People have asked me throughout the years, which comes first, the image or the words. Mostly the words, I answered. Because that was true for my heart. Every beat came out in poemed stanza since I was five, with the images close behind, only needing to travel an arm’s length.
Reading the poem again yesterday, I saw her image. I started with the eyes. Still moist from what she had survived, she could see ahead with hope, instead of fear. And I knew her. So perhaps in this case the words hadn’t come first. Because I had seen the look, not in the portraiture of the day, but on my mother’s face. Every morning at 7:20, ripe with loss, she and her prepared face made their way down Jefferson Street, to face another day of work — from her front desk in the Superintendent’s office and the depths of her bruised heart. And I was the bird she carried, until we both were ready to fly.
It’s good to remember. To keep in mind that we are all barely more than air. That even with, or perhaps especially because of, eyes still dampened, we can lift each other. Find our way. Together. We soar.
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.
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.
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?
When I saw the image of the man start to appear, it made me laugh. I had seen him before. Not this exact version, but certainly a handsome man, clad in something spectacular from the Sundance catalog, or Banana Republic.
It started when I was in college. We didn’t have email or texting. We had letters. My mother sent something to me weekly. Oh what a glorious day when I saw it in the mailbox. Maybe it began because there wasn’t a lot of news to be shared. Or maybe it was simply her glorious sense of humor. She cut out images of good looking men her age from catalogs and wrote, “Wouldn’t you like him for a stepfather?” The answer was always yes! And the jokes continued about ordering, sending away for, arriving in the mail… we could go on forever, until it switched to the outfits in the same catalog that she would wear to get said man, which turned into a fashion show of what we already had, an exchange of compliments, bent over belly laughs and hearts that were full.
Through the years, at gallery shows throughout the country, people would ask my mother if she too was an artist. She shyly said no, but we both knew the truth in the hesitation. She could, had, and continued, to create something out of nothing. Isn’t that exactly what an artist is? I think so.
I see him in my sketchbook and write stepfather. My mother’s art lives on.
I think even then, I didn’t feel like I was waiting for it, it felt like I was in it.
I didn’t use the front door of our house on Van Dyke Road. But I did use the stoop — the set of cement stairs that faced the gravel. I would perch there. Knowing a car might pass going to town. Or a truck to the North End. A Dynda hanging laundry. A Schulz boy up to no good. A Norton girl on bicycle, on foot. A Weiss getting the mail. A Mullen racing from the sound of their mother’s call.
Even motionless, I could feel the river’s ripple. Weren’t we all a part of this movement toward the ocean? Khalil Gabran tells us “It’s not about disappearing into the ocean but of becoming the ocean.” I didn’t have the words for it then, and yet the water lapped against my bare feet. Perhaps change is the hardest now when I forget the water and find myself waiting. Waiting for the change that will bring all the relief, the “I’ll be happy when…” It’s not until my formerly chubby toes wiggle and say, you’re already in it… that’s all, you’re in it. I smile, and let myself become.
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.
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.
As Jane Goodall sat for her portrait, she told the artist that everyone made fun of her as a little girl. After finding the Tarzan book, and reading from cover to cover, she knew that he had married the wrong Jane, and that she would go to Africa, study the animals and write books about them. “How are you going to do that?” — really more doubting than asking. “You don’t have the money,” or “You’re just a girl.” “Everyone scoffed at my dream,” she said, “but not my mother.”
And didn’t I make it the same way? Without examples or funding. Seeing the wrinkled looks. The doubters of my chosen unchartered path. But never with my mother. I can’t even tell you if she was reflecting my dream, or I was reflecting her belief, but within her presence, I didn’t just imagine who I could be, I believed in who I was.
…but who was doing that for her?
Maybe this is one of life’s greatest treasures. Finding your champion. The person who eventually teaches you how to become your own. Maybe it’s a parent, or educator, or friend. When you find it, hold on tight, then let go loosely. Because this is the gift that must be shared.
When I painted the first portrait of my mother, she looked at herself and said, “That woman doesn’t look like she needs to be afraid of anything…maybe I don’t either.” We were each other’s champions.
