In the springtime, when Hugo’s field began to turn golden behind our house on Van Dyke Road, and when the sun reflected off my winter white thighs, my eyes could barely adjust to the brightness of it all. For a few brief moments, blinded in the growth, I didn’t know where I was going, but I felt certain that I was on my way.
He didn’t want us running through his field. To cut across would save only minutes in the short journey to town, and I can’t explain why we were in such a hurry, but it was so tempting. Maybe it was the promise of summer. The grain that brushed against our legs. The windowed storefronts that called to us. Come. Press against. See what’s inside. We’ve been waiting just for you. It was too much to resist, so we ran across his beautiful field toward the neverending promise.
I’d like to think we didn’t do any damage. And I apologize if we did. In this fever to outrun time — this time measured so clearly by the color of the changing field.
It’s springtime in Provence. Purples and yellows bloom all around us, in a way that quickens the steps. My lavender legs still feel like running. But there is a moment when the morning sun comes through the window with a light that is so bright you can only feel it, and it tells me to stop. Stop chasing. Just be. Maybe it’s nature Hugo-ing us to take the long way. I smile slowly. I’d like to tell you it lasts. But I cannot stop color, nor time. Or the need to travel through both. But I can tell you this, it’s in these brief moments, that I feel gratitude of peace, and the golden blur rests.
I don’t know that I was necessarily being so “good,” but that’s how it was interpreted. My grandma used to marvel — “I could just put you down, and that’s where you’d stay until I told you that you could move again — such a good kid!”
I remember her roll-top desk. She plopped me in the chair. I could just reach the handle. It made a little thwapping sound as I pushed it up and then back down. I thought it was the greatest thing, riding this wave, the greatest thing that is until I caught a glimpse of what was inside. Pens and paper and my favorite, the pencil. I loved pencils from the moment I discovered them. The smell of the lead. The feel between my chubby fingers. The newness. Everything was just waiting to be created. I don’t know how long I held the pencil before she noticed me, rubbing it between my fingers as if to will the genie from the bottle, but she wiped her dish soaked hands against her apron and reached the scrap paper from the top shelf.
Tiny squares of white. Some blank. Some with abandoned grocery lists. I covered them all. Scribbles and drawings and near words. I was in heaven. I could have stayed forever. Was I being good? I was being me.
It should come as no surprise, whenever visiting a museum or landmark, my go-to souvenir is the pencil. I have a favorite — from the Pierre Soulages museum. The weight. The feel. Perfection. I use it in my sketchbooks. But truth be told, I often just hold it in my hand for a moment. And on those days when the world, the day, decides to plop me in an unfamiliar place, I hold on. I take comfort in all of these hand-held possibilities, and I smile, because I find myself saying, “I’m good.”
Maybe being brave is kind of like love, in the way that you never finish.
I didn’t know much about it then — my grandpa’s farm. I only saw how he changed the colors from season to season. From black to green to gold. He made it look so simple. I suppose we don’t often see people being brave. We just see them doing. But the changing weather must have brought worry. A tractor down, a man short. With each crop something different. He had to keep learning. Adjusting. Every single day.
I think it was the same with my mother. Most only saw the colors. How lovely she looked in her yellow. Her turquoise. Most couldn’t see beyond the popped collar, or ruffled neck, just how brave she was being. I’m not even sure she saw it herself. But I did. I still do.
Sometimes I get impatient with myself. Why do I have to keep tracing over the word brave? Can’t I just be? But in the moments when I let myself step into the beautiful colors of it all, navigating through the brilliance of the day’s challenge, I see it. And I’m ok with the not finishing. I will be brave today. And tomorrow. But I look around and smile, because I’m doing the same with love.
I have no memory of the apples growing. Each year, they were just there. The branches seemed to go from bare to weighed in just the blink of an eye. And as quickly as the green apples appeared in my grandparents’ trees, we were tripping over them in the grass, loading sack after brown paper sack to give away.
Maybe it’s the way of all living. It goes so quickly. We move from grand point to grand point, missing all the little things along the way. The how we got heres. The growths.
I keep trying to think of her as a young woman — the journey of how Elsie became Grandma Elsie. She wasn’t always in that kitchen. In that yard with an upturned apron full of apples. She once had to have giggled with the girls behind the school. Cursed her parents and dreamed of boys. Imagined a life. A future.
