Painting for My Life

I never thought that painting could take the place of singing in my life — at least in part. Before the shingles aftermath, I sang in choirs and choruses. It was the way I got my jolt of art beyond myself and connected with people in the strictly social way. By that I mean having casual relationships with people built around a mutual interest, where we laugh together and produce together, but were not necessarily wrapped around one another's lives. That door is closed to me now, as is even the enjoyment of listening. That was a tortuous adjustment for me.

I forget how much I miss those sorts of relationships in my life, but I do. I work at home. I pursue largely solitary joys, and since my neighborhood successfully blocked my attempt to create this sort of community in my home, I find my sense of isolation has grown. The degeneration of my spine precludes the trips to the gym now as well. So I search for the thing that will bring me casual company.

I have found, however, something beyond writing, to give me the jolt of creation.

Yet I feel something else happening as I get back into some routines of painting. The act of teaching a friend is waking me up. We hand a painting back and forth, each adding a piece of herself to the work started by the other. It is an electric process because whatever we envision in each step must necessarily change the next time the painting returns. She and I wrote together as adolescents, building on one another's riffs. Now Paige and I do the same with our art. She has not let herself paint or draw. And I have not let myself fly. Her imagination frees my own. We paint, draw, tear, paste. We laugh.

And it spills over into my solitary art.

I love the rhythm of collage and painting. I built a peony from scratch. One layer of tissue at a time, I built my flower, lightly tinting each petal. Fifteen minutes here and there, and from a blank paper rose something I've never done, captured my impression of the blossom from a tree peony. It excited me and made me cry. I thought of my mother and her joy at the slow art of flower gardening, how it made her seem to be more alive. I have felt barren for so long, and there it was before me--this birthing of something from my own mind. Once more I felt the thrill of the process and result, both. I had not felt that for three years, when I began the huge painting I just finished two weeks ago--my vision of a treasured memory with my dad.

The best of my life seems to be surfacing when I pick up my pencil, my brush, my papers. I have begun a diptych of New England, with the unifying thread being a stone wall--my impression of a wall. Winter will melt into spring, burst to the right into summer and drop down into the second part, summer still. Then blazen into fall and fade into winter again. I do not know whether there will be anything beyond texture and color that will be those seasons, but the wall? The wall will be absolutely recognizable as that. To me it is the quintessential New England item, wherever you go. Into the middle of a forest and there it will be, the reminder that so much of our land was once tilled, then allowed to grow wild again. I loved Central Pennsylvania, but I missed my walls. Walls that did nothing so much as invite you to cross them. they marked properties, but did not keep neighbors out. Just cows...

I will find other ways to connect in a group; I feel more confident again. The painting has opened doors I had not recognized were closed. I have walked into a different stage of biological life, but realize that I do not have to allow barrenness to be anything more than that. I am alive again, if not blooming. But, then, Fall foliage is not about flowering, so much as the last dance before sleep. And it can be a long, brilliant, lush season indeed.

The miraculous thing about facing our demons that they do not describe, is how it feels to be free of them at last. If I cannot dance with my legs or sing with my voice, then I will dance with paint, with paper, and with pens. I may just hit sixty in a few years, more alive than I have ever been. We'll see. For now? For now I will simply walk outside and weed the garden and take it from there.

Tree peonies & Irises

A friend of mine came into the house for her art play session and said, "Your flowers-forgive me--they are girlie flowers in the best sense. They scream 'Look at me, I am a flower and I've visible from outer space!"

To which, in all my erudition, I replied, "Well, DUH! Ya think?"

You can tell I am a writer, I know. But, hey, this is why I specifically planted those two plants. When I remember to expose the iris korms nice and early, I am rewarded with spectacular results — the kind really needed by any instant gratification junkie who is trying to learn the rewards of patience. I've dead-headed thirty blossoms and there remain twelve fresh blooms today — the last, but that's okay. The tree peonies, a new addition of just three years, are beginning to hit their stride. BOTH had five blossoms the size of breakfast plates. (I'm old. This is a plate between dessert plates and dinner plates.) At this stage of growth, the effect is sort of silly--all blossom, no foliage. Afterward, now that the petals lie in profusion on the mulch, the sight of the foliage of deeply cut leaves branching from one "trunk" is beautiful.

The point is that I have always overbought annuals in May. Now? I am so fully satiated by the spectacle of delicacy and boldness, that I hold off. These two plants just saved me about $75.

I expected a report from the space shuttles, but no. I cannot believe that those circling toward Bradley field don't tip down to have a look at the intensity of red and blue. Nope. Oh, well. The nightly news' loss is of no consequence. When the iris pass, the regular peonies--a ten foot, low hedge of them--will be off and running.

I can look down from my office, or out from my studio and drink them in. The gratitude for lessons taught by grandmother, my mother, and my oldest friend make me tear up. I did not know I was a gardener, until we moved into this home nineteen years ago, to a place of lawn and one forsythia hedge and not one single other shrub or flower anywhere. Now an island of viburnum, red maple, rhodies, mountain laurel, andromeda, azalea, run the sweep of the fifty foot ranch wing of the house, sheltering the windows from a neighborhood of eyes that DO intrude. There is an alcove of shade, where one can sit unseen from the street, and look back toward the house, to the flowers and other ornamentals. It is a spot of quiet and coolness. I dug every bed, planted every tree and bush and flower myself, largely unassisted.

