Jodi Hills

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

Tag Archives: spring


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Up the side of the barn.

Words are nothing until they leave the page. I suppose the same is true for love.

Someone was always jumping from something. The overpass. A bridge. The roof of a barn. While I can’t say that I ever would have followed — (we were often asked that question, “if the neighbor girl jumps off a bridge…” and for the most part we didn’t take it literally) — but still I understood the need. The need to fly from something. This need to take all the ordinary of Alexandria, Minnesota, the similar look of classroom and bus. This need to take all that was certain and sure and fling it into the wind and just see…see if in the letting go, we could simply fly.

People laughed when they read it in the news, or sat next to them in the orthopedic clinic, but there was just a tiny part of me that said, yep, I get it… as I turned to the blank page and poem-ed and painted my way up the side of the barn, dropping words and images like added weight, fluttering with excitement as I handed it over to my mother, vulnerable, and weightless, in that moment, in that glorious moment of trusting love, it was then I could fly.

It’s funny how it calms me. Being inside the risk of canvas. Of showing you. Who I am. It’s not my first barn. Not my first book. Nor canvas. But oh, how I keep climbing, because in this life, this love, I know, one way or another, I am going to fly.

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The other side of the brush.

I can reach it through the tree line when I’m mowing the lawn, this portal to my childhood years. Pushing up, pulling back and pushing up again, I saw it —  the outline, the invitation, of a small chair. I idled the lawnmower to peek through the leaves. There was a tiny table. Two abandoned plastic cups from the most recent party. One of the attendees, a small stuffed bear, obviously warn out from the festivities, was taking a nap in the shade of the table. Without unhandling the mower, my heart maneuvered through the thistled brush, and I, in my white flowered dress from my sixth birthday, sidled up to the table. Everyone came. All of my dolls and stuffed animals. My mom with her extra-frosting cake sat beside me. We clinked tiny cups of water disguised as tea and we spoke in the language of Alice, and danced behind the looking glass. Fueled by youth and love and the belief in all things possible, I finished cutting the grass.

I bake her cookies, the little neighbor girl. In exchange, I suppose, unknowingly perhaps, she keeps the door open.

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Pulling an Elsie.

I recently learned that when birds sleep in a row, the two on the outer edges keep one eye open to protect and allow those on the inside to fall asleep. It doesn’t surprise me, I have rested within that protective watch. 

There is a big scientific name for it, which I’ve already forgotten, this act of being able to keep “one eye open” while being in a half sleep — we’ve always just called that “pulling an Elsie.” She had to have been doing the same thing — birding her way through every card and dice game played on her kitchen table. Able to sleep while we pondered over our next move, then waking at the exact moment to handily beat us with chirping joy! And I saw her do it everywhere. In the funeral home where she phone-sat. At the grocery store check-out line (she did indeed check out). Even once in the car. But I was never worried. The speed at which she could belly-jiggle herself awake allowed all of us to rest, to play, to run in a carefree summer, to sleep soundly under her watch. 

I suppose you could just rule it all as nature. But I know not everyone was blessed with a Grandma Elsie. So I give thanks. And make my way to the outer edges. 

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The race of summer. 

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? 

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Hovering daily.

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. 

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Dear, Chicago

St. Patrick’s Day will always bring me back to Chicago. A green river flowing. Stumbling Irish of every nationality, fueled with beer of the same color and a hope for Spring, brave the cool March breezes that visitors often mistake for the wind of the “windy city”, kick dirty patches of left over sidewalk snow as if to rush along the promise of the warmth to come. Maybe it was easy to believe in the seasons, in each other, all draped in emerald, as if named from the Wizard of Oz. There was an assurance that we (a we that was all inclusive) would rise up. That the blue and yellow of this almost spring sky made us all one. Green. In the Emerald City.

Somehow the curtain always gets pulled back. The great reveal of the 18th. And everyone goes back to their own colors. But maybe we’re all a bit closer for the moment.

We can choose, you know. To be together. As one. Maybe it’s never been so “windy.” Maybe we’ve never had so much to brave. But couldn’t we? Shouldn’t we? Gather in the green of the day, and just be? Together? 

Dear, Sweet Chicago. I’m all in.

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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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A dance to keep.

I saw a fox on the road. He scurried off to the woods, and I back home to tell Dominique. I wonder if he was in a hurry to tell his furry family that he saw me? 

I think about it all. Do the butterflies regard me as a sign from a loved one, as they dance along my shoulders? Do the birds try to recreate my song? Have the flowers been waiting eagerly to bloom? To brush a dewy hello on my spring leg? Do the leaved trees enjoy the glint of my green ring as I swing my arms? 

I don’t mean any of this as vanity. Truly. I don’t assume the world is thinking just about me. I guess what I mean is, we all have an impact. The steps we take each day. The paths we cross. The lives we touch. And if we thought about it in this way, wouldn’t our steps be a little lighter? Wouldn’t we move with a little more grace and a little less trample? If I am love to the butterflies, just as they are to me, now, wouldn’t that be some kind of dance?! And couldn’t it continue from butterfly to neighbor? To persons across the globe? 

I guess the song said it best, “you may say I’m a dreamer…but I’m not the only one.” I see it in you. When you join me in Rueben’s field. In Elsie’s kitchen. In Ivy’s shoes. For aren’t they but the fox, the flower and the butterfly? They are for me. And if you’ll excuse me, I have a dance to keep. 

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We must spring!

I received my banana seat bike for my birthday the end of March in my sixth year on Van Dyke Road. Minnesota’s winter had yet to let go. Yet I bundled and booted and climbed aboard. I had trained for this all last summer and fall. The baby bike that I had learned on, with its stabilizing wheels, hung from a carpenter nail in the back of the garage, waiting to be passed along to neighbor or cousin. The slush of snow, salt and gravel spit from the back wheel, leaving a streak up my down jacket. But perched on the flowers of the vinyl seat, and led by the same pink, blue, green and yellow florals of the basket, it never felt more like spring. 

I never gave a thought to the weather, nor the whether… everything was yes! I suppose it has to be. How else would we get back on that bike with skinless knees and elbows? This is what I try to hang on to. Hang on to the slippery handlebars of youth. With no grasp of maybe. Not waiting for spring, but tethering it to my waist and dragging it in. 

The countless training wheels have been passed on again and again. There is no turning back. Only forward. I look out the morning window, and know I, we, must spring!

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