Color

She could see the images tumbling like Monarchs through the trees. The colors were always brilliant and buoyant. If she closed her eyes, she would have to completely succumb to them, so she kept her eyes wide open, hoping the images in her head would subside.

She was a visual schizophrenic. There was always a new image that imposed itself on her--particularly when she was relaxed. Sometimes pictures would superimpose themselves on each other, sometimes they would arm wrestle for dominance, but always there were far too many to paint or even draw. She had learned early in her artistic training—and it had taken some time to let herself be an artist—that if she gave in to all their demands, she would never sleep, never eat, never stop painting.

And then there were the pencils and ink pens lying in wait in the foxholes. If she kept them visible and handy they would attack her outright, demanding attention and allegiance even more ardently than the images themselves. They were the means to the end--these pencils, pens, and brushes. And they were in league with their compatriots--the canvas and paper.

She frequently wondered about this barrage. Where did it all come from? Why did she see the world in pictures and not words? Perhaps it was a mad rush against the reality of her blind, deaf, and mute muse: her grandmother, the one from whom her parents derived her name.

Her grandmother had been an artist in her own right, one who before the vision vanished in her eyes, had produced delicate and intricate crochet work. The works of others’ were always cumbersome and lumpy. Her grandmother’s were like snowflakes—yes, like snowflakes.

Throughout her house her deceased grandmother’s keepsakes were hidden. For the first time this struck her as odd. Why they had remained hidden she did not know. Even after this moment of realization, they would remain hidden. Perhaps it was too painful and frightening a reminder that the senses she now enjoyed, even the ones she herself had suppressed, had been systematically taken from her grandmother.

Her first and terrifying memory of her grandmother was when she was introduced to her by means of sign language. Her son had patiently signed into his mother’s hand the letters of her name m-a-r-t-h-a. The moment the last ‘a’ left her palm, her grandmother erupted with pure joy and crazy guttural expressions: “Gul! Marpha! Gul!” Her light and long fingers had fluttered wildly over the terrified grandchild’s eyes, nose, cheeks, lips, and hair. Marpha! Gul! She was her Martha, her girl, the oldest daughter of her only son.

She remembered being paralyzed with fear as she was pulled simultaneously into her grandmother’s warm arms and the cold steel of her wheelchair. The joy and delight on her grandmother’s toothless, blind face was equally astonishing. This hung like a beautiful, ravenous painting in her granddaughter’s mind for years to come. Rarely had she experienced such joy and absolute acceptance in all her life.

Yet, like the persistent and random images, she did not have any true sense of history with her grandmother--only gul and marpha and those long and tender fingers touching her face. Like a million butterflies brushing her face, her grandmother and the hundreds of colors had been with her for a very long time. They sustained her. They had given her hope. They had encouraged her and filled an otherwise gray life with color more beautiful than the autumn aspens.

Perhaps that was why she selected very carefully the images and colors she would apply to paper and canvas. If she put them all out there, perhaps she would lose them and lose the courage of her grandmother. This she could not do. This she would not do.