I floated in and out of a murky haze. Disjointed dreams entranced me.
I was a teenager, brimming with youthful hope, not yet tainted by the bitterness of the real world.
“Can I watch?” the young me asked eagerly, looking over Mom’s shoulder and plopping my backpack at the foot of my bed. My room was half mine, half my mother’s art studio in our small three-bedroom home. I didn’t mind sharing my space with her.
“Of course,” she said smoothly as she drew the outline of a man’s face with the graphite artist’s pencil. She paused, used her finger to smudge and blend, and then continued around with his chin.
I watched for a while, patient for a teenager, as she picked up different pencils to fill in the detail of dancing Lenape’s headdress. The dancer was on his head—Mom preferred to draw upside down. He was dressed in full regalia.
Her talent to capture a person’s emotions in their body movement and face was fascinating. Some artists did abstract work, still life…my mother’s forte was people.
A half an hour later, she spoke, her gaze not leaving the canvas. “Did you finish your homework?”
“Uh-huh. Why do they call you Red Elder?” I asked, crunching on an apple I grabbed from the bowl of fruit beside the window. The sweet juice of the Honey Crisp tickled my tongue. She liked painting still life, too. It was good, but not as good as her drawings of people. I loved to watch her gift unfold.
She put her pencil down and turned to me, sincerity shimmering in her light blue eyes. The sun shone in through the window and highlighted the auburn hues in her red-brown hair. “My friend gave me the name.”
I chewed on the apple and swallowed. Well, that didn’t help. “You’re not old though, to be an elder I mean. And you’re not in the tribe. We’re not Native American.”
“We can be anything we make ourselves to be. We may not genetically born into a culture, but we can still embrace its teachings.” She returned to her work. She might be a poet and artist but the paper and canvas received most of her attention these days. Not that I minded. Too much.
“Can I go to the pow-wow with you this weekend?”
“If you want,” she said.
My pulse hopped. She usually went alone. I only went to the art shows with her. If she wasn’t going to tell me more about the Lenape and their ways, then I was going to observe at one of the pow-wows she attended.
I pulled out my notebook and worked beside her. Not on artwork, no, that wasn’t my strong point, as much as I tried. I worked on my poetry and my girlish tales about true love. This one was about a girl named Amber and her summer romance with the shy, charming boy next door, who I modeled after Daniel, the boy I had crush on. This plot had yet to fully unfold, but Daniel (who I renamed Joshua for anonymity—I couldn’t let Daniel know about my crush!) had to solve a mystery of his sister who had gone missing and he and Amber teamed up on it.
Mom hummed as she drew and I wrote, both of us letting the serenity of late afternoon inspire us.
“How’s the story?” she asked after a little while.
I shrugged. “Meh.”
“You’ll get there. I can’t wait to read it when you’re done. I can’t wait to read all your novels one day.”
One day, I thought, nibbling on the pencil’s eraser.
Then my mind fast-forwarded twenty years to a few years ago as Mom’s profile disappeared from memory.
Now I sat at my laptop instead of beside Mom’s easel. My feet were propped up on the coffee table beside the latte Harrison had brewed me. The laptop sat in my lap. Harrison typed furiously away beside me.
Work. Again. Yup, here we were…the couple who sat beside each other on the sofa, both lost in a digital world.
Bored and avoiding doing my latest work assignment, I had been jumping around between answering emails and shopping for new jeans for Will.
“Why the hell can’t they make snaps on jeans?” I said.
Harrison was non-responsive, so I silently fumed. Apparently, once you got out of preschool sizes, finding jeans with snaps were no longer an easy task. I supposed that by the time kids were seven or eight, they should have mastered buttons. Not Will. Sure, he’d finally mastered, after many tearful Sunday mornings, buttons on his collared dress shirts. He liked to refer to them as his “cut shirts” because they opened up down the center. “Not another cut shirt, Mom!” he would say. And now it was jeans. Every day was a battle. He had slender hips and was obstinate and would slide them up and down without unbuttoning. But he’d gotten too big to be able to do that, so now we had daily meltdowns over putting on pants in the morning.
“Snaps?” Harrison finally chimed in, hearing me continue to mutter. “Sweatpants?”
“Never mind,” I said through clenched teeth.
I gave up. Perhaps I could doctor them myself. I’d already sewn Velcro into Will’s karate uniform to accommodate his sensory issues of needing it tightly closed at his neck.
With a growl of determination, I pulled up eBay. Perhaps I was wrapped up in another melancholy moment of self-pity, regret, grief, and longing. Autism parenting could do that to a person. I spiraled too much. One bad thing led to me musing over other past pains.
Little of my mother remained. I inherited her brown hair, prominent nose, and her artistic voice. I had a gold bracelet that belonged to my great grandmother, Anna. A “World’s Best Mom” measuring cup I’d bought for her at one of my elementary “Santa’s Secret Shop” events at school hung out in my kitchen cabinet. I had memories.
A wretched loneliness stirred the already turbulent emotion within me as I entered her name into the search engine box. Nothing. I tried her other name, her maiden name she had returned to after divorcing Dad.
A bit of scrolling and there it was. The framed black and white Lenape man in colored pencil danced before me. A wolf’s skin encompassed his headdress and leather threads twirled down from his beaded jacket as he held a feather dreamcatcher in his hand. He danced to unheard tunes. The musical memory of one pow-wow I’d attended filled my mind.
Excitement caused me to close the screen and have to retype it.
“Harrison! Look!”
I waited for him to tear his gaze away from the screen. “What is it?”
I pointed to the picture, which was selling for over two-hundred dollars. “My mom’s art! Remember that one I used to tell you about? There it is. And some vendor in Connecticut has it.”
“You should buy it.”
“But it’s so much.”
He took my hand in his and brushed the back of my knuckles with his fingertips. “It’s part of you. There’s no price on that.”
I had found a piece of my mother. She had died with only a few of her many canvases left in her name, for most of them had been commissioned portraits or sold at art shows. I had not found just any one of her works; I had found the one that I remembered so fondly of her laboring over for countless hours at her easel in her art studio. I eagerly clicked the “buy now” option.
I exhaled, distancing myself from the memory of me on the sofa next to Harrison. Soon they were vapors of days gone.
My mother had been such a mystery. I’d never understood why my mom had abandoned her Christian upbringing and embraced the spirituality of the Lenape. She was a poet, an artist, a kindred spirit with the earth. She was a nature lover, a tender soul, but also a withdrawn and hurting woman. I didn’t know it then, but she and my father had lived a fractured life. She sought comfort in her art and the Lenape. My parents had only stayed married for the sake of me and Brandon. She finally filed for divorce when I was in my early twenties. And, only in her death, at the hands of cancer a few years later, were they both freed from the pain. Now my dad lived a quiet, hermit’s life in southern Arizona with my stepmother. He’d moved there at my mom’s urging during her final years before their divorce. Now, all that was left of her was a few pieces of artwork and bitter memories.
Oh, how I loved her. I wanted to be like her. Little had I known how much I was indeed a lot like her.
