At the moment my two most popular pins on Pinterest are of young women reading. It warms my heart that neither are distracted by the thousands of views and likes. Nor by the news that we are becoming a post-literate world. They can’t be certain of what lies ahead, but they continue. Fighting back, not with fist nor fury, but by simply reading.
There is so much noise currently. But there are things that still give me hope. An open window. An open spine. The quiet exchange of knowledge. Of truth. That you will take the time to read my simple words. And we connect, not over a ranting rage, but a common calm.
I quietly open the morning window. Taking comfort in knowing that hope always whispers.
I recently started a large canvas. The difference between this and a small one? Patience. There are no quick scrolls to the details. The juicy parts. The larger work must be complete. But isn’t that what I also love? Sure. I have to remind myself, but it is true. I liken it to reading an excellent book. You know the kind. Where the characters are living in your soul. Words that keep you fighting through nightime’s blinking eyes, and doing the dance between the urgency of your brain that wants to see how it ends and your heart that never wants it to…. It is the glorious and deliciously painful anticipation of falling in love with the canvas. Why would I ever want to rush that? So, patience…
Certainly we are given lesson upon lesson. I don’t imagine it was my first, but it was early on. Waiting for my grandma in constant conversation in the aisles of Jerry’s Jack and Jill. Cart by cart, she spoke to everyone. We’d just finish one exchange, and I’d think, hope, that we’d make it around to the next aisle, but then there, by the beef, or the boxed cereal, it would begin, “Oh, Elsie…” and we’d be locked in for another five to ten minutes. I’d like to think I was patient at first. Even accommodating. But I’m not sure it was very long before my shoulders started to droop. Before my head tilted backwards, as if my neck were no longer able to support it. My hand hanging on to the silver chariot, willing me to drag along.
And I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I can’t say why. Wasn’t the point to just be with her? I see it now. Caught up now in the whirl and twirl and scroll of it all, I simply want to slow it down. To love slowly. With attention and intent. To maneuver the days at the pace of Jerry’s Jack and Jill.
I don’t always get it right. So I lesson myself again. I stand in front of the large canvas. I pick up my slow paintbrush, and hear the words, “Oh, Elsie…”
Even in the dead of winter it was vital for my mother to be able to open a window. When ice crept inside, gathering strength, sealing wood to wood, impeding her much needed freedom, she armed herself with the ConAir blowdryer that I bought in the 9th grade, and blew her window and eventually her heart, wide open.
Maybe it was the swinging of the summer screen door at my grandparents’. Or my mother’s head out the nearest window. But I, too, have found the meaning of home, not by looking in, but looking through.
Some may think you’re safe by closing it all down. But you’re not safe, just alone. I always assumed it was only about breathing. But she said she liked to hear it. What? I asked. Life, my mother answered. There was always hope in the sound of the living. A car door. Footsteps. The distant train. Leaves and bird wings — they became the sounds of her own beating heart, and she was saved.
We went to the Toulouse-Lautrec exhibition yesterday in Aix. Sometimes you need to see things again and again, to see them for the first time.
Of course the actual pieces of art were beautiful. But why were they beautiful? These prostitutes. This windmill. Seeing the actual photos of the women next to what he painted, took my breath away. Not because of what he saw, but wondering if I would have. Would we have seen it, all this beauty, had he not pointed it out repeatedly? And I suppose the same could be said about the Sainte-Victoire, the Cezanne-celebrated mountain also in view. If he hadn’t painted it throughout his life, would it be just another giant rock?
I guess that’s our job. As artists, sure. But as humans. We have to find the beauty. In the most remote places. In the unexpected. And point it out. Again and again. Celebrate it! Until no one can walk by without thinking, that’s really beautiful.
And didn’t my mother do that for me…long before I grew into arms and legs, or heart even. Long before I even checked the mirror, she gave me a reflection of love. Of real beauty. And I felt it. Feel it, to this day.
Because of my grandfather, I can see a field of gold as art. Because of my grandmother, an apron is to be revered.
I started another painting. Maybe this is the one where you see yourself. How lovely you are. I will keep painting until you do.
We can show each other the magnificent ordinary, daily. No ticket required. All admission free. Welcome to the beauty.
It seems when I know you, really know, you become a verb.
To make my favorite cookies, I have to Grandma Elsie my way through the recipe. We don’t have brown sugar here in France, so I make it by adding an undisclosed (even to myself) amount of molasses. If it seems like a lot, I add more flour, or adjust the butter, all by heart and eye, just like she did. Never measuring anything with hand, only taste.
It was my mother who verbed her first. If I fell asleep in a chair, she would say I was “Pulling an Elsie.” And the comparison brought only delight.
It’s funny how we are adjective driven. (And who doesn’t want to be pretty?) But I think the real admiration, the love, comes in finding the acts of the person. Because love is active. In constant motion. And to get pulled into the verb of it all, well that’s a dance!
My friend Loie is a dancer. My Grandma Elsie baked. When I saw the two paintings together, their worlds collided. Nothing similar but the love. So today, when I “Loie” myself around the studio, or “Grandma Elsie” my way through the kitchen, I will know that I am returning the love that I have been so joyfully given.
I had a customer request one of my older pieces. She said she looks at it every morning and wanted to give a print to her best friend. I sold the original years ago, but I still wake to the words on my heart each morning.
“It isn’t that something comes along and gives you a reason to get out of bed, you have to get out of bed and go find that reason, every day…”
I’ve always found discipline to be much more reliable than motivation.
