Shifting Seasons

I’ve kept rather quiet for a while on this site due to several influences. The fraught politics of last year could bear some blame, but more personally, my cataracts made it difficult to write. You who are familiar with what I post here​,​ will probably wonder, was I able to paint, and weirdly enough the answer to that is yes​.​  I think it’s because you do not entirely paint by sight. Instead, you have trained muscle memory after decades of practice, and a sense of values and tones, rather than exact detail. Detail can be had for the simple effort of peering at everything up close.

Indeed, while I still painted landscapes successfully while way too blind to drive, I also created a tightly photorealistic series of paintings of fat persimmons on a counter, a few drying leaves (they still are on a tabletop in my studio,) and some twigs. I shall do a post or two dedicated to the cataract experience, but not right now. Right now my mind and heart are occupied by something more urgent to share. 

Fireside in wintertime

 Like many of us who are able, I’ve had my vaccinations, so has my husband. Our daughter who is here until August, just received her second Moderna shot, and is curled up with a headache. A good headache, you might say. As I’ve settled into the joys of better vision I’ve realized how dirty the house really is, and how much easier it is to work when you can see. Indeed I did a spate of painting to fullfill my ideas for a new show of works which will be hung before the end of this month. But the new vision has also let me engage more, even though distanced, with friends. 

A few days past, I received the bad news that a dear friend, a man I’ve known first through writers conferences, then by shared conversations about writing, painting and music for more than seventeen years, faces a bad prognosis after over two years of struggling first with one cancer, then a second. I shall call him James. 

I’ve been in conversation via email with two other friends, who, like my friend James, I met through the writers conferences. They are such good men, and I’m really glad of their friendship.  One of them, Bill, sent to us an email about James, with whom he is in a writers group. They met up last night for the first time since COVID hit….

James is in good spirits, Bill said, “and we talked some about the temporary presence of our lives. He is focused on being here now, until he isn’t. We laughed quite a bit and read our stories to each other—stories of androids with souls, a couple who’d forgotten how to love, a child whose imaginary friend imagines him, a space crew sent back in time through the collision of an asteroid, a aged surfer who teaches his grandson to ride into his fear. What a joy to share!!!The greatest gift we can give James or each other is a note of love, a memory, a link to a work of music. He is relishing these things.”

Doesn’t that give you pause? I turned around and invited two much younger friends to lunch in our backyard. Anne and Ginny, (thirty and twenty eight for ages.) Made them pan bread, which is a fresh yeast dough cooked in a covered cast iron frying pan, to be eaten hot with butter or dried tomatoes, all sorts of cheeses and garlic, sauteed peppers, and we had a marvelous time.

 
 So now I’m saying, thank you James, for reminding me. Thank you Bill, for telling me. These sharings are the real matter of our lives. 

And I think of James who has struggled to stop smoking over all the years I’ve known him, but the cancer he has isn’t from the smoking. I think of his battle with morbid obesity, which has been this burden to him and this guilt– he has felt he caused his own problems– but it isn’t his weight that is killing him. No, it is another part of nature, over which he never had control.

 Surely there is a lesson here we can grasp and do our own barbaric yawp. Sometimes we need to just live and share and not think about how we ought to do it better. There may be no better. We may waste all these good times and things, food and fun and music, punishing ourselves for what was never meant to be. If friends love us, that is the feast and celebration. 

I tagged James, sharing one of my favorite pieces of music, a symphony by Berwald. It is an experience, as all music is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0G1Z9dwyPU