As work in the studio moves in new directions not yet ready to surface, I offer you, in lieu of new paintings, my morning’s meditation on the season.
I hear this month half-melted in dirty snow belongs to a Saint dressed in velvet. Amid the scrolling bonfires of vitriol, romance still flutters “below the fold” as they used to say, back in the day when you could iron the news in half.
Forgive me if I had misplaced February. At Trader Joe’s, on a mission to find King County’s last carton of eggs, I pushed my cart past the bulbs dangling jaundiced roots and the sticks that hold up orchids and arrived at a startling array of succulents in pink ceramic hearts. I paused. Such an unexpected sweetness they offered, tiptoeing into the swirling turmoil of my thoughts. I looked at the scalloped edges of the planters and the cascades of pearls and hens and chicks and said to myself, I am not the kind of person who buys such a thing. That shade of pink. Someone who had this in their house would be named Gladys or Edna or Myrtle, and she would wear a felt hat held in place with pins. I don’t wear hats. And then I walked my little succulent heart to the cash register and I said to the young man with hair down to his shoulders, If I buy this I have to change my name to Gladys.
He gave me a blank look.
Edna?
He made that gesture of something going right over his head and smiled expectantly.
And so I had to explain in the 90 seconds I had before the next shopping cart what it meant to grow up in an era of women with those names, their propriety, their resolute knowledge of how to organize a life by chapter and verse, their polished black pumps tapping the street named Main Street, the stores that actually had store fronts.
My father had a newspaper on the corner of just such a Main Street, and his secretary was named Myrtle. Every morning she came in and dusted the jade plant that sat in the corner window as the sun stole over the mountains and slanted across the walls. She had that one still moment. Then the back door banged and the men arrived, heavy boots and green visors, and shattered the silence with the clatter of Linotype and lead slugs falling to the floor. Myrtle wrote the society page and she never once misspelled. She would have kept African violets on her windowsills, and when no one was looking she went through a pack of Marlboros every day, and hid the ashtrays under the sink.
She’s my girl, I said to the young man at Trader Joe’s. And then I carried my Valentine very carefully to my car.
This week, as things you took for granted thaw and then freeze and then melt again, and every few minutes some new continent or body of water or civilization is renamed, deaccessioned, or auctioned off to a 25 year-old with a hard drive; this week, before you run off to Portugal or some other small nation that may not recognize your passport or your country, consider celebrating Valentine’s Day. Tell everyone you meet you love them, in some unexpected way.
And remember to love yourself, whatever your name is.
XOX
Iskra
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