I didn’t have the words for it then, sitting on the front steps of my grandparents’ home. The sugar still settling in my belly from one of the variety packs my grandma bought especially for us, I rested elbows on bare knees and rested bare brain in hands. My grandfather, not one to suffer fools or folly, making what wasn’t his first trip back to the tractor, asked me what I was waiting for. “I don’t know,” I said without lifting my head. “Better find out,” he said without turning back. “Yeah,” I thought, and raced into an open field of reasons.
There is always the sun. The morning. My hands and heart. I am out of bed, more than ready to find out….
I’m not sure when I learned it. Maybe on the school bus with wet hair, breathing so deeply. Holding blank, fresh notebooks tightly to my waist, to simulate the last hug from my mother at the garage door. “Be a big girl,” she said. Oh, I wanted to be. But then the Norton girls got on, all five of them, in all that comfort and bickering of a shared bathroom and last name. And I wanted some of that sameness, but I only felt more alone. I sucked in my lower lip, knowing that would be the first to go, to quiver. And I closed my eyes, willing the tech-school student bus driver to move, move… just get me to school and then I would be ok. I would find a friendly face in that circle as we sat on the cool floor. If I could just hold it in until, Cindy or Barbie, Wendy or Lori, or even Mrs. Strand, could smile at me and gather me in the warmth of “what did you do last night?” and “I’m so happy you’re here.”
I learned to hold it in. Mostly, I suppose, because I knew I had a place, a home, where I would never have to. I don’t know if it was the first time, but it was a time, and I was struggling, bubbling, simmering from lips to eyelids, and my mother asked me, “Do you need to cry out loud?” I shook my head yes. She sat me down. Sat herself beside me. And I did. And it wasn’t for long. I suppose when you’re allowed to let it all go, it can go pretty quickly. And I was saved.
And it wasn’t just tears. She gave me the safest space to do it all out loud. To dream. To hope. To become. To laugh. To sing. To try. I didn’t have to hide or wonder, brace myself or worry. I could just be — out loud, in living color.
I can’t say I never stumble. Never quiver. I can find myself looking back for her shadow at the door. And there are places and times when I know I have to hold it in. But freedom is never far.
We can do this for each other, you know. We can give one another the space to be who we are. We can join in the release of laughter, and tears — both out loud! And either way, we can be the one who says, “I’m so happy you’re here.”
I imagine how the next day went. And the day after. Because their lives didn’t end when I got to the last page. Isn’t that what a good book does? With the same tools as every other writer, all the curved lines that form letters, the dots and dashes that make you stop in your tracks, an author can change the way you feel (not just in the moment) but for a lifetime.
I suppose it’s the same with love, when it’s written well upon your heart. That has to be what draws us in. What keeps us thinking. Those whose lives are so developed, whose storyline runs so deep, it continues long after the final turning of the page. These are the lives I want to surround myself with. It’s the life I want to live, and not in a vain way, (although I do indeed want you to keep coming back – I want to hold your interest) but also for myself — I want to be interested in my own life — to see where this goes. What could happen next? I want to live so deeply that the only choice isn’t even a choice, but a continuation.
The morning sun awakens the letters that tickle their way from heart to head to hands…and the story continues…
You think it’s an apron. And it is sometimes. The proof is the paint splatters that are beginning to gather. And it makes sense around my waist, as a quick brush off of excess water, or a change of color, but it doesn’t really explain the spots around my neck straps. Those are probably because of the dancing.
While the music plays along with the strokes, there are some songs that just won’t take no for an answer, and soon I am dancing like no one but the portraits are watching. Partnered by the brush in hand, I will get pulled in, hence the paint on my collar.
My neighbor continues to ask, though I’ve answered many times, “Are you a singer?” I’m sure she hears me on the way to my studio. I say, “Sometimes.” And I am a dancer sometimes. And sometimes a poet. Sometimes a baker. I suppose I used to give the answer no. Not anymore. Because I am sometimes all of these things. And more. And it’s not a judgement or declaration of things that I do extraordinarily well…but rather if I can say, “Well, I had a time!!!! Wasn’t that some time!”
And the song will change on the player and I am a painter again, but I smile above my painted straps, tap my foot, and know the truth of all that can be.
Receiving a letter in college was monumental. We shared a community phone for our floor, and had to pay for long distance, so it was rarely used. The mailboxes were the tie to the outside world. Located in the entrance of our fifth floor walk-up, what lay behind the gray square door was significantly tied to the speed at which I could climb the stairs. One small letter could erase the added weight of my backpack, loaded down with the likes of Shakespeare and other anthologies. Anticipation picked up each foot. Thumb trying to break the seal before opening the door. Books thrown on sofa, I cracked the remaining seal, and breathed in the connection. And I was saved.
I could always count on the weekly letter from my mother. Sometimes my grandma. An occassional random boyfriend marked with a mascot of another school, or PFC. And I learned quite early on, to get a letter, you needed to send one. To be lifted, you had to do some lifting.
When I was painting her yesterday, the stories ran through my head. Up and down the staircase of my heart and brain. All those things I needed to say. All those things I needed to hear. And I wondered how you would see it. When you saw her. At first glance. Was she getting the letter? Or was she sending it? I suppose it depends on if you are needing to hear something, or if you have something that needs to be said.
We’re always navigating through both. And I guess the key is to keep the chain open. To be lifted. To keep lifting.
Life will weigh us with worry and “other anthologies,” but it will also give us what we need if we choose to participate.
