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 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!”
I watched her pull it off the shelf in our basement apartment. She’d sit beneath the garden window to get the sliver of light offered, turning the pages of the Leo Buscaglia book, each word a simple prayer for courage. I knew she was always worried that she wasn’t brave enough, strong enough, but even in that tiny sliver, I could see differently. For hadn’t she written it herself on the sticky note, after reading the sentence over and over. Hadn’t she risen from the chair, gone to the drawer under the phone, tested three pens, and finally rewrote the words, “ Only the weak are cruel. Gentleness can only be expected from the strong.” She went back to reading. I pulled the kitchen chair in front of the cupboard and read the words that hung from the phone’s receiver (that hang in my heart still). Gentleness bounced from room to room on Jefferson Street.
I’m sure at some point she had learned it from her father. Didn’t he display that same gentle strength in farm light. But it’s good to be reminded. In book, on sticky notes, in the glance of the common good. So I write the words in different forms to remind myself. To maybe remind you, with a gentle bounce of kindness, a never ending prayer for strength.
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.
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!
