Legacy XI: From Her to Me and Back Again

Almost the New Year, and I am thrilled that D Smith Kaich Jones is at the Magpie's Fancy to share an extraordinary post.  It just seems right that she's the next writer for the Legacy Series, and the one to help wrap up 2010.  There's a quote from Katherine Mansfield that's been running through my head all morning: "The more you are motivated by love, the more fearless and free your actions will be."  This describes how I feel when I read the posts of this gifted photographer, painter, and writer.  Her blog, Emma Tree, is a touchstone for me and for many other bloggers.  It's a joy to welcome her here today.




First – to Gigi - thank you.  For including me in your wonderful Legacy series, and for making me realize a few truths about myself, all good, including the fact, that I do, indeed have something to leave behind.

“There was once a fan”, she told me, “that blew magic instead of air . . .”   She was four, and I was enchanted, and it was a long time ago, on a hot Texas summer afternoon.  We were spread across the floor of my mother’s living room, playing games, aunt and niece, she, cousinless on my side of the family, forced to endure as playmates us grownups, I more than willing to be a child again.

She was a born storyteller, a conjurer of magic and witches, and she believed - once upon an Easter time, upon being told we thought we’d spied the Easter Bunny hopping across the backyard, that perhaps he’d left an egg or a basket, she asked if he was white and was he wearing a vest? -  because that’s how the real Easter Bunny dressed; her eyes lit when I told her yes.  She knew.  She believed.

And so the day of the story.  That hot day, the fan blowing air in lazy semicircles back and forth across the room, she weaving a spell with words, spinning yet another of her tales.  I don’t recall the details beyond that opening line . . . “there was once a fan that blew magic instead of air . . .”   What I recall is thinking this will end.  She will grow up and she will lose this just like the rest of us lose it.  The magic will fall away from her; never mind that it is still out there, she will grow up and the workaday world will take her away and she will lose it.

I have a degree in photography and almost an MFA and have been writing for as long as I can remember.  I help run a small business and when you are exhausted and the clock moves too swiftly, it is hard to find the magic.  You live paycheck to paycheck as far as magic is concerned and you forget that it is free, that it is out there waiting for you, that it is sending signals and voice mails and you stop seeing it; you trip over it on the street and don’t even bother to look down to see what caught you.  That is where I lived when she told me her story, and my heart broke when I realized that someday, she, too, would maybe, possibly, live in the same place.

And so a painting came to me, as paintings often do, just a moment of a moment, just a bit of nothingness, a hand held out to catch magic.  An open palm and magic falling from the sky.  I found the time to paint it and called it When Emma Still Believed in Magic, and told no one about it, I just propped it against the wall and went on about my workaday life.  But I was ruined – she’d reawakened within me that desire to run out into that falling everyday magic and play and get soaking wet, drenched by its downpour.  And the magic felt me looking its way, and worked another spell, directed me to a magazine called Artful Blogging, said look here, see this, don’t you want to ?. . .  you should try . . .

And so I did.  On a Saturday morning.  I opened with that painting.  And I told myself the blog would be about painting, but in truth and in my heart, I knew it would be about magic.  Everyday, plain ordinary magic.  That stuff that surrounds us, even in the bad times, if we but choose to look.  I showed paintings and photographs, but I mostly wrote, and almost 3 years later, I am still writing, and I am still finding the magic.  I write for you, to show you, to slow you down, to say see? isn’t that amazing?, and I write for me, to slow myself down, to make myself step out under moonlight and listen for the whoosh of owl wings, to put pen to paper or fingers to computer keys and type out words that spell magic in languages understood by flowers and storms and little girls and grown women.

And I write for her.  She is almost 14 now and at 14 the magic has begun to slip away; it makes her laugh when I tell her tales of her childhood.  But the day will come when she is my age and she is caught in that workaday world and she will feel that there is nothing there but the going and coming and the paying of bills and there will be tiredness waiting for her at the end of the day, and maybe then she will take out my words – she will need something to read over a cup of coffee – and she will understand again.  She will remember the magic, she will realize it is waiting for her, it has been so patient.  My words will suddenly make sense.  You have to grow up a bit to become a child again.

It is all I have to give her.  My words, and that painting.