Sue

She’s a joy-maker. Her hands in dirt, in clay, in paint, in crayons, she whistles. She makes up songs, she dances: to the radio or to the music of wind in the upper reaches of an Atlas Cedar she planted 40 years ago and has watered and fed every one of 40 summers. She talks to chickadees, bees, and sweet peas. She takes a filament of scarlet runner bean across the back of her hand and slowly, gently leads it to the next level of the bamboo trellis she built for it. She makes her mark with pens and daubs of paint, with brushes stacked in vessels she built of clay, makes her mark in journals that she later tosses out or burns, makes her mark on canvas, on paper bags and grocery lists, in watercolor and in water for hummingbirds. 

She loathes meetings and puffed up egos splitting hairs and counting propositions. Her laughter ripples over human absurdity, her own most of all, and I laugh with her. She clowns, she tosses my conundrums in the air and they come down confetti. She’s irrepressible. 

I think some of that shows in this portrait she allowed me to make. I blinded her with my new light, interrupted her pattern-making, and she asked me, “Did you get what you wanted?” 

Yes, I said yes, I did, yes.