A Reverie

To make a prairie

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.

Emily Dickinson, 1755

Statement

The commute from mom’s house to ours was a little over six hours one way, and I drove it a lot over the years before she died. The rhythm of the road and a steady gaze forward made the interior of the car a place to remember the highlights as well as the difficulties of the time we spent together.

As mile followed mile, as the ridges and changing pavement of the road translated a bass line through the tires, the auditory environment of the car became a chaconne. Reverie followed, but not trance. When I grew tired of pondering the unanswerable whys surrounding the end of life, I would occupy myself with the visual phrasing of plant life as it passed by the side of the road. Each leaf of a tree signaled repetition and I would visualize their shapes from stem to leaftip. The potential of innumerable blackbird perches was compressed into one cattail, and wildflowers buffetted by the tailwind of 18-wheelers illustrated bounty. Countless images of the multiplicative nature of life appeared and changed on the screen of my inner eye as I looked through the windshield at the road before me.

At some point during mom’s last years, I happened upon a life-size facsimile of Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium at the main library in Madison, Wisconsin where I routinely waited for my husband’s rehearsals to end. It was one of those serendipitous library moments when you hit gold by wandering aimlessly through the oversized book stacks. Opening the Herbarium I was thrilled. One of my favorite poets not only loved plants, but also took great care in the composition of her botanical samples as they appeared on the page — she was both poet and artist. I carried the heavy facsimile to a well lit table and carefully photographed each page on my phone. I learned that during her tween years, Emily collected a variety of plants that grew near her home, then taped and pressed them between the pages of a large album, carefully inscribing nomenclature that identified each sample.

Among Emily’s cuttings were two chrysanthemums arranged in a giant X underneath a sample of marsh bellflower, a snip of leatherwood flowers, and two stems of rock rose. The chrysanthemums reminded me of a story I used to read my two girls when they were little — Chrysanthemum, by Kevin Henkes. It’s a story about a little girl who got picked on; we’ve all been there. But in the Herbarium, the seeds of the chrysanthemums are ripening and almost visible. You can see where they’re tucked away in the center of the petals, with the promise of bees in their future. This made the cutting more interesting.

And mom? When I was very young, I knew for a fact that if the whole world had my mom for their mom, we would all be fine. Not only that, but everything would be fine, even if there was a misunderstanding or an accident. Mom knew exactly what to say if my feelings got hurt, and how to apply the bandaids and bactine if I skinned my knee. I loved her so very much — until that moment at three years old when she told me I was not allowed to do something. To this day I cannot remember what that something was, but she said no and I was not having it; I decided to run away from home that instant. And doggonnit I told her I was running away too, in no uncertain terms, and — she let me. I tore out of the garage, ran the length of the driveway, and then all the way down the sidewalk until I got to the corner. This was right next door. There, feet firmly planted in the shadow of the stop sign, I stood and fumed at the injustice of it all. I sure did stand there in my yellow polka dot shirt, at the intersection of two streets, neither of which I was allowed to cross by myself. That corner sure was a place I could stand doggonnit and I frowned there for probably three full minutes before I realized that if I wanted to have supper I would have to go back home. More than that, I would have to face mom too. The return journey was slow. I still wasn’t happy about whatever it was, but I never tried running away again. Mom watched me pick at my plate that evening, but before she tucked me in bed that night she asked me what I thought about what had happened. I guessed it didn’t go very well. Then she explained some things to me.

The next summer as I played with my friends under the front yard tree, a little girl our age walked toward us. She must have lived way up the block, I thought, because I’d never seen her before. She was especially downcast, and somehow I understood that she was unloved. This made me feel horrible, because no one should have to feel that. But the good news was that all her hurting could be repaired easily, thoroughly, and swiftly by my mom because my mom knew how to love her children- she explained things in a tender voice, she corrected without scolding, she read us stories and got us clothes as we grew and once in a while made chocolate chip cookies. The solution could not have been more clear. All I had to do was bring this little girl to mom, and mom would give her a hug and comb her hair and explain about her feelings and wipe her face and hands with a warm washcloth sudsy with ivory soap before giving her a snack and that would fix everything.

Four year old me was dumbfounded when this did not come to pass. I remember explaining to the girl that I had a good mommy so she agreed to walk up to my house to meet her. But when she saw this girl, mom -though very kind- was somehow unwilling to give her a hug and a wash and a snack. Grown-ups just didn’t understand how easy life was, I remember thinking, mystified, which of course showed how good I had it. I stood there for awhile, not knowing what to do. The little girl walked away and I never saw her again. All I knew was that she got a little further away from home than I had.

So what happens to the prairie when the seeds are untended? What happens to two chrysanthemums once they grow up? How did we manage to telescope what was into what is?

As usual, this painting required several layers of work, but the last part I worked on was the transcription of Emily’s writing. This required exacting focus, so much so that I decided to project the words onto the panel after everything else was painted. Gesture became extremely important, but I didn’t understand why until I was in the process of following Emily’s condensed, curving hand. It dawned that I was writing these words as she did, but with a liner brush dipped in paint instead of pen and ink. I was setting down her letters as her, in the paced and fluid order of writing. That realization was a moment of marvel because I became sensitive to what Emily’s young hand could teach me about the dawning of her cadence, her precision, and of course, her circumference. The brush could not be rushed, nor too much slowed, and the seconds that passed in rewriting her letterforms stretched long enough for miles of landscape to come into fruition, complete with automobile, asphalt, and sunset.

A Reverie, 11” x 17”, 2019-2023, was painted in oil with hand refined linseed oil and egg tempera on glue/chalk gesso over glue size on a cradled hardboard panel.