I have a robin the size of Pittsburgh, who lands not ten feet from me when I mulch or weed. He squawks at me after ten minutes, eager for me to leave the upturned worms for his lunch. He is insistent. I ignore him for a bit because I LIKE my worms. Eventually, I decide he deserves a meal, and I let him at it--for a bit.

I have had two weeks to drive into my driveway and laugh at my ostentatious, unruly, marvelous mass of blossoms. Soon I'll have another.

And now that I have work and it looks as if I may just be able to count on being here for TWO more years, not one? Well, I may plan another bed of future instant gratification. That phrase may seem like an oxymoron, but so is an impatient gardener. I think the NEED for annuals is for the learning process. Oh. Mind you, I'll get some for the little fill in places, but I will be more reasoned in the quantity.

Not in the brightness, however. I will need them for August, before sedum and chrysanthemum have their sway. After the ludicrous lilies have passed and their jester-ruffs have wilted, leaving pathetic stalk behind. I'll need my begonias and alyssum, petunias and coleus, lobelia and snapdragons. The punctuation marks of profusion filling in the blanks, letting me know that my legs still work well enough. My life is rich enough.

It is hard to remember how I hated to help my mother dig holes and plant. How silly I said it all was, all the while I marveled at the ten foot bank of rock garden that sloped up to our home. I remember the iris among the rocks. The daisies and pinks. Pockets of petunias tumbling into masses of something with foliage as dark as New Hampshire pine forest green. I would stand transfixed, yet insist I did not care for gardens... until I had no gardens to see. Until my mother was gone, the cottage was gone, and I grew tired of the sameness of apartment life.

I am a gardener and I never knew it. I am an artist and denied it for years. What a gift to discover such things as I moved through middle age. What will I discover by 65? I don't know, but suddenly, pain notwithstanding, this aging stuff seems a bit less scary than I thought.

I don't DO vegetables

I mean grow them. I eat them, though.

I do love to garden, though. Jetty's living art, my sister called it. She said I designed little rooms all over the yard. Yes, that's pretty much the truth. It's the one thing that is intense labor that doesn't kill my back. I don't know why that is; I don't care. When I garden, I constantly shift position. I have a small, light wheelbarrow I can never overload. Same with shovels. I have learned how to lift and it is automatic. There is a rhythm for me and it has become the one dance I've mastered.

But here we get to the core. I do flowers. Shrubs. Decorative container gardens. I don't do vegetables. Not now, not ever. Why? Well, something in me rebels at the practical. I mean, I'll gladly steal, beg, wantonly grovel for the veggies of someone else's labor. But the BUGS. No, really. Bugs like all those nice, juicy things, too. You'd think a gardener would be fine with them, but I'm not. I like a good worm, of course, but they stay put or simply burrow away from me. And honey bees kind of leave you alone in general. Flower garden bugs know civilities. Flies don't care about flowers and I don't know why.

I don't care why. I know only that they don't like my flowers and, when I wear a broad-brimmed hat and a hint of bug repellent, most all of them stay far away from me. My friends tell me to just do tomatoes? Why? I'll take theirs because they always have too many. I do them a favor, really, by eating them.

Besides, we go to flower gardens for respite; to look and to drink in the beauty. We don't go to the vegetable tangle for that. I don't think vegetable garden bugs had mothers. It's flies in your teeth, up your nose, and creeping greenish yucks crawling up your sleeves. Let's face it: no one has to pick little crawly things out of their hair after a little sit-down by the Japanese maple, amidst the hostas and astilbes on a July afternoon. Even cottage garden tumbles are civilized. Nope. Give me the pretty stuff that does nothing but feed my eyes. The worms and birds are happy. So are the bees. That's enough for me.

This is sacrilege I know. Oh, well. There is no symmetry in my plans. No rows. Just rooms that have grown through my twenty years in this house, in this place of peace for me. I had visions at the outset and have seen these visions become real through my small efforts every year, step by step. Through the turmoil of my years, the garden grows in peace. I start new rooms every couple of years, with an eye toward five to ten years down my road, and I hope I travel here long enough to see them to fruition, knowing my vision for them may change along the way.

That's the thing. When the vegetables are eaten, the following year you plant again. It's precise. When you plant flower gardens they are forever evolving, changing, yet offering the stability of the heart's design. My maple was a twig. Now it is as tall as a house, a mass of deeply cut shade and wonder through three seasons. The peonies will outlast my life. There are bits of my mother in the Canterbury bells saved at another friend's house until I could have a garden of my own. The deep blue-green hostas were from slips at my grandmother's cottage in New Hampshire, planted when the cottage was new in the thirties. And all of it my late sister--in my love of asymmetry and knowledge of the power of complementary color.

My flowers offer me the model for my life. Unbalance at first glance, perhaps even a chaotic mess to some. Slow to come to fruition, offering nothing much beyond the colors I've offered and BEEN given. Some years and to some eyes I haven't looked like much, but other years, to other eyes? I have had my seasons; I will have them still.

Leave me to my flowers; join me when you will.
Just remember to bring me your veggies and we'll argue over wine...