Little Bird
The house smelled like art. You could drive up to it and see her small and rather unmuscular body perched on a sturdy wooden chair in the sunroom. Glasses of paintbrushes with dried-up oils and acrylics cluttered the table. Old newspapers and photographs covered the desk behind her in a heap, but if you looked closely you could kind of match the faces in the pages with her portraits, but her paintings were usually more blurry looking without sharp edges or definition, but that’s why I liked them, because you could look at them and imagine for yourself. She was a bird, a small one, with pretty grey and white feathers that laid softly on her brows. And her wings didn’t spread very wide, but she had a pretty hum in the tune of her voice, that wasn’t syrupy, but still sweet, almost like the honeysuckles that decorated the steps that led down to the lake in the back of her home.
During the summer she used to pluck watermelon seeds and scatter them in the soil behind her house. Thick prickly vines would weave on the ground in late summer, then when the Earth was about to turn its face on the sun and drop into the eve of fall, plump stripy spheres would spurt from the yellow flowers and assert their bodies on the ground. And they’d grow and they’d grow until she’d go back and nicely cut them from the womb and bring them inside through the back screen door. Often times, she’d let her fruit dry in the back of her kitchen in a bowl she painted. She’d speak of how beautiful the pomegranates looked when they were dried out and wrinkled, and you could shake them and hear their bones rattle inside of them.
I can only imagine what she might look like now. I haven’t even heard her voice through the telephone since they thought she was going to die, and I’m scared to see what she looks like. Like shriveled, and hollow in the cheeks, and frailer in the bones than how I remember her. My mother showed me a recent photo of her and I burst into tears, and I’m ashamed of that. Because she was still beautiful, with her sapphire eyes and her fair skin. But I couldn’t get past the idea that her beauty was also transient. That her body needed to be here on earth and that even though I’d always admired her for that spiritual, artistic, eternal beauty, that there was also something about her appearance and the presence of her being that was so fleeting, and that shook me. The idea that her art and her dried up paintbrushes and her old knit sweaters could still be sitting there in that room puffed up with sunshine, but that she wouldn’t be.
I know she once pierced my mother’s second earring hole. She did it with an apple behind the lobe and a glass of wine on the table next to her, but she did it when my mom was a teenager and I can never imagine my mom agreeing to do that to me. It was off-centered and looked somewhat painful, even when it healed, but it was art. Because of the way she did it. That’s how she did things though, freely and without vanity.
She was a bird with small wings and grey and white feathers, but her chest stuck out bigger than the other birds, because she could fly. She wasn’t trapped in a cage of any sort. From a lovely oak chair, she watched the world and she painted it beautifully. She’d write short letters to me as a child. She’d write them on the backs of her paintings. The notes were simple, but she’d put things like feathers and stones into the envelopes. Things that she liked and that I grew to collect over time. That’s why it’s right to save grasses and leaves and stones and seeds and feathers. Because someday you might hold onto them, and feel in your hands a little weight of that human.
That’s how I remember her.
I don’t know what she looks exactly like right now. I don’t know. But I know her veins are still plump as they always were, filled with blood being pumped from a beating heart. I know her skin is still freckled and slick, like it always has been. I know that somewhere inside of her is not ending, but hopeful and at ease, filled with paintings of what beauty she has to come for her, of where she will next spread her seeds.
September 2019