Jodi Hills

So this is who I am – a writer that paints, a painter that writes…

Category Archives: attract


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Corralled in all that I love.

Besides fields of grain, my grandfather had cows. And while he taught me many life lessons, the actual day to day farming, how the cows got from one field to the next, into the barn, I really have no idea. But it’s possible the instincts were not lost on me, as I have the continuous desire to corral my make-up, shower products, and various items on the coffee table. 

It’s hard to explain the satisfaction if you are not of like mind. But if you are straightening your mouse pad as you read this, cornering your books, gathering pens in a holder, then you know. Some might argue that it’s a “control thing.” Maybe, but I think, for me, it’s more of a coming together, a calmness, a peace. No competition of chaos and clutter.

When I walk into our library, my joyful heart exhales. The details of art, books, music and plants, down to the Paris Review on the footstool I made from a stump in our garden — they make me, I want to say happy, but that’s not exactly right. It’s more than that. I am corralled in all that I love. It is a calm and safe place where my heart can rest, and my mind can wander. I suppose that’s home, isn’t it?

I love to roam the fields. Walk. Run. Fly even, in the yet to be traveled. In the unknown. And maybe that’s only possible because of the safety (disguised as love) that I was given first from an earth-roughened heart, on a farm just outside of Alexandria, Minnesota — one that rests me still in the south of France. 

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A dip in the magic.

My mother wasn’t one to swim, but she made sure that I learned. And right along with it she taught me how to take a DIP — how to access the Dream In my Pocket. “You never know when you’re going to need it,” she explained. So before anything ended, we made sure our pockets were filled. Before making a return trip home, a new trip would be planned. After an event, we’d plan our outfits for the next one. And one of the most important, in the last pages of a current book we would add to our “To Be Read” pile. 

I finished “Killers of the flower moon” yesterday. Within hours, I went to my TBR. I had purchased these two books about a week ago. I chose Paul Auster’s “The New York Trilogy,” because he had recently passed. I had only planned on getting this one, but on my way to the counter I saw the book, “The Details,” by Kira Josefsson. I had just listened to a podcast about it on my morning walk, so I grabbed that book too. They both waited patiently by my bed.

I was tired last evening. I had taken my actual first dip in our pool. This summer’s dream was officially out of pocket!  The water that may have been splashed onto the lawn was replaced with smiles.

Getting ready for bed, I randomly grabbed the top book, “The Details.” I wasn’t even six pages in, when the magic outshined the lamp clipped onto the pages. The character in the book began talking about her love for reading, specifically for her love of the author Paul Auster. My heart giggled. She went on, her favorite book was “The New York Trilogy.” You just can’t make this stuff up! 

I’ve always trusted the readers, and the dreamers. My mother gave me that. Perhaps these pockets were filled from heaven. I don’t know, but I slept in the knowledge that I was still surrounded by magic. And I will take a luxurious dip in all of it, every chance I get!!!

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From the front.

It was only the handle that stuck out of the back pocket of our jeans, but it was enough, this plastic curve of the comb, to tell everyone who we were. Enough to tell everyone we had seen the movies, read the magazines, understood about the proper hair style (for both boys and girls). 

My mom bought it for me at Peterson’s Drug. The light blue plastic was easily seen, but not too showy. The widely spaced teeth of the comb feathered my bangs perfectly, and inserted me smack dab in the middle of the hope that “I belong here too.” 

The level of things that would have connected us more deeply were reserved for secret poems written while lying beside the stereo — poems that only my mother and Casey Kasem understood and were privy to. 

It would take years for me to gain my voice. Find the courage to use it. It’s joyfully ironic, when I stopped thinking about belonging and concentrated more on becoming, only then did I gain both. I did belong. To myself and to this world. The heart that I wear on my sleeve is decisively more connective than any comb I wore in my back pocket.

We’re given the tools we need right from the start. It takes a lot of growing, a lot of courage to use them. But it is what connects us. This sharing. It’s so delightful when I offer up an experience, and then you share yours.  More delightful even than running together wildly down the halls of Jefferson Senior High! Today I see you! From the front! 

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Driving to the airport.

Maybe our sense of chance is diluted by the daily barrage of “last chance” emails. For the fourth day in a row I have received my “really, this is your final chance” to take advantage of this sale.

