One September afternoon after I’d moved from England to Alabama, I saw the shadows of leaves dancing on a whitewashed shed. I cried with happiness. I loved England, but not it’s overcast days.
Years later, my wife Judy and I built a house in North Carolina with stucco walls like blotting paper for shadows. When I wake in this house, I see images of leaves on the curtains. Moonlight casts shadows onto the living room floor. A prayer and a benediction.
A shadow cast by the sun is a diary, moving slightly every 24 hours. Drawing this is a quiet moment against the distractions of daily life.
The light from the sun traveled 93 million miles to make these shadows. The least I can do, faced with such wonder, is to draw them.
“One of my grandfathers died of a clump of Iris stylosa,” wrote Beverly Nichols, the British gardener and playwright. “It enticed him from a sickbed on an angry evening in January, luring him through the snowdrifts with its blue silver flames; he died of double pneumonia a few days later. It was probably worth it.”
I thought of Grandfather Nichols recently when a pink crinum, usually a late summer flower, decided unexpectedly to bloom in mid-December. I trudged out to see it, not in a snowdrift but in my frost-withered garden. There it was in the pale December sunlight, a frail and slender lily that chose to fling its pink star into the night.
After nine months of fear and darkness, it seemed like hope.
From the airplane window, I glimpsed a small airport terminal in Cozumel, Quintana Roo, Mexico. It was painted in bright colors. The jacaranda trees were blooming and a mother was selling tortillas in the open breezeway.
I wanted to get off the plane and start my life over.
How is it that a small detail can change the way we live? What does a painted airport tell us about a country, and even about ourselves?
In Mexico everything matters, my wife Judy said. “The stones in the street, the fruit placed on a market stand, the geometric pattern on the dress of a tortilla seller. It’s all esthetic.”
Moreover, this esthetic wasted little and honored much. After seeing toy animals made of soda cans, eggshells turned into flowers, and an ordinary philodendron growing on a wall in a reused jar, I slowly realized that the extraordinary could be made from the ordinary.
When I looked out of that airplane window 30 years ago, our children were in school and Judy was becoming a landscape architect. We wouldn’t get off.
