I have had this canvas for about 15 years. It has transitioned and traveled with me through abstraction and country. The last painting was here in France, a seascape of sorts. But I can’t tell you exactly what came before that. I know it’s still there. Underneath. Behind, within this woman.
If you ask me who she is, prepare yourself for the underpainting. She is the curve of every woman.
She is my grandmother whose hands never stopped. Hands that I watched in amazement and wrote, “If she did worry, it never showed in her hands. She held. She gave. She touched.”
She is my mother. The posture of grace. In an apartment kitchen filled with more worry than nourishment, she lifted a hand, and gently directed me in the dance.
She is my friend, long past her days of professional dance, who still walks in the garage as if onto the stage.
She is another friend, deep in grief, (a depth that only comes with love) who dares the dance of my mother, and releases, again, and again, with the curve of a woman.
When I look at the sides of the canvas, I see these bright and dark colors. Not who she is now. Not who I am now. But I see the lines of the underpainting — the embossing and debossing of all that paint (the experience) that has come before. And it adds pattern to her dress. Movement to her hands. Strength to her feet. And opens the sky. Opens her heart. My heart. Your heart. Wide open.
At first glance, you may have thought her superpowers came from her clothes. But I was witness “after the phone booth.”
I stared at the gravel road, waiting for her to come home from work. First came the puffs of gravel from Van Dyke Road. Then I could see her car. The blinker. And every schoolyard worry exhaled from my elementary body, as she pulled into the driveway. Her skirt and blouse were wrinkle free, just as she had left at 7am that morning. Not a scuff on her shoes as she sat on the side of her bed and placed them back in the box. She took off her run-free pantyhose. Washed them in the sink. Hung her clothes back in the closet. Sweeping down one last time, not to dewrinkle, but more I thought, in thanks of a day well served.
Donned now in her house clothes, her posture never changed. Shoulders back. Head high. Her size 10’s seem to glide across the kitchen floor. “You could be a dancer on the Lawrence Welk show,” I praised. She leaned into her smile and started dinner.
In my newest painting, I’m trying to convey the elegance. You might wonder when you see the curve of her hand, or the strength of her neck, how she could be in a simple house dress. But I know where she came from. I have witnessed the puff of smoke she rose through and above. The canvas is big. I have to stand. To reach. And I know it is the praise she deserves. I raise my chin. I raise my brush. And continue.
You can’t tell me that they’re always trying to get somewhere. Most of the time, it looks like they’re playing in the wind. Dancing even. These birds so elegantly bouncing and bounding above. And why wouldn’t they dance, they already have the song.
She never wore a tutu, nor spandex dresses, but oh how my mother could dance. She would teach me on the carpet of the living room floor. It was slower. But when I had mastered the steps, she’d lead me to the kitchen floor, and I barely felt my stockinged feet touch the linoleum. She’d sing along to the boombox, pull me in and spin me out and I knew I was flying. I asked her if she had dance instructors? No, she said. In school? I asked. No. Did grandma teach you. She laughed (sure it was a bit of a dance maneuvering through all those people in the farm kitchen), but no. Then how did you know you could dance? I asked. I could always hear the song, she said, and pulled me in once again.
And wasn’t that belief? Wasn’t that the true art of living? Just listening for the music. Trusting your feet would follow. Believing, one way or another, you were going to fly!
There was a certain freedom to it – being in the girls’ gym. You might think freedom a strange word for this windowless box in the basement of Central Junior High. But certainly there were no pressures to impress.
We cycled through the normal courses. Basketball. Volleyball. A simple change with a new set of balls. But when it came time for the gymnastics week, the whole pink gymnasium was transformed. Beams and mats. Horses and Bars. Certainly we should have been padded on knees and elbows. At the very least helmeted, gauging our limited expertise. Yet, we flung ourselves without knowledge or permission in unwashed gym shorts and t-shirts for the allotted 50 minutes. No guidance. No spotters. No inhibitions.
The floor exercise came with a record player. We were decades ahead of the popular saying, “Dance like no one is watching,” — believe me, no one was. Dropping the needle with a scratch, then racing to the mat, we made “routines” (completely ignoring the definition of routine, because certainly these movements couldn’t be repeated, as we made them up to the music.)
We were never graded. If you could make it up the cement stairs back to the locker room, you passed.
I can feel it sometimes. Hear the turning of the record as the day begins. And I just abandon rule and worry, and move. I get to decide. We get to decide, how to make our freedom. How to fill it. Drop the needle, and simply dance.
We don’t wear gowns in France for visits to the doctor. The windows where modesty must fly out, are left wide open. I keep a mental pile of these things I would have thought to be traumatic, just as a reminder — not unlike the sticky note above my mom’s phone that read, “What haven’t you survived?”
Yesterday, to check my lymph nodes, the doctor asked me to place my hands on her shoulders. She in turn put her hands on mine. Then just under my arms. I’m not sure anyone else heard the music, but I could have been back in Junior High at the gymnasium dance, swaying arms-length apart from last night’s worry of “would he ask me to dance.”
And that’s how we save ourselves, I suppose. Our brains our wired to come running, sticky notes in hand. Some as proof of what we’ve survived. Others just to make us laugh.
Is that why I love the color yellow? Because all of my original thoughts that come dancing on the original yellow pad? Or maybe that’s just another thought to distract me and remind me of all the love around me. I don’t know, but I still hear the music. So I raise my arms on shoulders, in the air, and I keep on dancing.
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.
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.
I used to imagine that the front stoop of my grandma’s house was only there for the family of Hollyhock dolls that grew on either side of the cement steps. I was only allowed to pick a few each season. She showed me how to pluck the flower from the stem, flip it upside down and push an unopened bud through the then top to make a head that rested above the pink flowing dress. And for the rest of the afternoon, this small gathering of elegant ladies danced outside the entrance reserved just for them.
I gave them the voices to compliment each other. “How lovely is your pink dress!” “And yours is beautiful!” I danced them together like my mother once did at the Lakeside Ballroom with her cousin Janet. And the music from the transistor radio scratched in and out as I adjusted the antenna in the summer breeze. The lessons of last summer were forgotten. I had no fear of the wilting dresses. I only played. And played, believing that all beauty on Rueben and Elsie’s farm would ever remain.
I wasn’t wrong. Yes, the flowered dresses lay almost flat by the end of the day, but decades and countries away, the beauty remains. Yesterday, in the French countryside, she showed me the one Hollyhock flower that somehow grew between the century old crack of the house entrance. I wasn’t surprised. I had enough French words to tell her of how I made the pink ladies on my grandma’s stoop. We both smiled and touched the rhythm of her little pink dress.
I wrote in a poem, “This year… let’s love like no lessons have already been learned…” Of course we have to grow and educate and evolve. But some “lessons,” like those that deal with lost love, disappointment, unreached expectations — to keep our pink ladies dancing, we have to let those go. The heart stoops must remain clear and ever hopeful.
Countless things grew on Rueben and Elsie’s farm. Again and again. And the beauty will ever remain. I wake to this morning sun, and keep on dreaming.
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.”
