She wrote her first order in Chicago. My mom was always there for moral support. Cheering me on as I sold my goods. But she was yet to pick up the pad and pen. She looked beautiful standing beside me — as if she just stepped off Michigan Avenue. She visited with the customers. Told the various stories behind the art. (Most of them included her.) She made them laugh with their hearts. As they say, nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd, and soon my booth was overflowing. I looked up at her (as I always did). I think she knew I wanted her to grab an order form. I saw the “oh, no” rising in her face. But just as she had done with me since birth, I could see her capabilities first. I nodded my belief in her and she picked up the clipboard. I more than loved her. I was so proud of her. And she of herself. I could see the “oh, yes” fluttering!
Our roles are always changing. Sometimes you’re the little girl. Sometimes the bird. If you’re lucky you will be surrounded with those who welcome both. And if you’re wise, you’ll allow them the same.
Perhaps I’m more careful now of where I lay my expectations, knowing that often the people who rise up to the occasion aren’t the most expected. Like a gift without pressure of holiday they gloriously appear, and lift you higher than you could have ever imagined.
When I was a young girl, I found so much help in the school system. Teachers offered aid and solace. Encouragement and discipline. It was a structure that I depended on. Solid. When I first arrived in France, I had to attend a mandatory French school. Around the table, desperations were as vast as the countries we came from. Of course I looked to the teacher as I had always done. It didn’t take long for me to learn of my mistake. She would not save me. Nor any of us. She made fun of each nationality, as if she had an offensive handbook. And when the insults weren’t understood with language, she used gestures that could not be ignored.
After three months, without common language or permission, we began to stumble into something close to humanity. We found out more about each other. After learning that I paint and write, it was our teacher who asked me to be the teacher. To bring in art, books, and give a demonstration, in French on my final day of school. I agreed. For if she taught me anything, it was where to place all my expectations — within. As I struggled with art and easels from the car to the classroom, it was the newest addition to our class, the man from Cambodia, who spoke neither English nor French, who picked up the heaviest of what I had, and walked beside me. I smiled, knowing that without my knowledge or expectation, I had been lifted. I had been saved.
I’m not sure where heaven begins. How high up it actually is… but when I saw the mannequins on the fifth floor of this New York walk up in the fashion district, I thought perhaps, for my mother, it starts right here.
You could say she loved clothes, but that’s not the complete story. She loved fashion. What’s the difference? I would equate it to the comparison of house and home. Fashion is about the design. The putting together. Accessorizing. For her it was not about what she was wearing, but how she wore it.
Certainly no one mistook it for the promised land — the Woolworth’s on Broadway in Alexandria, Minnesota — but when I watched her thumbing through the Butterick patterns, or the McCall’s, on Saturday mornings, when I watched the dream come alive as she swooped her hands from waist to knees, stretched her arms out in the make believe dress, for me I was certain I was in the presence of an angel.
It had always been her dream to be a dress designer. I imagine her now, so easily she bypasses the stairs and floats her way to the upper floor. How joyfully she passes on her heart and knowledge to the young people amid the mannequins awaiting. How she drapes and flows. So elegant. So possible. And they can feel it. Beyond their pin pricked fingers and weary eyes, they are Woolworthed into her sense of magic. And it’s Saturday morning, every day. And they dare to dream because of her. Just like me.
The light is changing. The cool winter blues are softening into tones of hopeful yellow. Two steps out the back door going down to the studio, I could feel it, see it. Bouncing from the woman at the door who welcomes me onto the back page of my sketchbook. Still a child at heart, I tried to capture it with my phone. Both women smiled gently — the same look Grandma Elsie gave us as we chased summer’s tail around the house.
And why wouldn’t I, we, try to keep in step with all that shines? To keep believing in goodness. Light. To keep understanding that there is no such thing as false hope, only hope. Yellow, gorgeous hope that keeps our legs spinning beneath us, delightfully, nearly off balance, yet always in the race.
I mention it because we don’t all get to see it every day. So I think we have the responsibility to call it out, tell the others of what we’ve seen. Shout it out until it’s their turn to step inside and do the same. I saw it, my friends. The yellow. Still shining. Bright as ever.
I find it thrilling, reading a book and entering a place I’ve already been. Like I’m in on the secret. Like the letters of the words are eyelashes in the wink that says, I see you.
I’m nearly finished with the book, “Geek Love.” It is perhaps the wildest ride I’ve encountered for quite some time. It couldn’t be further from my reality, and yet… yet, there it was, as clear as if I were en route on Highway 7, looking up at the green sign, “Hopkins, Minnesota.” Never have I read a book that mentioned it before. Minnesota, sure. Minneapolis, of course. But never Hopkins. And I was knee deep, no, heart deep, in the word.
