Jodi Hills

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

Tag Archives: Change


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Hold Still.

I have almost no photographs of my grandparents, yet thousands of images live in my brain. To picture my grandpa in the living room, is to first hear the creak of overalls against the lounger. Then the crack of the foot rest locked in place by the side lever, making just enough room for me to crawl beneath. The trust had to have been palpable, as I arched between the space that could have cut me in half were he to pull the lever again. He emptied a pinch of tobacco and tamped it into his pipe. I played with the rice filled cushion that rest beneath the ash tray, and waved my hand through the cartoon waft of smoke that danced above me. Mixed with just a hint of sugar from grandma’s kitchen, the scent was warm and welcoming, and I tried to catch it on the tip of my tongue, like the first snowflake of the year. 

He never rested long. A farm is impatient like that. He only had to give me the nod to signal his return to the field. I slipped between cushion and metal and he let down the foot rest. I ran off to nature’s imagination and he back to work. 

I don’t know the name of his tobacco. I wasn’t yet confined by words. Nor was I caught in the pursuit of photography. It would be a handful of years before I ordered my plastic camera from Bazooka Joe gum wrappers and run over it with my own bicycle in three day’s time. 

I mention it because I recently read something by the photographer Sally Mann in her memoir, Hold Still. “It is because of the many pictures I have of my father that he eludes me completely,” she writes. “In my outrageously disloyal memory he does not exist in three dimensions, or with associated smells or timbre of voice. He exists as a series of pictures…. It isn’t death that stole my father from me; it’s the photographs.”  

I smile, knowing my images will never be torn, lost, yellowed, or stolen. They hold still, tucked safely in the ever of my heart. 

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No ordinary days.

We were surrounded by it — growth. Hugo’s field rich with grain. The swamps in the North End, ripe with thickened green. Marigolds lining driveways. Lawns under the hum of walked mowers. Discarded school books on abandoned summer shelves. Tennis shoes bursting out at the toes. Yet, it was imagination that surpassed it all on Van Dyke Road. 

We were given space. An empty lot sat between our house and Dynda’s. An empty lot to do anything we imagined. What a gift this empty! What drew us to this nothing? Made us race our bikes over gravel and abandon them in the ditch just to be in this open lot? When I type it now, this “lot of possibility”,  I have to smile, because I suppose that was it — so much — a lot! — of possibility. Here we had the freedom to imagine our way out of or into any situation. Balls and flashlights. Teams and cans and bases. Forts and races. Worlds away each day, but gently tethered by a mother’s front porch call. 

The magic still holds. When Dominique asks me, “What do you want to do today?”— and I can answer, “nothing” — we both smile. And I race toward all things possible, knowing the lot.

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Showering in the Louvre.

It was one of the best compliments ever. They were visiting us from the US. After getting ready for the day, he said of my bathroom, “It was like showering in the Louvre.” I’m still beaming. 

Sunday afternoons were always ripe for the dreaming when I was a young girl. Saturdays, my mother did laundry and catch-up work. We often snuck in a trip to the mall if my homework was done. And it always was, by Friday night.  Which left the sweet spot of Sunday afternoon, hovering between the rush of Saturday and Monday’s panic that arrived late Sunday evening. 

In our small apartment, it wasn’t unusual to wish for space. “And if I had a big house,” she said, “I would travel from room to room, each one an adventure.” “Oh yes!” I agreed. And donned in our Saturday clothes, sale tags still hanging, we decorated the imaginary rooms with all of our very real hearts!

I think of it still. Each room an experience. Books and paintings and photos and music. Walls with feeling. A welcome. A gathering. Decorated with the sweet dreams of Sunday afternoons. 

So when he said, it, it wasn’t about the bathroom itself. It was bringing my mother here. To France. It was a gathering of all sweet dreams come true. 

For the same reason I offer the scent of fresh baked cookies to the kitchen painting on a Sunday afternoon. It wafts throughout the house, past Sunday night, into the fresh week’s beginning. The dream continues. Monday promises to carry. 

