There’s a tradition within the working kitchen — “Yes, Chef!” It acknowledges the task at hand and signifies the willingness to follow through. It’s what I say to the fluttering of my white-hatted heart, daily.
I wasn’t feeling that well yesterday afternoon. But I was mid-paint, (a bird in the hand) and hadn’t I promised the page? Hadn’t I said to the other birds, today we welcome another? Yes. But most importantly, hadn’t I told myself that I could do it?
I have no contract with my daily blog, nor my sketchbook. But I do have a commitment to my very core, to be who I am. To make something of the gift of the day. To wing myself above the obstacle and keep becoming.
So when I say yes to the morning and the song in the trees and the keyboard and the brush, I am saying yes to myself. Yes to the chef, the boss of my being, that I am willing. I am able.
The sun feathers day’s light through the window. My fingers wiggle, wings too, already hearing my heart’s yes.
Sometimes I have more patience with a batch of cookies than I do myself. That doesn’t seem right.
I was always amazed that my grandma never measured anything. A rule follower from Mrs. Strand’s kindergarten class, I just didn’t understand. I put my head down on the desk when she asked. Raised my hand before speaking, and even drank the milk that made me gag. But then in Grandma Elsie’s kitchen, flour and sugar flew with wild abandon and I found myself caught up in the twirl. Still a bit uncertain, I would ask, “But what if it isn’t right?” “Then I’ll know soon enough,” she said.
I wanted it — whatever that was — confidence, experience, trust, or maybe a combination of all it. Making the cookies yesterday, I found myself once again in the twirl. I made a test cookie to get to my “soon enough.” It was perfect and I finished the batch.
The years have given me the strength to brave the twirl. To let go the worry of what if it’s not right, or good enough, but to simply try. I can feel the trust in my Elsie hands and kitchen heart. I feed my soul. And I taste this life.
Sometimes, when painting a portrait, you can get stuck. The image isn’t exactly right, but you can’t see why. A trick that many artists use is to simply flip the canvas. It breaks the autopilot of the brain and you can actually see the shapes more clearly. You can get the chin just right, or the angle of that brow. It slows you down and you can see everything in a new light.
How I try to remember that lesson for real life — when the universe kicks my feet from underneath and I tumble topsy turvy. It’s hard to see the benefits immediately, but once I gather myself, I have to think, oh, perhaps it was time for a new perspective. I, we, can get so accustomed to “how things are.” To shake us out of the “well, that’s how we do things…” and the “well, that’s how I feel,” and into a new vision, a better way of seeing, living, sometimes it takes our world turning upside down.
I guess it’s all part of this delightful journey. This jungle gym. So if you see me, feet in the air, don’t worry, I’m just getting a better view.
It was my mother who listened to me with the patience of paper. I could tell her anything. No dream was too big. No concern too frivolous. No wonder dismissed. I could cursive my feelings throughout the house, and she would gather them in softly, gently, filling heart reams daily.
I didn’t read Anne Frank until junior high. I had already been writing for years. On scraps of paper. Wood-burning notes into panels. Poems on birthday cards. Hopes onto sticky pads. But I didn’t have a diary. And it wasn’t until reading Anne Frank’s that I knew why. It was because I had my mother. Anne wrote in her diary, thinking she had “no such real friend” to confide in. My mother was that “friend.”
Through the years, as I made my living selling the words and images, I was constantly approached by my sales reps and store owners with “What’s new?” A feverish flurry to get to the next thing. An urgency to keep the writing short – “no one will take the time to read all that.” I would smile and think that Anne Frank was right, “Paper is more patient than people.”
I’ve tried to stay true to my slow and looping cursive heart. Giving it the space and time it needs. Giving it the care my mother showed me it was worth.
I hope you have that friend. That confidante. If not, let it be me. Take your time. I’m in no hurry.
There is an older couple on YouTube that reviews restaurants and bakeries. Normally I can’t swipe away fast enough. I really don’t care what people eat. I only stopped one day when I saw they were giving a rating of 14 out of 10. It made me smile. How rare to see such positivity!
I don’t know their names to direct you. They show up on my feed now because I stop when I see them. It’s nothing new, this “power of attraction.” I mention it more as a reminder to myself.
When I first started my own art business, I gave myself two rules. Pay attention and surround yourself with the best people. It worked. It still does. And not just for business. Whether you are involved or not, positivity will always lift you. Everything else is quicksand.
I tried a new recipe for bread yesterday. We had it for breakfast. With a little French butter (a lot actually), lavender honey for me, my homemade apricot jam for Dominique — I give it a 14! I’m still smiling.
It wasn’t long after I realized that everyone didn’t have them, these Tech-ers in the basement, that they were gone. It’s clear now that we needed the money more than the space. We went through at least three cycles of young men from the law enforcement class. I only remember one’s name – Terry Eilers. Maybe because he was also our bus driver, but mostly I think because he was nice to me. And wasn’t that everything? —when there was just one unlocked door at the bottom of the stairs that separated them from our laundry.
Before lessons were learned, I race from upstairs to downstairs without a glance. It was one of the men from the first group of three. (Everyone over 17 seems like a man when you are six.) He was building a canoe in the driveway to our basement. Fascinated by anything being built, I was probably annoying. Watchful. Eager to know the bend of wood. And what was that green stuff? What was he putting on the shell? Certainly he must have my best interests at heart, I thought, he lived with us after all. He was going to enforce the law. He told me to touch the canoe. I poked one hesitant finger out of my sleeve and touched it as if it were a hot pan on the stove. No, really get in there, he said. Rub your arm across it. I don’t why I did. Just like the heat from a hot pan, it took a minute for the tiny shards of glass, the insulation, to reach my brain. And it took longer, I suppose, wondering not why the pain, but more, why did he want to inflict it?
