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.
It might surprise you to know that the best croissant we’ve ever had, was not in Aix en Provence, nor Paris, but San Francisco. We congratulated them. French butter, they said. It was perfection. Nothing added. No cookies or chocolate stuffed in the middle. No pistachio cream. Just a simple butter croissant. When things are done well, no additions are required.
And isn’t it the same with living? The best that we can offer is often without flare or fanfare. An open door. A seat at the table. An understanding that doesn’t require explanation, only a place, a presence.
We all know people who are struggling. Sometimes I think we imagine that we have to offer an answer. A solution. Most people really only want to know that you care — they want to taste the richness of your simple French butter — to step into the warmth of your heart’s kitchen, and simply sit down.
It was one of the greatest mysteries to me, the perfection of the rows in the fields. I knew nothing about farming, nor even driving, when I asked my grandpa how he did it. “I just see them,” he said. “But how do you not run over it all when you turn the corner? Or get out of line when you take a sip of coffee from the thermos between your feet?” “I know where I am, and I know where I need to be. It makes it very clear.” “That’s a lot to see,” I said, still not certain that I would be able to do it. “Will I be able to do it?” “This, probably not, but you’ll see what you need to see.” “How will I know?” He got on the tractor, and showed me.
I don’t know the exact moment it happened. How I found my row. My place. But I did. It all became so clear on the page and on the canvas. People ask me all the time — How do make them so real? How do you bring them to life? The truth is, I just see them. And it is my hope, that they see what I see, and others too… then they will know they are beautiful. That’s why I paint the portraits.
I can’t tell you how it happens. So I simply hop on my daily tractor, and write and paint, and I know, somehow, we’ll all find our way.
I don’t suppose the spaces left from loved ones passed can ever be completely filled. But maybe it’s wrong to think they ever were. These relationships weren’t beautiful, memorable, longed for even still, because of their solid perfection. Perhaps they were always stardust, flittering, fluttering, changing shape, with room always left for dancing, beneath the flickering light.
It’s the way I choose to think of it, my mother’s space, not as a hole left behind, but a dance floor. And all that magic that sprinkles from her still, lights up the people around me, and they step in, tap me on the shoulder, and ask me to dance. They are my new daily connections. My new last calls. My shared laughter and secrets. Hopes and challenges. Not replacements, but keepers of the dance.
We’re not all good at the same thing. Some are meant to pull you in, and simply sway. Other’s tap their feet and keep the beat alive. Some dizzy you into laughter. Dance you into breathless. And hold out the ladle of punch. I am grateful for them all. All of you, who keep my dance floor filled, my heart in motion, in sway, in the right tempo, under the stardust.
I bought it at an antique store in Hopkins, Minnesota and carried it back to France with me. You know it’s valuable when I allow it space in my ever overpacked suitcase.
It’s from a time when people still wrote letters. When desk objects were given beauty along with function. On the right is a tiny scale for the weight of the words, and the left a circular housing for the precious stamps that carry them. Of course I don’t need the scale. I have a pretty good idea of the weight of the words. At least I hope the receiver knows — knows that I could have just sent a text, an email, but instead thumbed through all of my cards, along with the thoughts of this person, picked out the one that fit the situation, borrowed my husband’s best pen, wrote in cursive (like nobody’s taught anymore), signed it, meant it, sealed it with wax, and walked it to the post office. And isn’t it just as important that I know?
My little antique scale can’t weigh all that, but it does remind me to keep doing it. Yes, I have an Apple Pencil, an iPad. I love modern technology. It is connecting us today. But I keep reminders around me — that there is more. The more of photographs printed. Books with spines. Jams without preservatives. Art with actual signatures. And I make the connections with heart and hand. And the joy that it brings, that I carry so easily, daily, makes me smile, because it actually weighs nothing at all.
I was listening to a short story while walking yesterday. Somewhere between the farmhouse, the stranger, the shooting, the sheriff, the horses, the chase, the lost love, the death, the title revealed, my feet had climbed the Montaiguet without ever telling my breath. And it really came as no surprise, stories have always carried me.
I began to learn the power of words at age five. Mrs. Strand read to us in kindergarten. I loved her for it, but I had a sense of urgency to get to the first grade where I knew we would learn to read for ourselves. I’d like to think I took my time. I’d like to think I thanked Mrs. Strand, but I can’t be sure. It was her words that launched me into the front row of Mrs. Bergstrom’s first grade class. I wanted to sit as close to her as possible. If the words she wrote on the blackboard were to travel into her pointing stick as she tapped the word on the board, and be flung into the open and wandering minds of all the wriggling 6 year olds, I wanted those words, that power, to hit me first — so even in this front row middle seat, I leaned ever forward, closer still. And I must have been breathing because I’m still here, but it felt like a year, a glorious year of inhaling.
I joyfully rode that air. Every word she gave to us, I gave to my mother in poems. When the wind was knocked out from inside of her. I, we, replaced it with the hope of each letter. Arranged them again, and again, until we were lifted. Until without our knowledge or permission, we were looking out gratitude’s vast view, and we were saved.