To know the exact details, I suppose, would be like trying to reattach the apples to the tree. But I think it’s enough to know there was more. There is more. So much more to all of us. There are reasons and seasons of how we got here. And maybe we’ll never know all of it, but I think there is empathy in the attempt. Compassion in trying to imagine the whole picture. None of us are just one thing. Maybe in learning that, we come to see some growth after all.
We’ve never had a duck in our yard before. It was a delightful surprise when I went to open the shutters. Perhaps even more surprising, “canard,” was the word that popped into my head (french for duck).
That is the very thing that keeps me coming back to the page, the canvas, the morning shutter — this belief in the unexpected. This hope that I’ll see something new. Create something new. Feel something waddle across my heart.
And it’s never been about shock. Shock is simple. Anyone can severely rattle and create a response. But to find the beauty in the simple. To see the spectacular in life’s gentle and daily offerings, this, I think, is the extraordinary.
It may not sound like much, but for me it was a sign of learning. A sign of growth. And without that, what am I in this for? Sure it may be at a waddler’s pace, but I am learning continuously about life. And this is hope. This is joy!
I have never been a go back to bed person. Even waiting for the winter school closings to be announced on the KXRA radio station, while all the neighborhood children were praying for anything — even two hours late — I prayed for fully closed or regular hours. I just didn’t understand the advantage of two hours late, I was already up.
Full steam into that project, that emotion, even that brick wall. Maybe it’s my sign, my nature, my upbringing… I don’t know, but it is me. And I wouldn’t change it. But I have to keep reminding myself, that it’s not for everyone. And as natural as it is for me to want to get started, it is as natural for others to wish for a 10:00am bus. I smile, because I remember seeing the others, the Norton girls, still running out late with wet hair, even with the extra time. And for brief moments, I envied it, but I didn’t change.
So it comes as no surprise that I school myself each morning. Early. French lessons. Blog. Exercise. My “bus” arrives early. I only mention it because I can see the snow flurries out the window, and children’s prayers floating through the air. For some they will come true. For some they won’t. But one thing is sure, for both, for all, time will move faster than anyone can imagine. But the scent of wet clothes, and chilly toes, and wild hopes will remain. My dreams fog the glass of the window. I draw in a heart. And begin.
It was exactly one mile from our house on Van Dyke Road to the railroad tracks just before town. When I was 6 years old, I was allowed that far on my own. I walked it, or biked it, every day of summer vacation. The first thing in sight, besides the large Viking statue, was our local museum. Truth be told, I wasn’t that interested in the Runestone. My sunburned cheeks, along with the pink part in my blonde hair, marked a head that was sufficiently filled with everything Washington Elementary had to offer, so I wasn’t hungry for the town’s history.
I earned a quarter each Thursday for cleaning the mirrors and vacuuming. With know stores in my one mile excursions, my collection of pocketed quarters was building, burning like the summer sun. I twirled them in my sweaty fingers at the edge of the tracks. I could see the sign for the gift shop. It was just a few steps more. I made lines in the dirt with the tips of my bumper tennis shoes. Surely a few more steps wouldn’t matter. I was going to be in the first grade in only a month. Please, please, please, I begged my mother when she returned home from work. “I just want to go to the gift shop. It’s only a few more steps.” “You don’t even know what’s inside,” she said. Which was true, but I had quarters, and I knew what the word gift meant. “It’s not toys,” she continued. I said something about needing it, wanting it… I’m sure I through in a “everyone else gets to” — even though I never saw children racing toward it. By the next Thursday, I had worn her down and she agreed with a “fine, go ahead.”
The first few steps beyond the tracks felt like I was floating. Maybe all freedom feels this light. I skipped the air to the front door and waited. And waited. I didn’t have a watch. So far I had only learned digital time. I sat twirling the quarters through my fingers. I jumped up with the click of the door. Open — the word felt just for me. I sprang through the door. Still sun blind, I couldn’t see anything on the shelves. It wasn’t what I expected, it was even better. I wandered slowly past the woman seated by the counter, so she could see me seeing. Someone should witness my first outing, I thought, and it was going to be her. She looked up from her paper, not nearly grasping the importance of this moment. And then I saw her. This little Native American doll. (I’m sure I still called her an Indian at the time, but we wouldn’t learn that for a few years.) She had the shiniest black hair. A little leather dress. I wanted her. I needed her. She was glorious. Two dollars. I had eight quarters. It was my miracle of freedom. I placed her on the counter along with my quarters. “That’ll be $2.08,” she said. I smiled, still not realizing, pushing my quarters closer.” “$2.08,” she repeated. “But it says, two dollars. I have two dollars. I Windexed for two months.” (Which wasn’t really true, we only bought off brands, but she didn’t need to know that.) “It’s the tax,” she said. Tax? I didn’t know anything about tax. “You can take from the penny jar,” she said. There were four pennies left on the side of the counter. I was still short. I looked at the doll. I looked at the counter. I looked at the woman. She took the doll and turned around. My heart sank. Gutted, I began to turn toward the door. She placed the sacked doll on the counter along with her purse. She pulled out her coin purse and added four pennies to the cash register. My heart floated again. She handed me the doll. She had seen me after all.