I wasn’t going to let him see me cry. I ran up the browning hill of fall grass. Through the garage door. Down the stairs to the laundry room in the basement. Took off the painful sweater and placed it in a basket. It was the first time I noticed there was no lock on that door. It was the first time I needed one.
I stayed upstairs for the rest of their time. The next group came. They called one “Buzz” I think because of his hair, but I remained at a distance.
When Terry Eilers came the next year, slightly overweight in his tan shirt and brown pants, the new uniform of the students, he smiled at me from behind the big bus wheel. I don’t know how many rides it took before I trusted him, but I did.
It’s no longer a technical school, but a college. They have their own housing now, I guess. Call it whatever you want, I hope we’ve all learned along the way. Kindness is memorable.
Some will try to take it away. Innocence. Curiosity. Joy. Others still will pick you up when you need it most. It only takes one Terry.
It’s one of my favorites in Paris, the Musée d’Orsay. Maybe because it feels most like me.
It didn’t start out as a museum. At one point it was a train station,
even a parking lot, long before it housed the most beautiful impressionists in the world. I suppose I’ve always known it — that I would have to become, and keep becoming.
When I was a kid, I thought I would just figure stuff out, you know, and be something, and that would be it…that would be my life. Because didn’t they always ask, “What are you going to be?” And especially at this time of year, as we prepared to dress up and go from door to door asking for our treat behind the question, “What are you supposed to be?”
At first I was a cowboy, (was this my train station?). Then I was a hobo, (my parking lot?) It took a long time to become an artist. This was me. Who I was supposed to be.
I think that I, we, just have to keep becoming. We change and grow. We are molded by love and trips around the sun. It takes a long time to build a soul. We get older, maybe wiser, (even better, we gain a little grace) but we don’t finish – we don’t have to – we begin, and be, and begin again. I think that’s the gift of living…the joy of being alive!
We learned early on at Washington Elementary that so many of our problems could be solved by sitting quietly. If we were too hot, “Sit quietly,” the teacher would say. Trying to memorize our times tables, it was important to “tune everything else out.” Even in our excitement of knowing the solution to the problem on the chalkboard, she never called on the ones that “Ooooh, Oooooh, Ooohed,” — no, she smiled and pointed to the steady hand raised silently in the air.
It followed me through high school and even college. I could never do my homework in front of the television, nor with the music blaring. The answers, for me, always came in a whisper. The same has held true for everything, I suppose. Recovery, hope, dreams, even love, has never arrived as the Tabernacle Choir, but more of a hum, a bird song in my heart, that to be heard requires the silencing of all the doubt, fear, and chaos that surrounds us.
There will always be the chatter of those who are so eager to shout, “you can’t,” “you shouldn’t,” “you won’t.” To them (and mostly to myself) I say in a gentle hush, “Oh, but I am.”
Of course I was going to get in. Everything I had done up until this moment was about taking the chance, saying yes. So when she pulled her car up next to me and stopped, I walked up to the open window. She said the French equivalent of “get in” twice. And it’s surprising how quickly the brain can weigh all the options in a splintering of a second. I opened the door and sat down, and said “OK…” We both let out a nervous laugh, neither quite sure of what we were agreeing to.
It was her husband and son-in-law I had painted. The two men on my daily path. She had stopped me once before and applauded me in my paint splattered shorts from behind the car wheel. We were connected by nothing but sharing the same path. (And isn’t that everything?)
My mind tried to leave the proverbial bread crumbs as she wound us down the gated path. Through the sea of olive trees. Past the pool. She apologized that it was becoming green. She opened the shutters and we walked into her home. She unlocked the armoire and pulled out the most beautiful bottle of olive oil. This was their art — their exchange for the painted portrait. I held the weight of it close to my heart and thanked her in both languages.
I asked about her husband. I don’t see him anymore on my daily walk. The Alzheimer’s no longer allows his trip. A small tear, hers or mine, said he still makes the journey each day on the canvas.
I walked home knowing we always have the tools to connect, if we share the best of us. If we dare the best of us, ourselves.
It’s only a painting. It’s only olive oil. But it’s everything.
Although she only sat down for one, Days of Our Lives, the soap operas played all afternoon on my grandma’s television set in the living room of their farm house. Of course we could hear them as we ran in and out of the screen door, up to the corner kitchen cupboard with the Lazy Susan that held all of the candy. We’d spin ourselves almost dizzy trying to decide between the blur of Black Cows, Sugar Daddies, Sugar Babies, and all things sweet.
Deep into our sugared highs, we acted out the parts we heard from the other room. Using words we didn’t know, but kept repeating them, whispering them into our sweaty hands covered in sticky giggles, after our Aunt Lillian warned us that to say them aloud was to risk living them.
In no way do I believe that my summer antics, nor my cousins’, brought to life all of those whispered words we seem to be living within. We say them out loud now. Words like divorce and affair and death and cancer. The only real difference, what they consolidated in less than an hour on the television, has taken a lifetime for most of us, but certainly we have all been touched.
And I think it’s ok to say them out loud. To not hide from them. Not give them the power. To voice our struggles and our fears, whatever they may be. Maybe we knew something as children. We weren’t afraid of any of it. Not the words, nor the warnings. Nothing could stop us. Not screen, nor cupboard, or door of any kind. We raced through it all together.
I suppose I write the words each day in order to release them from the living room set. To fling open the doors and tell you it’s ok. To show you. To run with you. Play with you, amidst it all. We’ve never had the power to rid the world of all the difficulties. The pain and the struggles. But we’ve always had the power to find, still, the dizzying joy, the sweaty laughter.