Maybe it’s empathy. Validation. Or simply our need to be seen. But it got me thinking. If mere words can do that, simply on a page, couldn’t we do that for each other? Aren’t we supposed to? Having not only traveled through place, but emotion, don’t we have the responsibility to turn back and say, “I’ve been there. And I see you,”? I think so. So I gather the words and arrange them on this page, and maybe you see yourself, and maybe that gets you looking, and maybe you see someone else, and they find comfort in you having been there… and… and they see hope… and someone else…and the story never ends.
My mother never came empty handed. Whether it was for a week’s visit, or a long afternoon, her arms were filled with toilet paper, paper towel, Kleenex, or something frosted from the bakery. It wasn’t that I couldn’t purchase it. It was just another form of connection. And when I poked my finger through the plastic to carry the rolls up the stairs to my apartment, along with her suitcase, I knew that she thought of me, not just here, not just at the events, but on Tuesday afternoons at Cub while picking up some essentials. And I felt loved.
We have a chalkboard in our French kitchen to remind us of those very things. I guess Laetitia saw it when she came for lunch that day. Toilet paper written in white. I walked her out to her car. She opened the trunk. Reached in. Pulled out a multi-pack of toilet paper. I would never refuse a visit from my mother. I held it, her, in my arms at the top of my heart’s stairs. And I am loved.
Just imagining it, I can feel the tension leave my shoulders. My breathing slows. To lie in the folds of my grandma’s apron was as near as I came to where all hopes nested.
She possessed the most remarkable ability, to fall asleep at any given moment. Not narcolepsy. It was as if she stored the sleep beside the Kleenex up her sleeve, and when she needed five minutes, or twenty, she could pull it out and take the needed rest. And I truly mean it could be any time. During a telephone call. A commercial break during Days of Our Lives. Or as you struggled through your turn in a card game of which she neglected to explain to you the rules.
During one such game, I watched her apron fall and rise. I couldn’t take it anymore. I laid down my cards and gently folded myself silently from my chair. I wormed my way back up into her lap, and rode love’s ebb and flow. When I think of it now, I was not all that graceful. Surely my climbing must have awakened her. I looked up to see if an eye opened. I think I saw just the curve of her lip. I rested comfortably in the knowledge that it was still my turn.
I like to light candles when I get up. This morning’s illumination put up a fight. The first two matches burned themselves out so quickly, I had to abandon them to save my fingers. Next the wick broke off. Then again. By the fourth match I had to laugh, remembering this is exactly why I never volunteered to be an acolyte at Bethesda Lutheran, and was always more than relieved when Gail Kiltie raised her hand. What’s ironic, the very thing I feared and tried to avoid — their judgement — would eventually come to pass anyway the minute my mother got divorced and we were not pushed out the door, but conveniently shown where it was while being held open.
I don’t know what they expected the lesson to be (that’s the thing, we get to choose that). My take away — people are going to think what they think, do what they do, without your knowledge or permission. And you can decide whether you are going to blow around in all that wind, or simply fly. (I think the birds on the page, tell you what I did. What I do.)
I haven’t thought about them in years. I have no ill will. For didn’t they give me wings? And my faith is strong. My house and heart are well lit. I release myself into the morning flutter.
I don’t often work in this color palette. But it suited her, my mother-in-law Lucy. Near the end, when time took to wrinkling, it was the pink of youth that said “not just yet.”
And maybe that’s the way for all. I hope so. I can feel it myself, that girlish vigor. From the pink of the gymnasium where we ran off our preteens. Cheeks, thighs, everything pinkened with beginnings. The blush remained through unanswered questions in classrooms to the bus stop, trying to time the line just right to sit next to the high scorer of the junior basketball boys’ team.
We grew and wandered under a blanket of rose. Beginning and beginning. Our hearts and minds must have sensed that all the change would bring with it challenge and heartache and pains of growth, but it was the pink that lifted us, the pink that held up the hand to our adulting years and whispered, “not just yet.”
I remember asking my grandma if it all went so fast. She giggled, partly because of the “of course” of it all, but mostly I like to think because most of the pink still remained.
I bought pink Lillies for Lucie. Placed them by her portrait. Not at her grave. But in the morning of the bathroom. She keeps beginning. Her palette remains.
There was a group of men helping my grandfather. I suppose neighbors. Being the sponge that I was, I listened to them during their break. I could still fit underneath the table, amid the smell of earth from boots and overalls. They drank the coffee and ate the kolaches, and spoke as if they were one of us, even though they said the name wrong. Hvezda. Yes, it began with an H, but we didn’t pronounce it. It was vee-ezda, not he-vezda, I shook my head and told the table leg. Still, they finished the plates and drank the coffee to the grounds. Joyfully. And they would come back, again and again.
I didn’t ask why. The answer, for my grandfather, was always nature. So I walked in it. I hope I still do.
They say that Redwoods are smart enough to share with neighboring trees the water that they collect. Knowing that to hoard it would put them at greater risk in a wildfire.
My grandparents were Redwoods. What am I? What are we?
