VISITING DAY
February 4 2015
We’ve come back to Provence, to the little village in the Luberon where we started our “year” in Europe, 2 years and a month ago. It’s a little bit like meeting a lover with whom one had had a brief but serious fling; the kind of affair that takes one by surprise, having until that moment of seduction, been perfectly content with one’s spouse…the spouse in this case being Tuscany. And so you meet the ex-lover for coffee and although all the qualities that once intoxicated you are still present, your heart no longer bangs against your ribs; you are no longer torn. There is no decision to be made. We belong to Tuscany.
We are staying up the top of the village in the studio apartment across the hall from our dear friends, Sharon and Paul, which is really why we’re here; friendship proving itself deeper than romance. The apartment is a jewel of simple restoration, a meditative nest across from the crest with a view of our favorite lavender field…you remember, the one with 7 cherry trees.
Snow fell yesterday and continued through the night, cocooning us in extra permission to relax, to breakfast in bed, to make soup, read in front of the fire, or pop across the hall to lunch with our friends by their fire, visiting and revisiting each other into the evening.
And in the visiting, revisiting stories; stories one thought never to tell again and in the telling discovering another element to the plot. Stories. We all tell them, cobbling together remnants of our past in yet another attempt to make whole cloth of our lives. As if to revisit the past we will rediscover something of ourselves that seems to have gone missing.
The piece I rediscovered yesterday was hidden in the back pocket of my journal. This pocket is where I put bits and pieces of interest to me; a newspaper clipping, the last rosebud of summer, a note from my stepson and an odd collection of photos that migrate from journal to journal: photos of our children, of younger versions of Joel and me, one of my hair salon from 80’s and so on. But the photos that spoke to me yesterday were of some paintings I had made in the early 90’s…before I became a “serious” writer.
What surprised me while revisiting these images was the recognition that I had been a “serious” painter for 15 years prior to breaking my neck. They were the last of a series I was working on shortly after the accident and they told a story, which, like all stories had transmuted from one thing to another while keeping the central idea, or spine if you will, intact.
In November of 1990, shortly after leaving the hospital and wearing the halo vest that would be my inescapable companion for 2 months, my dear Joel drove me one night, to the scene of the accident. The country road seemed to me a metaphor of my spine. It, like me, had been repaired. Its patches spoke to my vertebrae and the road itself became my spine.
The next day I began the series of drawings; pastels of the road rubbed dark into the paper, the road held in place by the body of the night. Several months later, released from the steel rods and metal vest, I moved to Provincetown where the breakwater became the metaphor of spine. Its vertebrae of boulders, herniated here and there, thrust through the saltwater inlet out to the spit of sand that marked the separation between land and sea and sky.
As I looked at these images last night, I felt released from the relentless pursuit of the written word. I felt joyous with possibility. For there are many ways to tell a story and perhaps the stories we can trust the most are those that speak to us silently, encapsulating everything there is to know through visceral communication; the sudden feeling of familiarity illuminated in a heartbeat. Like the unembroidered truth of a visitation.
All photos by Maggie
