Hills

So this is who I am – a writer that paints, a painter that writes…

Monthly Archives: August 2024


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Perhaps, to bloom.

“I was leaving…to fling myself into the unknown… to transplant in alien soil, to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns and, perhaps, to bloom.” Richard Wright

My painting style keeps evolving. Along with my writing. And why wouldn’t it? With only a pocketful of native seeds, I left my small hometown, for a slightly bigger city. First 60 miles away. Then 120. Then more. And more again. Scattering from field to sidewalk. And picking up more along the way. 

My first business card was topped with their name. Then mine below. Smaller. But fitting, I suppose, as I was a mere version of myself. But I wasn’t afraid. It was my grandfather who taught me that everything grows in its time. Its place. He rotated his crops. I didn’t have the words for it then, but here they are now, so elegantly put  — my grandfather, he too, was in search of “new and cool rains,” “bend in strange winds,” and the “warmth of other suns.” 

I just received my new order of business cards — tiny blossoms of the seeds I have sprinkled here in France. Planted on canvas and in person. This is not my humid soil of youth. It is cracked and dried from centuries old. And I can feel it against my skin as I work my way to the daily sun. But it is warm. And it is my name atop the card. I am becoming more of myself. Embracing (not the promise) but the perhaps of it all — the glorious perhaps of the bloom. 

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Second foot off the ground…

There was a magic to the North End of VanDyke Road — not because I knew, but because I wasn’t certain at all. 

Of course I was allowed to ride my banana seat bike down the gravel hill to Norton’s house. I did it in numbers higher than I could count. Racing with an excitement of pedals missed and handlebars rattling, I scattered pebbles behind my back tire from sun’s first light, until I got the porch call to come in for dinner. 

I inched my way past Norton’s, one turn of the wheel further each day. Even with all the stories of fright circled in childish whispers, I knew one day I would have to go into this unhoused, untamed — into the wild.  

It was about six months after my fifth birthday (the days when we gathered in halves as fast as we could, so eager to get to the next year). School had just started. Winter would follow. My bike would have to hang in the garage. I balanced the banana seat between my thighs. Held tight to the rubber coated handlebars. I had asked my mom early in the week if I could go down the second hill. If I could enter the North End. I wanted her to hesitate a little longer, but she said sure, and I knew I would have to go. I lifted one foot off the gravel to the top pedal. Wiped my sweaty hands one at a time on the last shorts I would wear that year. I gripped tightly. Held my breath. Released my second foot and began racing down the hill. I gave the pedal brake a couple of short taps to slow my decision, a decision that could not be reversed. 

I don’t remember how long I stayed. There is a part of me that still remains in the conquered fear of North End’s open gate. I was so happy. So relieved. Neither pushed nor prevented, I had entered the unknown and survived. 

This is the joyful knowledge I pocket and roll around in my nervous fingers as I face today’s unknown. I smile. Second foot off the ground…

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Pillow, the verb. 

It doesn’t come naturally to me. Not like painting. Or writing. I usually have to get out the manual each time I wind the bobbin. It always makes me laugh because it certainly isn’t written in my grandmother’s voice. After each instruction they are quick to warn that the rules must be followed explicitly or you could ruin the machine. With almost any direction, my grandma was more of a shrugging shoulder “oh, you’ll figure it out” kind of leader. 

Not needing to sew every day, I follow the guidelines and the bobbin spins empty. Then I close the book, trace the thread, pump the pedal, tug at the bobbin, pulling it up just a centimeter or so, and it begins to collect thread. It just needed a little Elsie-ing. I smile at her picture that doesn’t guard the machine, but welcomes me, and I continue the conversation, making a much needed (if you know, you know) bed pillow out of an old mini-skirt. 

I show you the picture of the pillow now. But what you really need to see is not in the image. More than a pillow, what I really needed yesterday was a break from a slight worry. It’s silly, I know, but I can get caught in a cycle of repeating thoughts that just gain momentum. I suppose we all can. But I know myself. 

It was my grandfather who first told me to focus on something else. And my grandma, with never the luxury of needing something else to focus on, shrugged her shoulders in smiling agreement. 

Tagged by them both yesterday, I stitched my way back into all the pleasant that surrounds me. The soft comfort of love that pillows me daily — that welcomes me home. 

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Crossing over.

Maybe it’s because I was brought up to listen for them. To watch. Even to feel the track. It sounds of train this morning, though I know it can’t be true. There are no trains that run through our neighborhood, not through the hills of the Montaiguet, here in the south of France.

