dVerse Poets Pub
Today is Open Link Night at the pub, so I get to write about anything I want. There are already lots of little green starts coming up from the seeds I planted, and I painted the big rock I dug up from my garden.
When Mixing, It’s Important to Know There Are Warm Shades And Cool Shades to Your Colors
I made sure she came out and saw it:
I don’t know why I needed her to see it
She instantly said, “It’s like one of your images. You made it look like your photographs.”
I couldn’t believe it, with all its imperfections, she saw it, just as it was.
The rock, the huge-to-me rock that I dug up out of the garden plot I’ve been working for so many years; it was so big I knew I had to paint it, to turn it into a marker, a greeter, a part of the garden.
When I asked him if I could use the plot, the square of overgrowth where my grandfather had planted potatoes, he said, “Go ahead, but the soils bad.” After I’ve tried all sorts of different seeds and plants and worked and worked that soil for a decade, when I showed him this year’s planted garden, he said, “We’ll see. That soil’s bad.”
How can the soil that fed me those incredible baby acorn squash —that I didn’t even plant when the car wasn’t running and I needed food—be bad?
I was so surprised when I dug up that rock after digging in this same square of earth so long. But then, that’s what roots do: they reach down, and around those rocks, and while they reach,
they grow and forget about those rocks
as their reaching and growing pushes rocks to the surface.
It was hard to decide what to paint. I wanted to create something that would invite me into my garden to work, to weed and to tend, to pay attention. I wanted something that I would want to visit. That’s hard to paint for oneself. It had to have something right and wrong with it, change with the light.
And she was right, I tried to recreate overlapping colored lights with paint, to turn the curled metal of my small mirror into a vine. And she saw it. And she saw me without a word, she just knew it was me,
inviting me to my garden.