Going to Caro-fornia in My Mind

Seven years ago, a skinny gray cat appeared in our yard. He rushed from bird to lizard to rustling plant, not focusing on any single thing, except for our feral cat, Mommy, the mother of all but one of our house cats. Rudely, he nosed her out of her food dish, he appropriated her favorite sleeping shelter, and plopped down in the middle of every one of her sacred sunny spots on our deck. He duplicated her every move. Yet, despite the invasiveness of his actions, the young gray cat seemed not so much aggressive as desperate to belong.

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…in North Carolina…
So much green that will blaze bright with color in the fall…

..in California..
A flash that might have been a mountain lion.
Buckeyes dropping everywhere.

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..the year my mother was failing a brown tabby and her dreamsicle-colored sidekick began frequenting our yard. Before we became wily enough to trap her, the brown tabby presented us with two litters of four kittens each. Not one of the kittens in the first litter resembled any of the others. We speculated they had four different fathers. The second litter was a matched set. When the brown tabby brought them on the deck for the first time, I quickly took pictures and forwarded them to my husband Tom. He turned to a colleague at work and remarked, “My wife has just sent me photos of tribbles.”

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Where is Portulacca Sleeping? or WIPS, as I call it for short, is actually one of the very first cat-centered picture books I ever thought about putting together. It has taken decades to finally fall out into book form. The idea came from my parents’ cat, Portulacca. She used to sleep in the oddest places—a roasting pan, the dish drainer. My dad put a shoebox on his chair to keep her from usurping his spot while he went to pour himself a cup of coffee. He returned to find her asleep in the shoebox.

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She was half the size of the other kittens, the runt, a tortoiseshell---so difficult to see in shadow---and as I later came to know, every bit as wiley as her mother. She rode home with me because, as I told my mother, “he pulled her by the leg, she was limping---I’ll take her to the woman who took the other kittens tomorrow, when I know that she is all right.” Twenty-two years later my father snapped a picture of Portulacca, basking in the sun on the brick sidewalk behind my parents’ house.

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There is poetry where families pull together when death comes to separate them,
some kind of song that needs to be written.

(This blog post is a poem I wrote for a poetry-in-art class . The collage shown with this blogpost is the companion work I created to express the poem visually.)

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…As I stitched my two routes through San Jose together in my mind, it occurred to me I have never felt I know San Jose the way I knew my home town, even though, by now, I may lived in San Jose longer than I lived in North Carolina. Routes in San Jose feel like a network of acquired knowledge that I have put together like a puzzle, something I’ve had to do to pass a professional exam or get along at a job. This information is not innate. It is not a part of me. I carry it…

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Sometime during my high school years and college, Bradford pear trees became the horticultural rage in the U.S. They had a nice straight trunk with a round crown, scads of beautiful white flowers in the spring and no messy fruit to clean up. They were the quintessential flowering lollipop tree. . .

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There is something visceral about combating evil. When it accosts you, standing up and fighting back is important. Even if you only get to do it vicariously through a cartoon, or with the magic you imagine when you read about Harry Potter. There is something to seeing justice prevail in a mighty way.

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I wondered about that alien. It was shorter than our teenaged artist, and much more vulnerable in appearance—and so happy to stand there holding its head. The little alien’s happiness in the face of headlessness must have been an expression of this young girl’s resilience.

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I’ve been selling art for a while now. I’m counting the years in my head—18 perhaps—not quite two decades. When I’m searching for documents on backup drives, I run across whole folders of paintings I’ve completely forgotten about. I see them and recall the details of my path more precisely than I ever would have, had my memory not been jogged by those images of paintings that left my life long ago, because other people wanted them.

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At home, being a tomboy was easy. When my father was around the house, he was happy for me to help him and, fortunately, most of the time my mother was preoccupied. She taught, she worked on her Masters degree, she frantically cleaned house with what little time she had left. I was free to roam the woods with my dog, a black and white border collie with an Irish setter mother that froze in a perfect point when he spotted squirrels, but barked madly when we stumbled upon land terrapins in the woods.

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To my right, a two-year-old sits on a high wall while her young mother ties her bright red sneakers. The little girl’s short dark curls bounce, telegraphing her impatience.

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