I just finished reading The School for Good Mothers,by Jessamine Chan. For the last twenty four hours I have been thinking about the characters. It is not an easy read by any means. And yet it lives on inside of me. Words create their own heartbeats, and even when the book is closed, thump, thump… a chicken with its head chopped off, still running. Still running.
We have this idea that everything has to be so comfortable. That life is a lounge chair for the heart. On that same farm, where chickens ran, my grandfather showed me how to lean into the discomfort by picking the rocks in the field to prepare for planting. Not glamorizing the dirt, nor fighting the weight of it all.
So I embrace the words and paint the image of the girl that remains in my head. My way of moving the rocks.
Most lessons do not come with cushions. But I know, as always, something will grow from all of this, and it will be me.
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 bisous is nice — a kiss on both cheeks — but for me, it will never replace a good hug. I have the imprints on my heart. I can tell you the progression through the years of my grandmother’s hug. The first I can remember were mostly knees. Then I was sticky faced against her apron (maybe because of me, or maybe because of the apron). She was pillowy. And welcoming. Pulling me in so close, I was almost behind her. And then there was the angled structure of my grandfather. Firm and elbowed. Offering the blessed assurance of “I’ll be here, strong, a foot in each furrow.” And then there was my mother. I knew every inch of her. Where my head could rest. Where my mind could wander. The home of every embrace. The feel of each blouse and sweater, hugged so closely, as if to wear the same. And didn’t we wear them together, our sleeved hearts, through every fashion lay-a-wayed and purchased.
This is to be hugged.
It’s not our culture here in France. But it is happening. Slowly. And isn’t it beautiful, that without pattern, knowledge or language even, we can teach each other how we need to be loved.
Ever since I painted his picture, Dominique’s cousin, he has hugged the stuffing out of me. Such a joyful surprise from this man of French measure. Nearly lifting me off the ground. A melding of imprints. Strength and joy and tenderness. All the arms around me now, I paint my way home.
If you look it up in the dictionary, it has two meanings. Opposite really. Nervy. It can mean bold, or nervous. Both are probably true. And for me, usually at the same time.
Months ago, in the middle of a situation in Marseille, feeling both, I decided to Wordle for distraction. I know there are certain starter words, almost mathematical, to give yourself the best chance, but I don’t play that way. I usually insert a word that says something about my current state of affairs, a way to insert myself in the game. It’s just more fun for me that way. So I chose the word with two meanings. Bold and nervous, because wouldn’t you have to be, I mean, are you really being bold if you’re not nervous? Is there any bravery without being afraid? I typed it in. N-E-R-V-Y. The letters turned over green. One by one. I beat Wordle. I chose the word in a single guess. It was about me.
I three and four my way through most days. Sometimes two. Not playing the odds, but always playing myself.
Last night, reading a new book, Apples Never Fall, there it was on the page, twice. Nervy. Had I not taken the big chance, the big swing, with my Wordle word, I would have just passed this page without great meaning. But I had taken the chance. I had bolded and nerved my way in, and found myself again, here in the words.
I don’t want to live timidly. I want to be bold in the attempt. When I love, when I live. So when my reflection is offered back to me, I can say proudly, I was nervy.
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.
She came every day and landed, not on, but near the book. She fluffed her feathers as bold as the words she imagined. If she just flapped hard enough, she thought, the cover would flip and her story could begin.
The exact day the store owner noticed her, she couldn’t be sure. She had no watch, no phone, no calendar. Just the angle of the sun. It glinted off the sidewalk’s tree, at the same time each morning and lit the way to the unlocking door of the bookstore. She watched him wheel his stack just under the shade. And she rested eager, now brave enough to be on the cover. One day he smiled at her. She gave her best beak, and he opened the book. Page one.
She returned each day to a new page. Pecked the words. Then nested them home. A month of words. A summer of chapters. Words shared. Stories intertwined. They belonged to each other now. A new story forming.
Of course he had known loss. Everyone does. Perhaps that was the main reason he opened the bookstore. To connect.
In those sunny months of bird and book, everyone began. And began again. We don’t need to be fixed, sometimes we just need a reason to turn the page. And sometimes we need help to do it. We’re all learning.
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.
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.
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!