There were no flashing lights on the line behind the statue of Big Ole that guarded the Main Street of Alexandria, MN. No barriers to block out the danger. But to cross over from neighborhood to town, you had to get over the tracks. I began watching for one, coming down the hill by Lord’s house, just as my mother taught me. There were no distractions of cell phones. No music. No photos to take. But there was more than enough to hold my attention. Geese droppings to navigate through from the true owners of the lake on the left, who hissed and chased, just in case you forgot. Someone fishing. Someone biking. A gentle honk and hand wave out a car window — followed by an extensive explanation of yes, I indeed have gotten this big and am able to walk to town all by myself. Jingled change in pockets to be twirled and dreamed over. Shoulders burning in the summer sun. Would Shari and Jan keep fighting? Would Cindy still be my friend if I couldn’t sleep over? Is it Barbie’s birthday? Will I dive off the high tower? Will I be stopped at the tracks, losing five to ten precious minutes of my summer vacation — I listened for the train. Ready, willing, excited even, at the possibility that I could yell out to goose, fisher, or any passerby, “T R A I N!!!!!!”

I never go walking without my phone now. Is it for safety? Maybe. It would be hard to argue that case though. Is it because I need to begin every sentence with, “I was listening to a podcast…” — possibly. I do watch my surroundings. I say hello to the birds. Bonjour the daily walkers. I paint the path. But I know I need reminding to take it all in. Even the voices in my head. To really listen. To really see.

I know the sounds I’m hearing this morning are construction. Roads being redone up the hill. But my heart leaps with youthful warnings to pay attention. Listen. It’s all rumbling by so fast. Not to be lost, but gathered in. I want to shout it out to everyone – look how big we’ve gotten — how far we’ve come! — but it all sounds like “Train!” I look both ways, and cross over to the beauty that lies ahead.

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A trail I won’t forget.

There was nothing really “western” about it, this growing up in the Midwest. Maybe that’s why I remember them — the bookends my mother had — wooden cowboys riding wildly on horseback, not taming, but protecting each author in our living room on Van Dyke Road. 

And surely it was my mother’s love for the written word and her wooden bookends that led me to the “Cowboy Sam” series on the bottom first and second grade shelves of the Washington Elementary library. We read together each night, a trail I won’t forget.

When the years roughened the edges of the metal bottoms that slid under the books, she lined them with green felt, and the words rode in comfort once again. She taught me that each story was precious, to be held, cared for — even hers, even mine.

I never would have imagined then that some of the plots we lived through could be gathered, softened… even protected. But she, you see, was and is the green felt that slides the cowboy ‘neath the wildest of my words, my dreams and keeps them alive. 

First, I was a cowboy. Ever and still, I ride. 

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Chasing the light.

It’s no surprise when my color palette sneaks from canvas to canvas. It happens quite often. When painting in blues, I gravitate from sea to sky for several images. Currently I’m in the greens. All colors are available all the time — one could be grabbed as easily as the next. But I think it’s because of what I see. After painting Margaux on the balcony of Marseille, the greens of bush and tree were everywhere. The light that changed this one green from yellow to nearly black, was called to me. Greeting me from the breakfast window, on to the morning path…everywhere a welcoming. You could say, “Well, sure, it’s France, it’s beautiful…” and yes, that’s true. But it’s not the first time I have been carried in this palette, lifted by this light.

My basement bedroom in Alexandria, Minnesota — yellow and green. It was the first time I got to choose my palette. From carpet to bedspread, that one windowed room gleamed bright with possibilities. I’m not sure it was even a year. The house was sold. The neighborhood got small in the rearview window of the small moving van. We left without bed or spread, but the color remained. It still does.

I suppose it’s always been about what you choose to see. Loss or opportunity. Pain or growth. Because within every palette of life’s journey there is the spectrum of color. The same green is lit bright, or shaded black. Knowing you can’t see one without the other. 

I can’t tell you what everyone sees. But I know it’s different. This is painfully clear from the daily news. From balcony to gravel, we all have a different view, a different perspective, a varying palette. But maybe the “them” and “us” of it all could be replaced with just different shades of green. And we could see each other, really see each other, as we navigate from color to color, sharing this palette, chasing the light. 

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Ensemble

.

“You’ll be too warm,” she said.

“I don’t mind,” I said.

“Cooler days will be coming way sooner than you think.”

I knew my mother was right, but I was bound and determined to wear my one new fall outfit for the first day of seventh grade at Central Junior High School. It had been on lay-a-way at Herberger’s Department store since the end of July. I went with my mom every store visit, the clerk letting me try it on each time as my mom paid down a little bit more. The ensemble, a word I had just learned, was a pair of chestnut gaucho pants with a striped matching turtleneck and knee length socks. In the comfort of the air-conditioned fitting room, I marveled in the three-way mirrors, knowing, I think for the first time, the feeling my mother had when doing the same. You can call it vanity, but I don’t think so.

I watched her get dressed each morning. Piece by piece. It was an exercise in confidence. From shoes to earrings, it was a path to get out the door. A boost. A head-start, some days in an inconceivable race.