I don’t know if it works for everyone. But I take the chance that maybe it does. I keep writing the words daily. Bringing you inside farmhouse and classroom, on top of bicycles and mountains, on the chance that you too will forget the labor of breath, and only feel the heights reached from all that inhale.
There is a trend of writing letters to your younger self. And I must admit I’ve given it a little thought, but as I remember back to my first class on perspective — how the assignment was to draw the hallway in your house — and I thought, how nice, the teacher actually thinks I live in a house… I went home, (because you can have a home that isn’t a house), sat in the apartment kitchen where you couldn’t drink the tap water, looked through the living room and drew the small space between my mother’s bedroom and mine, completely in reverse perspective. I mention it because it occurs to me that this younger self already knew she saw things differently. So it probably won’t come as a surprise that I do the opposite now — it is she writing to me, daily. Each one starts off the same, “Dude…” (she calls me dude, because she was cool like that, and because I know it’s as harsh as she going to get…) “Dude,” she says, “you’ve already learned this…” “But I’m doing it all wrong — backwards,” I tell her. And she replies, a little more gently this time, in my mother’s voice, (because she, my mom, was kind like that) with the same thing my mother said to me when I brought home my incomplete assignment on perspective. I told my mom, “I did the whole thing backwards,” hanging my head. She pulled up my chin and said, “Great!” “Great?????” I questioned. “Sure,” she said, “you’re Ginger Rogers!” I smiled. I was learning perspective after all.
There will be a mountain of things I have to relearn today, and again tomorrow, but in this moment, l look around, offer up a little kindness, and this dude begins to dance.
She was the first to notice, the waitress in Stillwater, Minnesota. I have worn these earrings every day for a couple of years — the outline of the Sainte Victoire mountain. She brought the check to the table and asked, “What mountain is that?” I beamed, for me of course, but for her as well — being curious, paying attention. “It’s the Sainte Victoire,” I replied, “in Aix en Provence where we live.” And the conversation began, all because she was alive, awake!
These earrings represent home. Heart. Courage. Strength. They are the mountains I have, can, and will continue to climb daily. What made her, of all people, notice? Even in France, no one has asked about them. But she did. Maybe she was climbing her own mountain. Maybe she was asking her legs to carry what her heart just couldn’t bear at the moment. Or maybe she just liked them. And that’s enough too. The thing is, she asked the question. A specific question.
We get lazy I think. Uninterested. We settle on the “how are you?”s and think we did enough. But is it? Is it enough? Is it enough to just pass through each other’s lives? Without learning? Without caring?
Two years of climbing were wiped away in just a few brief seconds, and I was happy! It really takes so little. So I tell myself, I tell you, be curious, pay attention, — it’s not too much to ask.
I only had to hear it once for it to stick. “There are no stupid questions,” Mrs. Strand said, addressing the thirty strained-necked five year olds looking up from their cross legged positions at Washington Elementary. So the questioning began.
Behind our house on VanDyke Road, there was a field of grain. Hugo’s field. Lined from green to gold every summer. My grandpa had the same, but he also had a field for the cows. Unlike the fields of grain, it was fenced and trampled — “But still a field?” I asked my grandpa. “Yes, he said. “But what will grow?” “The cows,” he said. I shook my head in agreement.
I was surprised the first time my mother dropped me off at the field to play softball. This was a field too? This sanded and based lot. The teenage boy who we loosely called coach said he would teach of the basics – hitting and fielding. Fielding? No one else raised their hands. Why wasn’t anyone else questioning all these forms of field. I put down my hand and began to play.
It wasn’t lost on me that when you were asked to choose your line of work, it was your field. And when you became good at your chosen profession, you were “outstanding in your field.” The first time I heard this, probably because of Mrs. Strand, Hugo, because of Grandpa, because of the teenage boy, I heard, “out standing in your field.” I still think of it that way. Because this is where I go to create, to the tender fields that led me here. And they were tender. Even through every cracked bit of earth, with every run and trample, I learned. When yields were low. I learned. Each season, I grew. Never with a guarantee, but always a promise of hope. It is with this welcoming of wonder, I wander today’s field.
Something will grow from all of this, and it will be me.
Something will grow from all of this, and it will be me.
I have to admit, (physically and metaphorically) I’m shooting most of my photos in the wind. As I walk along the gravel path, the wildflowers seem to pop up, blooming as proof that it can be done, even in the strongest of winds that race directions through the hills. Some barely petaled, they still have the audacity of hopeful beauty, and I think, if I could just catch them mid sway, it would be like capturing the wind…and if I did, in fact, capture that wind, it would find its way into my heart, spreading limb to limb, and even against all forces of the natural and unnatural, I too, would dance.
So even as the sun blinds the screen of my phone, I point and shoot, not knowing until much later what will appear. Looking at yesterday’s photos from the comfort of home, I have to swivel in my chair. I smile at the blurred backgrounds — the forgotten hardships — and see the dancing petals. So fragile. So strong. So beautiful. And I smile, knowing today, it just might be me, who flowers in all of this wild. Me, barely petaled, who dances in the wind.