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You don’t have to blend to belong.

They tried to warn us, I suppose, with the pegs and the holes, so many years ago on the floors of Washington Elementary. And the real hint to how serious the lesson, was the absence of our mats. No, we sat on that unforgiving cement floor, cross legged, trying to rise above our sleepy, tingling thighs, to match the right peg with the right hole. 

You’d think I would have learned it by now, but there are still times when instead of picking up a new peg, (actually being the peg that I am) I still try to force it. I hadn’t done it with my original family, this trying to blend, so I’m not sure why I thought it would work with my French family. Was I round, was I square? Did I even know the words for either one? It wasn’t until I got up off the floor, stretched my legs, and became what I had already become, myself, that I began to fit in. 

We get caught up in the labels. What do they even mean? Wanting so much to belong, we blend ourselves into disappearing. And how do you become a part of something if you’re not even here? And I get it, sometimes the call of the soft mat, says just relax, forget about it, but that’s never really been my style. So I get up off the floor, wiggle the tingle out of my once bent legs, and with unmatched pegs in hand, I dance! I dance on the floor that had always given permission. And with each twirl, I let go of the who, and the what, and the why, and I just am. I joyfully am!

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Having the farm.

When he saw the painting of my grandfather he asked if we still had the farm. I paused, stuck in who the “we” would even be. I started passing it down in my head, from uncle to cousin, to second cousin, (none to whom I felt a collective we). It passed again in my head to I’m not sure, to finally, it didn’t really even matter, because, I told him, “I still have everything.” And I do.

Even a lifetime and country away, I can feel the warmth of the rock at the base of the driveway. The same steady of my grandfather. The gravel beneath my feet. The jolt of an electric fence. The smell of apples, on and off the trees. The sandy feel of a cow’s tongue. The bounce of a screen door. The scent of my grandma’s kitchen. My face against her sticky apron. The ever damp basement. Jesus on the cross upstairs. Prayed to from the kitchen table. The sewing room that stitched all nine children’s lives together. The front stoop that promised the scent of tobacco and hope. My mother laughing in that kitchen. Crying in that kitchen. Hands folded at that table. Driving away from the rock one last time, never really leaving. 

So, yes, I still have the farm. And the we is all who listen to the stories. The we is you who remember your own grandmother’s apron. Who read the words and climb upon your grandfather’s lap. We still have it all. We have everthing.

Something will grow from all of this, and it will be me.
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Stardust.

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. 

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The comfort of shore.

Van Dyke Road separated the two worlds. It was so magical how far crossing one small stretch of gravel could take me. The back of our house faced a sea of grain — Hugo’s field. And in a way, it was like swimming, running through the stalks at full chubby- legged-speed, arms stretched to each side, creating a golden wave. Across the road though, behind Weiss’s house, was a lake. Not a big one. Nor a clean one, of the 10,000 our state touted. We didn’t swim in it. So what was the allure? It had to be the dock. 

Florence and Alvin had a big yard. Bonnie, the daughter, was so much older, that to me, she was just another adult. So there were no arms of youth waving me over to play. I would sneak along the shrub line. Roll down the manicured slope to the lake’s edge. I could hear the dock before I saw it. The wave rocked wood cracking gently. I took off one bumper tennis shoe and placed my lavender-white toes on the sun warmed plank. It was extraordinary. I have no memory of being a shoeless baby, but I imagine at some point some uncle or boisterous neighbor blew their warm breath on my rounded feet, and I knew, standing there, barefoot on Weiss’s dock, this must be exactly how it felt. I giggled like that infant and took off my other shoe. 

I braved each crack to the end. My body craved what my feet already had, so I lay down and let it gather in my arms, legs and back. My fingers danced at my side in the tiny puddles of cool water that gathered in the wood’s unevenness. I don’t know if I saw all the beauty of these imperfections, but I’d like to think I did. 