But I suppose I can’t really blame the internet. Maybe we’re just not designed to see it. Prepare for it. All of these final chances. These last times. The poets and singers have even tried to warn us — “Live like you were dying”; or “Live today like it was your last day on earth.” I get it, but I can’t say I really adhere to this way of thinking. There seems to be a lot of pressure within, or perhaps even desperation. I heard something recently that I like much better. It is from the author of Between two Kingdoms, Suleika Jaouad. Living with cancer, she was, and is, seriously confronted with this every day. But she explains, rather than living like this day is her last, she decides to live like it’s her first. Seeing the wonder and beauty of everything around her. This is how I want to live.

I thought I already loved him. But he was a country away. Meeting him in real life for the first time I was nervous and excited. My hands gripped the wheel, unsure of how to keep the car and my heart on 494. I slipped my foot from my shoe. I needed to feel the pedal. The energy seemed to be racing from my toes, changing to butterflies in my belly, to songbirds in my heart, and tingling straight out of my updooed hair. I was alive. Alive in every first of my being. I circled the airport once, not seeing him. Our phones, foreign to each other, couldn’t communicate. I circled the airport again. Pulling up slowly this time. There he was. Just like his picture. Sitting on the sidewalk. All of my first were real. Especially love.

Time has a way of covering the path in laurels…go ahead and rest, it says. I’m as guilty as the next person. But I don’t like it. And when I hear the shuffle of my feet in said laurels…when I get annoyed by the little things…it takes me a minute, sometimes longer, but then I hear the voice, “You better drive yourself to the airport…” And I smile. I make the first breakfast with the first toast from the new loaf covered in the new jam. Have the first coffee under this first sun with my first love and the day begins. I begin. I am alive!

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Spinning into stove.

Rita will turn 98 on the fourth of July. I only know this because of an apron.

It was her niece who bought it for her — this apron of mine. She had been a ballroom dancer with her husband. Still dancing in her nineties. And wasn’t that the whole point of what I wrote on that apron — “and then one day you realize, every floor is actually a dance floor…” Life is something! We are pushed and pulled, sometimes knocked over, knocked flat, by the pulsing beat..but the wisest, the strongest of us all, keep dancing.

It was my mother who taught me to dance in our kitchen. Nothing stopped her. In the green house on Van Dyke Road, in her lengthy arm exuberance, she knocked the light fixture from the ceiling. It fell like a disco ball, just missing both of our heads and crashed to the floor. A broom, a paper sack, and the record kept playing. When we moved to the brown house, she turned up the stereo in the dining room, and we danced within the frame of the orange countertops until we lost the house, and began apartmenting. Each floor became smaller, but never the dance. Still she pushed her hand into mine to signal the turn, and I would – sometimes spinning into stove, sink or fridge, but the dance continued.

So it seems no accident after all that I was invited into Rita’s kitchen. Aproned and joyful, she led me onto her dance floor. Watching the video she shared, I wanted to capture everything. I knew I would paint her. Every dish in the cupboard, plaque on the wall, it all felt so important. And it is!

I finished this painting yesterday in France. This image of her in California. Beginning from the lessons I had learned in Minnesota. We are all connected by this joyful beating of hearts. This music that never ends. This rocket’s red glare!

I often use the word “she.” Today I mean Rita. I mean my mother. Myself. (And hopefully you!) When I write the words, “…and so she would dance.”

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Fill your heart. Feed your soul. Taste this life.

Only in the painting can it remain this way. In real life, left with only a bite, it will begin to brown, decay. So the only choice is to enjoy all of it. 

I suppose it’s the same with so many things. Especially from the heart. We think we’re safe or something if we use just a little. Just a bite. But it’s just not true. We’re meant to taste it all. To give it all. And trust that there will be more. And if you’re reading this, there has been, there is, and there will be…more. 

And sure, it may seem frightening. This never changing apple on the paper, you might find security in that. Nothing will change. But say it again slowly, “Nothing will change.” 

Love is always changing, and moving, visiting places I’ve never seen, and waiting…resting with patience, feeding with forgiveness, and holding, with an ever evolving shape. Sometimes my heart aches with missing someone, something, but I tell myself again, it’s only love, it’s only love. I am not stuck on the page. I am feeling and growing and changing and all the while love comes with me. So I smile at the anger — this anger that I can feel while love keeps changing shape. Because really, that may be love’s greatest gift of all. Ever changing. Ever more. 

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Without fuss or fury.

If the truth has to come at you like a ton of bricks, maybe it really isn’t the truth at all.

Grandpa Rueben didn’t say a lot, but when he did, we believed him. He was one of the hardest working people I ever knew, (other than Grandma Elsie), yet I never saw him labor with the facts. There was a quiet certainty that rose from his overalls. His right elbow raised from the table. His open hand began with the slightest of beats. Like a conductor, his rhythm held our eyes. Chosen carefully, the words, without fuss or fury, slipped into our hearts and minds and filled them.

