Sis
just sent me a picture of a paint-by-numbers work she’s completed---it’s simply
lovely, with peaceful water and pale pastels of lawn chairs and flowers. And so I wrote her a little memory of our
Aunt Lu---Mammaw’s just-younger sister, whose entire life-as-I-knew-it was
lived within the walls of a small-town General Store.
Internet photos except for Sis' at top of page
Sis, your beautiful artwork of that peaceful stream and the welcoming pink chairs is your Aunt Lu side emerging---she took up the hobby in the
early Fifties. She had these beauties
hanging all over the house, and was generous and free with her handiwork. They
were not quite so elaborate or sophisticated in their gradations of color or
light as those today, and you can tell the old-time Fifties ones from the new,
by the gentle, kindergartenish flow of the pale primary shades. The shapes and colours remind me of gently-contoured
baby-toys vs. sharply-delineated lines of modern young taste. They’re the barns and horses a child would
colour, varying only the pressure of the same few crayons.
She
thoroughly enjoyed her art. I think sometimes of those long days she spent in
that old country store, reaching things down from shelves and cutting meat
right there on that immense slice-of-a-tree that was her butcher-block, with
all the same-old same-old of the days in that rattly, people-worn place---what
a wonderful outlet for her soul the painting must have been!
The paintings always came in twos, right there in a flat box on the shelves of Ben Franklin with the 500-piece puzzles and Monopoly. They were
mostly simple studies of big red barns or windmills or peaceful streams or
horses, with a small set of tiny plastic paint-pots strung together like
Pop-It-Beads. The primary colours and
the tiny brush provided many an hour of get-away for Aunt Lu, with the
absolutes of the grays and reds in their indicated patches of shading making a
few “professional” shadows on a patch of snow, a horse’s coat, a shady
lawn.
And
she loved the snow scenes---perhaps the heat and humidity of the South prompted her
inclination toward shadowy snowbanks and sleighs.
She
must have felt a wonderful sense of accomplishment in her work, however many
scarce hours she had to devote to it, for her work-days were long,
six-day-a-week times of dashing from counter to shelf to the Meat Market to cut
a steak, grind some hamburger, snip off six of the fat sausages from the ropes
hanging in the cooler. She cut and
measured and weighed, ripping the sheets of heavy store-paper across the cutter-teeth like flipping a sheet onto a bed.
A nimble flirt of hands with the string from
the the ceiling loop, and the package slipped neatly into the basket, along with
a small brown papersack of just scooped beans, two bananas nipped with the little curved
knife from the hanging bunch, and maybe-two-of-those-chocolate-pennycreams-today
went into the sack. I like to think
that she could do all those motions by rote, still thinking of the scent of that
paint and the structured order of the strokes, keeping those shimmery dobs of paint inside the map of small blue lines.
I also thought she
must order the hangers in bulk from Sears Roebuck, for each and every one, gift
and kept alike, was framed in smooth wood, with a lovely purplish rosette on
the silk hanging-cord, no matter the colours or shades in the paintings. She liked things to be nice, and I think
those rows of graceful triangles securing the tops of her paintings, with their
dignified rosettes atop---those must have satisfied some of that longing for something
elegant amongst faded green counters
and the footworn floors of her days.
She
gave her treasures for birthdays, Christmas, wedding presents, almost always in
pairs as they came in the box.
And
once, she astonished the congregations of both churches in town by presenting
each with one of the pair of religious pictures she had painted. She had
beautifully framed the two: Sacred Heart of Jesus and one of the Virgin Mary,
and Methodist and Baptist each got one---there was a hubbub under hair dryers
and in church pews for quite some time, but I don't think our Dear Soul
ever heard about the should-we? should-we-not? quandary faced by each of the
Church Boards. I KNOW one of them hung theirs right out there in the
vestibule, from the maroon silk rope-with-tassel that she'd presented it with.
And that's YOUR heritage. Ain't it a fine one?