Who knows how long I stayed. Summer afternoons felt eternal. I guess in a way, they are. I can still rest in that warmth. 

I have written so many times about swimming – in actual lakes. Lake Latoka was only a bike ride away. But just out my door, front and back, oh, how my heart and imagination swam. Daily. And maybe that’s what home is after all…this ability to dream in the comfort of shore. 

The comfort of shore.
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No sharp edges.

For me, it’s the softness of her gaze. No sharp edges to her reaction. Even her shoulders aren’t weighted. This is what makes her beautiful — not what she sees, but how she sees it. From within. 

I paint her to remind myself the same is true for all of us. How we navigate through this world is what people really see. We need to stay informed, of course, but the ugliness that gathers, and there is a lot, I don’t want that inside of me. So I soften my gaze. My eyes. My lips. My tongue. Relax my shoulders. Nothing for hatred and ill will to hang on. (Because aren’t those sharp edges so much easier to cling to?)

I suppose I only know it, because I was always given that soft place to land. My grandma’s lap, my mother’s heart. I see now that it was not only for me, but for them as well. A gift we must give each other.  A gift we must give ourselves. I dare the morning and the mirror softly. No sharp edges in sight.

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Egg salad and lemonade.

Sometimes I worry about things changing. Of course it can be difficult. But we’re always given the tools. So when I’m in the throws of it, I just try to remember egg salad.

My first years in France, I searched for white eggs. We just don’t have them. But the Easter eggs?  How will I dye them? That problem was solved, because I couldn’t find the dye either. It took me awhile, but the answers were at hand. With combinations of water colors and non-toxic paint (and I’ve eaten enough of it through the years to know, just by licking my paint brush) I have found a way to make, what I think, are beautiful Easter eggs. 

It takes me hours to paint them. Many joyful hours. Today I will have to crack them. Throw the shells away. But that doesn’t take away the joy, it only brings on new. I like egg salad a lot. 

I wrote it before, and I’ll say it again, “I believe perfection knows no time constraints, because the time spent with you has been perfect.” 

Life continues to change. We are asked to make lemonade and sometimes egg salad. And through it all, we find, we learn, again and again, life can be so delicious!

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Blue! Red! Orange! Bang!

On my way out of the art store yesterday, I saw it, the “Color of the Year.” And the first thing I wondered is, (I’ve always wondered) who decides?

We were asked on the playground. In the classroom. By adults. Our friends. It was one of the most frequent and popular questions — “What’s your favorite color?” I suppose people thought it was such an easy question. No thought or controversy. Just simple. And I listened to them pull the answers out of the their holster so quickly, with such fluidity, such ease – Blue! Red! Orange! Bang!

Why couldn’t I do that? Why did I have to give it so much thought. Why, at even five or six did I struggle? Who could pick I thought? All the colors – they had so much importance! Yellow for when I needed cheering. Blue for calm. Green was a longing for bare toes in the grass. Tans for the gravel that led me home. No one wanted to hear that. The thoughts raced through my brain — just shoot, I thought, pull the trigger – just say blue! But I couldn’t. I loved them all too much. So I began explaining to the blank faces, the eye rolls, the far off stares, the backs walking away.

And maybe I wouldn’t have had the courage, but for Grandpa Rueben. He listened. He looked directly at me. And if he were to walk away, his hand always extended back. He knew. He told me, often. You decide. Whatever the situation, he repeated it — “You decide.”

The world has always tried to direct, but now more than ever, we are bombarded by “influence.” (My apologies to Dominique, he hates the word.) And I’m still wondering, why on earth do we need it? Why do we need someone to tell us our favorite color. Moreover, why do we even need a favorite? We get to decide. Daily. We get to grow and change and love what we love, who we love, when we love. Neither my heart, nor my palette can be boxed in.

You can choose Mocha Mousse for your favorite color this year, if that’s what it actually is — if you love it, really love it — but remember, you get to decide! And you get to change your mind. You get to be you! Bang!

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