Color and Light

A bluebird has taken up residence in a birdhouse Jeanette placed on an old stump in our backyard. He ignored the half dozen houses placed strategically around the property and chose a temporary spot set up by accident. Go figure. Sparrows and wrens need birdhouses too, I suppose. The fields around our house are buzzing with life. Fledgling birds are trying out their new wings, a bumper crop of bunnies scamper about, and the corn is headed for the sky. There is a sense of hope and possibility in there air. I am grateful for this July because this has been a season of letting go, especially for Jeanette. She is still figuring out how to live in a world without her mom in it. The immediate shock is wearing off, but a whole house full of memories remain. Each time she approaches the place she grew up, the past rises like a hymn. The journey through those rooms is on hold for a while. For now, the garden and her flower beds have become a place of refuge. The time she spent at her mother’s side is now filled among purple cone flowers and lilies. As I watch her, however, she often pauses and looks out across the fields. She says she still thinks of things she wants to tell her mother and then realizes with a start her mom is gone. She strolls from place to place, trying to make sense of this new state of affairs. The flowers remind her that the seasons of life are natural, that all living things begin and end in a rhythm we can’t control nor fully understand. In her book The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion suggests the difference between grief and mourning is that mourning requires attention. It helps explain why we are so often surprised by moments of deep sadness long after a loved one dies. We fall victim to the myth that we need to be “strong” and move on. Thankfully, Jeanette’s mom was an artist and her paintings have left an emotional trail to help her daughter find her way.

Aren’t we all trying to understand our past? Don’t we all wonder how we got to where we are? What an enormous gift it can be to have some record of what your parents were thinking and feeling as they grew up.  My own father – who likely would have scoffed at the idea of being called an artist and never talked about his feelings – revealed the most to me when he played his guitar and sang the old songs he knew. Art communicates beyond words.  The large collection of water color paintings her mom left behind has given Jeanette the chance to “pay attention” to the legacy of her mother. To see the world through her eyes. When Jeanette was recently asked to exhibit some of her mom’s work at our local library, she thoughtfully and lovingly selected paintings that revealed her mom’s joy in color and light. After seeing those paintings, there is little surprise this morning why Jeanette pauses amid the tiger lilies and marigolds to look across the meadow. Her mom would have smiled.