I suppose that’s why today, if it comes at me too hard, I can’t let it in. It’s only noise. There are some who think if you say it loud enough, repeat it again and again, then it must be true. I still am of the belief that the real work has to remain in the fields. The truth, when balanced on the uneven legs of the kitchen table at day’s end, should come lightly, easily, ever without harm.

It only just occurred to me — they often say before you speak, take a beat. I smile. I see Grandpa’s hand gently keeping time, and my heart knows what’s real.

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As I come clean.

I suppose it was at my grandparent’s house that I first learned to come in clean. Winter snow or summer dirt was wiped from shoes in the entryway before climbing the couple of steps into the kitchen where grandma wiped her floured hands inside of her apron pockets and brought you in for a loving belly hug. After the apron imprinted your cheek, there was nothing to do but come directly with the truth. The truth of what you had been doing outside. What you touched that maybe you were told not to touch, like the electric fence, or a baby bird from a fallen nest. Maybe it felt safe, because it had been proven safe, time and time again, with wiped shoes and warmed cheeks…so we told all, and she loved us still. 

If I come to you with that same truth today, I will tell you that I have battled it throughout the years — love and trust. Maybe we all do. But it has yet to change. The only way any of it seems to work is when I come in clean. When I come clean. When I tell you my truth, and accept the same from you. It’s not as complicated as I, we, often like to make it. 

I grab the straw broom from the corner and smile. It has never needed instructions. Nor does my heart — its screen door swings open, and I dare it all again. Safe. Welcomed in the loving arms of home. 

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Packet to packet.

I have carried the remaining one or two tissues left in the pocket pack for over a year now. That means passing through three allergy seasons, yet I can’t bring myself to use them.

She followed me around for two hours, this woman from Anderson Funeral home. During the visitation before my mother’s funeral, I wept and hugged and bent and wept some more. And she was there, this small, gray haired woman, hired, certainly, but it felt sincere. It felt like she was truly there to follow my trail of tears. And she did her job well. I was never without a tissue. She began handing them one by one, and then switched from packet to packet. 

I could have picked her out of a lineup that first day, but her image is fading. I don’t remember if she had glasses. I think she had glasses. She was wearing a dress. Maybe a blazer. A dress with a blazer? Lipstick for sure. She wasn’t tall. Perhaps at my shoulders. But it felt like she was lifting me. 

As with all grief, supporters move on. They have to. It is natural. It is necessary. We all know it. We all know it, that is, until it’s you that is grieving. And the grief changes shape. It doesn’t require the same kind of attention. I don’t need her to follow my trail, but I need to not forget. As I watch the fading image of the gray haired woman, I bring to life the stories of my mother. And tears of pain turn to tears of tenderness, tears of joy, never to be wiped away. No, these tracks of love and laughter must remain. 

I reach into my purse for my lipstick, or my signature fragrance, and I smile. I touch the tattered plastic and know that I am ok. So grateful for those who walked with me, for those who walk with me still. I mention it in hopes that these words will follow those who need it. That the stories will catch your tears, will lift your smile. And the face that follows will change from mine to yours to theirs, and we will all be there, for each other. Heart to heart. Packet to packet.

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There is motion at your front door.

Maybe it’s because I want to hear it. Maybe it’s because Mr. Iverson told us in the first grade that they could be about anything, the poems that he wanted us to write — the poems that he would inscribe neatly on the black board and our hearts, measured out note by note. And they were special. Lyrical. The ordinary things, our houses and shoes. Our games and basements and cars and trees. They all became magical because we called them poetry. 

We recently got a new doorbell for our gate. It is connected to our phones. It gives us the alert whenever motion is detected, even when it’s us. When I go for my morning walk, just past the gate, she pings in my ear and says, “There is motion at your front door.” And every day it is the poem that starts my journey. There IS motion at my front door – and isn’t it a good reminder! I always smile. Because isn’t it what we’ve been told in movies and books. By philosophers and teachers. “When you stop learning you die.” “It’s over when you stop dreaming.” “Sharks never stop swimming. You gotta keep moving.” The list goes on. It’s all about motivation. And could there be a better place to start than your front door? So I hear it. I feel it. There IS motion! I AM alive! And so I begin with my doorbell’s poem, off in search of another. Because we get to decide. We hold the chalk that turns the cursive words into prayers and sets the path of our journey. 

I have to go now. Begin. Create something. There is motion at my heart’s door. 

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