Dear Mom,I began yesterday with the intentions of crafting a heartfelt photo blog in homage to your own RedOrGray style, simple words and simple images that together create quilts full of bright thoughts and intricately stitched emotions. After a long day at work, my camera and I hiked about my favorite wild area on the ranch snapping photographs and picking up rocks. A startled deer berated me before bounding off into the trees. Dried algae patterns showed that a creek or pond usually sweeps along the pathway I followed. I climbed through the dense trees, their twig fingers grasping my hair, and found my favorite sycamore with the perfect sitting spot just a few feet up off the ground. Still sticky from the day's dried sweat and sore from a week's worth of ladder climbing I pulled my tired self up into the arms of this tree and rested my head upon its trunk. The stillness allowed my thoughts to wander through the much more dense and tangled wild in my head, mulling over imagery and theme, composition and what exactly it was that I wanted to say to you with this gesture.
Back at the house, I perused your most recent entries to help me structure my post. The beauty I saw there stopped me in my industrious tracks. I climbed into the still place your words shape and rested my heart against the loveliness I found there. The internet attributes the adage, “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” to a nineteenth century magazine man, but I'm sure that the words came from his mom. Similarly, looking at your art is like reading an earlier translation of my own thoughts about the world. In your creations, I see the crisp lines and textures that satisfy me and the purposeful words that convey so much while leaving space for further interpretation.
Your most recent post about Grandma echoed the untyped thought fragments swirling about my brain, and my heart swelled to read the words I had hoped to write about you, “My mother [is] an artist. She [personifies] the word unconditional.” When I see beauty in the world, whether in the excitement of one of my students or the constant stretch of a sycamore towards the sun, I see through the eyes you created and trained. When I search my brain for the perfect words, I lean upon years of red letters in rough draft margins. When I love, when I sing, when I encourage I repeat the words and kindness you have given to me. I am one of the ripples you have created with your life, which Grandma helped to create, and her mother before her, and today I thank you for my beautiful existence. I would not see it without you.
