There was never an event without my mother. Not a book signing. Nor exhibition. A keynote speech. She was there. And not because she showed up that particular day. No. Because she was there at the beginning. She was outside my bedroom door at five to gather in my latest drawing. She framed the earliest poems and hung them by the bathroom mirror for morning inspiration. She walked me through graduation. Helped me clean the first dirty apartment I could afford. Always with a smile, and the hint of Elizabeth Arden’s Red Door.
She wore it well. Never overpowering. A slightly floral hint of kindness. Of excitement. Of “I will always be there.”
I keep a bottle on hand. When I walk into my bathroom, there is the scent of possibility. Breathing it in, I can hear the clink of her make-up against the counter. Because in the sound of her getting ready, I could hear the promise of good things to come, and not only did she urge me to believe it, but to Get Ready!
Just a waft will lift me. Ever. Into all the goodness that is right in front of me. That is yet to come. With the smell of hope I feel it. I know it! And I’m ready!
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.
Mrs. Bergstrom stood at the front of the first grade class, the “times” tables rubbing off onto her shoulder from the blackboard, and she told us that we had to “learn it by heart.” Always one to feel a little more than perhaps necessary, I assumed she meant everything from here on out. I still do.
I’m a firm believer that the heart can, and must, override the hands’ hesitation.
I can’t think of anything where my heart didn’t first convince my brain to urge my hands to continue. From painting a portrait to baking a cake, I am grateful for my hands every day, but even they are well aware of who’s leading.
Painting her yesterday, I could feel it. I know that fear of moving forward. Risking it all. Being vulnerable. But I also know that I won’t get stuck there. I will lean in. As I always do. I will brush away the shouldered what ifs, and take my elementary self, by heart, into the music of the day, and I will dance.
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.
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 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.
The physical therapist for my hand wants to be a singer. I like knowing that she plays guitar. That her fingers create music. Maybe the song she’s humming in her head is traveling down into her heart, through her arms, then fingers, and into my hand. (I may have heard my pinky sing.)
I suppose as a dreamer, I’ve always trusted those with a dream.
My mother wanted to be a dress designer. And it was that dream that carried us from Herberger’s, to malls, to boutiques, to dressing rooms around the country. It was pure joy that reflected off of three-way mirrors and bounced from her heart to mine. Lives well designed.
Sitting at the table, drinking egg-coffee and eating home-made pastry, I asked my grandma what she would like to be. “A UPS driver,” she said quickly. “Then I could drive from house to house and sit with people and have coffee and visit.” “I think we’re doing that right now,” I said. We smiled in the moment of that dream come true.
When we think of people not just as who they are, but who they are trying to become, I think maybe we can be a little more forgiving, a little more empathetic, perhaps more understanding, and certainly more joyful — what could be more fun that travelling along on a dream?!! But we have to be willing to dare, and willing to share. I encourage you to do both. My singing pinky is proof that everything is worth the dream.
When I went off to college, the first thing that surprised me was the noise. I had always studied in silence. I was alone for the most part. I didn’t turn on the television or stereo. I liked hearing the books I was reading, feeling the words I was writing. So the first few nights in the dorm were alarmingly loud. No one had headphones. Doors seemed to be quite optional. It was overwhelming to say the least.
I wore a path to the library. And then I found the silent rooms. Doubled glass. No distractions. Glorious. My first sanctuary. It was there I could invent anything, even myself. I surrounded myself in words. Some lay quietly in yellowed pages. Others rearranged themselves and shot through my #2 pencil. It wasn’t the first time I heard my own voice, but it was the first I started to use it.
I fear that some believe courage is only born out of chaos. That we must rise above all the noise with a clattering of our own. I suppose at times this could be necessary, but maybe the most bold is to listen to your own heart, your own mind. To brave the silence and find yourself.
There is a setting on my iphotos. It is called noise reduction. It takes away all the clutter to get at the real picture. I didn’t have the words for it then, but I have been hitting that button for most of my life. Sometimes I forget. I get caught up in all the clamor — “but he said, and she did, and they are!!!!!” It’s then I have to remove myself. Find my balance. Listen to the quiet.
I whisper by hand into my sketchbook. And I am found.
My mother started drinking coffee at 14. That probably doesn’t sound unusual now to the Starbuck’s generation. But this was not chocolated or whip creamed. Not frapped or frozen. No, this was black coffee. From the stove. Drank from cups that carried the proof of exactly how strong it was. They told her it would stunt her growth. She laughed and grew taller. Maybe it was because her mother kept having babies. Maybe it was just an old wives’ tale. Or maybe it was her sheer will to prove them and the coffee wrong.
Of all the stunt worthy obstacles in front of her, coffee was the least of them. None of the other farm girls loved fashion. And certainly not Grandma Elsie. There was no money for design school. No time for dreaming. But she drank from the cup that defied logic and carried it high within her. She dressed for the life she wanted.
People will always be quick to tell you of all the things that can’t happen, won’t happen, shouldn’t happen… Warning you of the “what if it doesn’t…”. I was joyfully raised by someone who thought, “what if it does!” Raised by someone who urged me to stand tall. Not be afraid to grow. Even when my head raced above the others in grade school pictures she said, put your shoulders back, head up.
We don’t always get to choose our obstacles. But we do make the choice of how to get around, above and through. There are a million things that could stop us. Daily. Today I am as tall as I ever was. As tall as I’ll ever be. But I must decide, day by day, minute by minute to keep growing. I want to be a better artist. A better writer. A better human. I want to believe in the best of me, in the best of all us. To forget about the what if it doesn’t. The best could happen — and what if it does!!!!
