Working between two screens, sometimes my cursor gets stuck in the opposite one that I want. (Like my brain doesn’t do that all the time.)
It’s so easy to think, “Well, I always did it this way…” Whether I’m talking about different countries, different languages, loves, relationships, even my hairdresser. And I catch myself swiping madly on the wrong screen.
Change is never easy. Neither growth. But both are so necessary. And it doesn’t mean you have to give up everything in the letting go, the moving on…You keep the lightest of things, like joy and hope and love — none of these will ever weigh you down.
Too often I’m unaware. It’s barely more than air, the little birdie that tells me things. But when I’m paying attention, really paying attention, all the truths that move between who I am and who I want to be, chirp seamlessly between my heart and my brain, and I am saved.
There were rare occasions when I saw adults cry. Gathered snuggly around my grandparent’s kitchen table. Perhaps to confine the news that came in the letter. Or the heartache of a loved one lost. To give it open space was to let it catch up to us in the summers of our youth. But sometimes, with the need for a Sugar Daddy, or a Slowpoke, I would sneak through the screen door and see it, them, dampened eyes and heads down, and my heart would sink. The ground seemed to shake beneath my bumper tennis shoes. I backed out the door.
It was my grandfather who caught up to me. Dazed and darkened under the largest tree near the road. He could see I didn’t want to be dazzled by false comfort. And he was never one to do it. “It’s like the Magpie,” he said. He was never much for small talk. He got right to the point. “What is?” I said. “The color. So black that it’s blue.” “I don’t get it.” He told me to get up. He led me back to the kitchen. Dishes had already begun clanking. There was the scent of coffee in the air. Chairs being pushed aside. Knees unbending. Even a few laughters of relief. Life. He looked down at me. “Blue,” he said. I smiled and nodded.
I have carried it for years. This knowledge, even when things are so black, they are also blue. You have to get up. You have to want to see it. But it’s always there.
I look out the morning window. He’s still right. I smile into the blue.
To be so filled with life that it has to flush from your very pores. Cheeks ruddy and ever ready. I suppose we all think it will last forever — sure that our feet will keep the deal that youth has made. But maybe it’s the heart that takes over. (Or maybe it led all along.) Maybe it’s the heart that drags us from spring’s mud into summer’s bliss. Maybe it’s the heart that races through grass’s morning dew again and again, and lifts us up from green knees when we fall, ever promising to keep our cheeks flushed through autumn. Through winter.
Every time I paint a face, I feel the colors in my own, flowing through my hands. And the corners of my mouth rise up, smiling, so happy to be a part of youth’s reddening still.
What will you do today, to remain in the race of summer?
After a very confusing day in the library at Washington Elementary, I went home for some much needed clarification from my mother. Hovering between fiction and non-fiction, I asked her if Grandma Dynda, (who lived two lots down on Van Dyke Road) was real. “She’s a real person, of course, but not your real grandma.” So is she fiction or non-fiction? Eyebrows up, and mouth partly open, the words didn’t come, so she just smiled at me. I think we both know we would spent much of our lives hovering in this magical place.
My brain would come to understand most of the difference, but it’s my heart that’s still bouncing around the in-between.
When we first got our cherry tree, and I was searching for a name, (because that’s what I do, name our trees and plants), something worthy and pure and sweet, I hopped the whitewash fence of Mark Twain and found Little Becky Thatcher. In bloom now in the spring of our front yard, she’s as real to me as any written word. As real as any love given two lots down.
It will be a race between us and the magpies when the cherries come. And I like not knowing. Being mid-page. Hovering daily in the smile of this magical place.
I’ve started a new project. Each time I do, there are always things to be learned. Computer programs change so quickly. The paths to incorporate my artwork from page to printer are constantly changing course. And armed with my mother’s sense of direction, (she who thought the map at the mall should be on the ground so you could just step into it), I can’t say that I find my way quickly, but joyfully, I always find my way. I suppose it’s because I’m never traveling alone.
My first step was to get photos of all the new images. I was stumbling about. Turning pages. Checking lighting. It all felt so clunky. And then I got the tap on my brain’s shoulder that said, “get the sticky notes.” It was my friend Deb who gave me the little notebook of multi-colored tabs. We first used them to mark our favorite outfits in the Sundance catalog, sipping lattes, and reading the cover letter from Robert Redford, as if he had addressed it to us personally. We had colors to mark “maybe,” “yes,” and “why am I not wearing it right now.” Hours of entertainment with just a stick of a color.
Smiling, I used those notes to mark the pages of my artwork. It all began to make sense. I found my direction. Even using the new programs on my computer became easier.
I keep moving forward, but not without those who got me here.
There’s an expression that people use when someone dies that I’ve never liked — “She’s no longer with us.” It couldn’t be further from the truth. While the Sundance store has closed, my friend Deb sits right beside me. And I am saved.
I was still riding my banana seat one speed when Lynn Norton graduated to her adult size bike. I could hear the gears click into place as she passed me going up the hill by Lord’s house, on the way to Van Dyke Road. Between huffs I marveled at her speed. I stood up on the pedals, fighting with all of my might, all of my heart. She was barely breathing hard. “Wait up,” I panted and hoped she not only heard, but somehow could pull me along if I stayed within reach. She stopped at the right hand gravel turn and waited. Her look back was the incentive I needed and I made it. “How did you go so fast?” I asked. “I know how to shift.” I suppose it was right then that I made it part of my life’s plan.
Being right handed, I have recently finished all the right hand pages of my very large sketch book. There was a choice to be made. Forget half the book, or shift. I purchased the vellum sheets to protect the completed work. Are they a guarantee? No. Of course there is risk. And part of my brain says that something bad could happen, but the loudest voice in the room, my pumping heart, says to go on. What if something great happens! What if on these left handed pages, you create a masterpiece?!!!!
Two summers after Lynn beat me up the hill, I too had an adult size bike. Three gears! Mastering those, I graduated to 10 speeds. Then twelve. It took all those gears and more for me to go to college. To take chances. To become an artist. To write books. To fall in love. To move to another country. To face today. I am not afraid. With the confidence of the oldest Norton girl, I look in the mirror and claim, “I know how to shift!”
The Christmas carcass became yesterday’s soup. Aproned and worry-free, I Grandma Elsied my way through the process. Adding everything. Measuring nothing. And it was delicious. Steeped with holiday and attention, it tasted rich and full, but for me, the added pleasure, satisfaction, joy, came with nothing being wasted.
I try to practice it — this making use. A scrap of metal turned into a frame. Discarded wood into panels. Yesterday’s still fresh oil paint into tomorrow’s tableau. And to me it’s all important, but I hope I pay the same attention to living. Using everything I have. Every speck of courage, because we’ll get more tomorrow. Loving with every piece of my heart, knowing it means nothing left inside. And perhaps it’s not as easy as pot to stove, but I was taught to attempt in Elsie’s kitchen. To abandon worry and just create.
She’s smiling over my soup bowls, but more over, my heart. Telling me daily to give it all, and just become.
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 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.
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.
