I never noticed how much it looked like a little nest, the tuft of hair on top of a cow’s head. I guess the bird knew before I did, and it showed me how to find its way home.
I’ve never lived on a farm, nor even in the country. Yet, I’m trying to count, this morning, the amount of times I have been connected to another human, simply by a cow. Of course, my grandparents. Uncles and overalls and electric fences. I’ve sold four original paintings of cows. Three in Minneapolis and one in France. After finishing this cow yesterday, I sent it to my friend in Minnesota. She told me how her father, the week before his passing, wanted to simply watch and listen to the cows on his farm. He was showing her, how to find his way home.
If a cow can do all that, certainly we could do that for each other, be the nest, or at least the direction of home.
I don’t know how many times I got lost in the North End of Van Dyke Road. It was my Grandma Elsie who told me not to count things like that. Returning from ice skating at Noonan’s Park with my two cousins, she asked how it went. “I fell six times,” I said. “Why would you count that?” She shook her head with tight lips, handed me a variety pack size of Kellogg’s cereal, and I knew not to do it again.
Wandering once again down the hill into the untamed North End, I found myself disoriented. When it happened, the only thing to do was to look up. Up was familiar. Up carried the sound of garage doors opening, bicycles popping wheels in the gravel. Up was familiar. Comforting. Home.
I suppose we always have a need to get to higher ground. I hope we do anyway. And we can’t get there by counting our failures, but striving to do better. It’s always up. “Things are looking up. Get your hopes up. Spirits are running high.”
It took a couple of hours to finish her — the woman in the sketchbook. Two hours of her looking up, telling me to keep looking up. I count on my sketchbook, my hands, my heart, for such things. I’m pretty sure Grandma Elsie would be ok with that.
When the world gets this overwhelming, I have to narrow the picture. From planet to country. Still too big. From city, to neighborhood. I can’t make sense of it all. Down to house. To room. To kitchen. To my own hands. I pull it out of the oven. And rest in the place of, “This bread is good.”
And maybe that’s all we can do. Be responsible for our own hand in it. Each day. Each minute. Forget the but they did this, they think that, how could they???? In order to breathe, I have to let go of “they,” in exchange for the reach of my own hands.
At the breakfast table, it’s hard not to go over the latest news. Of course we have to be informed. We must learn and grow and be aware. I can’t change what’s going on in my old neighborhood. And it would be easy to say it doesn’t make a difference at all. But I can’t believe that. And so I humbly paint and write. And connect with the random. We will never be rewarded with certainty. But we have to try. Who would we be if we didn’t even try?
So I rise from the morning table, knowing only two things for sure, this bread is delicious, and all we have to do is be good to each other.
It’s usually only after I’m finished that I see it – everything (everyone) who made the journey from my heart, through my arms, into my hand that held the brush, that moved the paint onto the page. Most of them have made the journey so many times, I have to laugh at them packing up, saying “here we go” as they jump on the painted trail.
Yesterday my mother arrived in her ruffled white blouse and red lipstick. My friend Ken brought his hat from the Easter parade (or let’s be honest, a simple Sunday brunch). And they became coupled again — from a Good Life gallery opening — while the nested bird sets upon the life upcoming, singing that love lives on, ever.
Maybe it’s harder to see while we’re in the midst of it — all this becoming. I think that’s why it’s so important to stop and take a look at the daily page. Give thanks for all those who bring the ruffles, who bring the nested hats — those ready and willing to meet you at the day you’re in, no matter the circumstance, and leap from your heart with a “Here we go!”
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.
I was a teenager having surgery in Minneapolis. It was not yet spring, but for my mother. She was dressed in yellow, head to toe. From my wheelchair, I could see her slacks, not break at the knee, but simply curve like a note in a Harry Belafonte song. The elevator door opened and the doctor smiled at her — said she looked as “beautiful as a jonquil.” I didn’t even know what that meant, but it was the most elegant compliment I had ever heard. Back at my room, no iPad or telephone, certainly no dictionary, we could only imagine how beautiful that flower looked.
It has been decades, and I’m still lifted by yellow. I’m still lifted that my mother dressed to lift, herself and me. I’m still lifted by jonquils standing tall in a breeze that they shouldn’t survive, as my mother bent, but never broke.
As the elevator door opened to 2026, I gave the woman in my sketchbook a yellow sweater. That’s what we do, isn’t it? Lift each other.
“Women in pain become birds.” I just read that. I often find myself looking around for the cameras that are surely filming me in this episode. And as I flutter through the inexplicable planned randomness of the page, I think, yes, but not in the way the author meant — small. No, I think women do become birds, but there is beautiful strength in that. A grandness of sky. Adapting in mid flight. Hovering. Not avoiding the breeze, but feeling it. Using it. All while dressed and feathered.
I say this, not in praise of my own wings, but marveling at those before me. I have been nested and pushed by the best. Elsied and Ivyed into the blue. Words like small were replaced with capable, and I learned to fly.
It’s not to say that days won’t be fragile. That we won’t be fragile. But we have been given everything we need. Mostly love.
I wrote it long ago. The truth of it still lifts me. “She believed in the pure randomness of it all. It could happen to anyone at any time, pain, happiness, confusion, even love.”
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.
The Christmas carcass became yesterday’s soup. Aproned and worry-free, I Grandma Elsied my way through the process. Adding everything. Measuring nothing. And it was delicious. Steeped with holiday and attention, it tasted rich and full, but for me, the added pleasure, satisfaction, joy, came with nothing being wasted.
I try to practice it — this making use. A scrap of metal turned into a frame. Discarded wood into panels. Yesterday’s still fresh oil paint into tomorrow’s tableau. And to me it’s all important, but I hope I pay the same attention to living. Using everything I have. Every speck of courage, because we’ll get more tomorrow. Loving with every piece of my heart, knowing it means nothing left inside. And perhaps it’s not as easy as pot to stove, but I was taught to attempt in Elsie’s kitchen. To abandon worry and just create.
She’s smiling over my soup bowls, but more over, my heart. Telling me daily to give it all, and just become.
I had a favorite spoon when I was young. Rounded, I never felt the edge of elongation. It just simply delivered. And I loved it. My mother made sure it was clean for every meal. From Captain Crunch to Campbell’s soup, I had my security, my joy, my spoon.
When my parents divorced and we had to leave our home, everything felt sharp and long. Who were we if not on Van Dyke Road? The last cardboard box packed, I stood at the door and she slipped the spoon in the pocket of my navy windbreaker. Everything would be ok.
Since then, I have never left a situation without a dream in my pocket. Every school, vacation, team, life event, I have taken flight with my pockets filled. Nothing is lighter than joy.
Each time I paint a wing, I smile, because I know what’s beneath. I know what they carry. My mother showed me long ago.
When I first moved to France, the letter arrived in the mail. A little too bulky for just words. Inside was the spoon. The dream. I knew everything would be ok.