I attended sixth grade in that same school, but our classrooms were placed in an upstairs corner. We didn’t interact with the seventh through ninth graders. We used the side entrance, across from the Police Station. Let out only for lunch and gym, we were nearly invisible. But not this year. This year we were going to be a part of the Junior High School Class! Of course at the bottom, but in the race nonetheless. Everything would be brand new. I knew I needed those gaucho pants. My mother knew it as well. She didn’t put up a fight.

The Superintendent’s office that she worked in was located in that same school, just under the sixth grade classrooms. I rode with her to work. We had entered the same side door for a year.

This first day of my seventh grade year, I got dressed in her bedroom. She had the only full length mirror in the house. We drove through town with the windows rolled down. But she didn’t turn on our usual street. “What are you doing?” I asked, “Aren’t you going to park where you normally do?” “Yes, I will,” she said, “but after I drop you off. Today, you’re going through the front entrance.” I couldn’t stop smiling as she pulled up in front of the big double doors. I didn’t even notice the beads of sweat near my baretted bangs. I waved goodbye. I saw my reflection in the glass trophy case that welcomed the students. I guess it was meant for aspiration, but I already had mine — it, she, was driving to park by the side door.

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Untethered.

I wanted to be excited. I walked and finger rolled the handful of quarters I had saved from cleaning the house each Thursday afternoon. Counting them with each step. Knowing it would only take a couple of them get through the gates of the fairgrounds, a part of me wished for a surprising hole to open in my Herberger basement cut-offs…dropping the silver coins in Kinkead cemetery as I short-cut through, coins that I would once again find as I made my way back home after apologetically waving to my friends on the other side of the Douglas County Fair. But my American-made jeans remained strong, holding the coins, forcing my dusty dragging feet through the turnstile. 

Everyone loved the fair. I wanted to be everyone. But the rides made me sick. The games were rigged. And the food was too expensive.  There was always one girl each year that said, “Come on, you won’t throw up this year, I promise…” Still believing in promises, I would nervously stand in line, double check the lock that the summer carnival worker made, smile as if to warn her, remind her, “you promised.” The spinning would start and my lunch flung somewhere into the crowd. I walked over to the live ponies — all of us tethered to a fair we didn’t want to attend. 

“You know you don’t have to go,” my mother told me when she got home from work. “But everyone goes,” I said, “they love it.” “I don’t,” she said, “I hate it.” There was no hesitation in her voice. No pull of the “they.”  I watched her change out of her work clothes. Placing her shoes back into the original box — no dust on them. Nylons in the sink. Skirt and blouse smoothed and hung. 

She made no promise of where my joy would be…she only slipped three new shiny quarters in my pocket and said, “Do what you love.” 

I still am.

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Without time.

It took me forever to do my math homework. All the problems dealt with trains leaving, arriving, clocks ticking, tracks crossing, and with each one I went on a trip. I was so much more concerned with where I was going, than the actual calculation of time. It seemed so clear to me, even as a teen, barely one foot on this train, what was important — what was I going to do with the time?

Is this the math they said we’d never use? Maybe. From time to time, I must admit I start to calculate. Calculate how long 12 years felt in school to gauge how quickly the next twelve will go. How fast did it feel? How long did I know my grandmother? How many rocks did I pick with my grandfather? How many days of vacation did I take with my mother? And did it feel fast at the time? Maybe if it felt long, if I could only make it feel longer, then the days ahead would pass more slowly? What am I doing? There is no math for this. 

I sit at my desk, both feet on the train now. I open the window and drop the “times this” and “divide that” and let it rattle on the track. How easily I let go of the problems then. It feels so good to do the same today. My heart and brain wander without time, only experience. I begin the day’s journey. What a trip it will be!

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My place.

It was only the most trusted friends who held your place. They lined us up for everything at Washington Elementary. The lavatory. The drinking fountain. The library. And it continued onto the playground, at the monkey bars and swings. At the Dairy Queen. The movie theatre. But urgencies arose, and we asked our closest friends to hold our place as we navigated from the middle of the ticket line into the back of the bathroom one. Darting back without missing a step. 

We had special languages then. Phrases and words. Tattoos from Cracker Jack boxes. We wrote on each other’s hands. Pricked our fingers. Braided our hair. Anything to connect. To hold our place. 

I suppose we’re still doing that. I know that I am. I can leave the country for six months, and before I’ve changed my internal and external clock, I am mid conversation with the ones who pinky-sweared to be there upon my return. Always making room for me. 

It’s not lost on me that I gave her my hand painted bookmark. We Wordle daily, long distance. Share silly thoughts and emails. And we are tassled together. Even as life throws us from line to line, beyond the grumbles of those waiting, those checking their watches and throwing hands in air, we smile, knowing, repeating, “Oh, but it is my place!”

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