This was our town, I thought. I belonged here. On both sides of the tracks. I smiled in the knowledge. I had so much to learn, but for one brief shining summer moment, I knew everything I needed to know.
We learned to type on electric typewriters at Jefferson Senior High. You could hear the click of the keys from down the hall. It was located on the other side of the school building from the band and choir rooms, but there was a music to it, all the same.
I certainly don’t miss the “white out,” or replacing the ribbon. But there was an art to it. Even when we were all typing the same thing — “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” — we would make our own mistakes, different letters would be painted over, then typed over again and each sheet was an original, with it’s own look, it’s own sound.
I type now on my iPad. It can go with me anywhere. I can correct mistakes in an instant. There is an ease, a freedom, unmatched. But I must admit, there is a tiny part of me that longs for the music. The romance of the keys.
I want to allow for this in my daily life. I want to see the romance in all of my mistakes — and oh, I am making them for sure — daily tangled in my not so quick brown foxes. I, we, need to see the beauty of the learning.
Today’s blank sheet opens with the sun. I set off, not in search of perfection, but poetry. Click, click, click, begins my imperfect heart.
It’s not that I don’t make resolutions, it’s just that mine are more of the day to day kind. Perhaps even moment by moment. I don’t know why I thought of it this morning. Maybe it was the crowd of Valentine’s Day hearts hanging in the hotel breakfast room that shouted January is almost over!
It goes so quickly. And I don’t want to waste any of it. So I looked it up this morning. This “resolution.” I had to scroll down a little, but I found my answer. By definition, in scientific terms, resolution means the smallest interval measurable. I smiled, because I guess that’s how my heart runs, my brain operates, in these smallest of intervals.
If the coffee is good and strong, and the hotel has peanut butter for my toast, breakfast is good. When the words come for my blog. When you respond. I feel connected. I fill my sketchbook slowly, page by page. The story, my life, unfolds.
I remember making those paper hearts in school. Folding the paper in half. Cutting out the heart shape. Then, still folded, making all the tiny cuts. Even then I remember thinking we had just done the same thing for snowflakes. In a blink the teacher took them from the wall, we changed the paper and made the same little cuts into heart-flakes. We didn’t think about the whole school year. We just made the tiny adjustments. The tiny cuts. And moved through each day.
I guess I’m still doing that. Making the tiny cuts and unfolding the day. Determined, resolute even, to measure the moments heart by heart.
Two of my mom’s sisters ended up in Texas. Being a child in Minnesota, that seemed about as foreign as it could get. (Little did I know…) When my Aunt Sandy returned on her first visit, she already sounded different. I didn’t have the word for it then, but she definitely had a drawl. How strange, I thought. But I wasn’t that worried, until years later when my mom and I took my grandma down to Texas for a visit. Tired from the drive, I didn’t really notice when we arrived, but the next morning, there she was, my full-on Texas aunt, asking my grandma — the one that her northern children only called “mother” — “Mama, do y’all want to go for biscuits and gravy?” Wait! Mama? Y’all? Biscuits and gravy? What was happening???? Perhaps there was a slight emphasis on the word mother when they returned and my mom asked her, “Did you like the biscuits and gravy, Mother?” I was already smiling when she answered, “Uff-da, y’all…”
I can see now how it happens. Living in France. They say I have an accent. There, of course, and even when I return. We all want to belong. Be a part of something. And we gather ourselves in, word by word, bit by bit, to make ourselves whole, to find a place at the table.
Visiting the Starbuck’s in San Antonio yesterday, they were all out of the butter croissants, so I said “I’ll take the pain au chocolat.” She looked at me so strangely… Uff-da, y’all, I thought. “I mean the chocolate croissant,” I smiled. I am a part of it all.
