Running feral as I did, from sun up to sun down, on the equally untamed gravel of Van Dyke Road, it’s counterintuitive, (and yet true), to believe that I never wanted to get dirty. Of course dust gathered on my once-only-white gym socks, creating a permanent outline of my bumper tennis shoes. This was unavoidable. But I mean really dirty, purposefully dirty, like when the Norton girl added more water to yesterday’s rain soaked garden and scooped the mud by hand into discarded EasyBake oven tins scattered in their back yard. “The horror!” I exclaimed to my mother, “Mud pies!” She, being ever crisp in her white blouses, understood completely, as she tried to rub out the wayward splatters on my shorts and t-shirt.

I still find a way to run wild, mostly on canvas now. I have specific clothes just for that. Yesterday, in the studio, K.D. Lang was singing along with each stroke. It wasn’t lost on me that I noticed the brown oil on my sleeve as she sang, “Wash, wash me clean. Mend my wounded seams.” And isn’t that what love does? Accepts us. Gathers us, in all of our commonalities, all of our discrepancies, washes us clean.Maybe this is what allows me to dare the palette. To navigate this beautiful mess we’re in. 

She left them in my care. Her most crisp and white. It’s healing for me. Tending, wearing, my mother’s blouses. It mends my wounded seam, and keeps her near, through wayward splatters.