Truth Telling

I was looking over the girls’ school work from the year, and found this, drawn and written by Harper:

That’s quite a valley Harper’s headed towards, don’t you think? Here’s what our alleyway looks like:

I’m going to argue though, that Harper is attending to truth in her picture.  The slant she drew might not be accurate, but looking at it, I think a person might understand (and maybe even feel) fear. The truth Harper is revealing here is that she was afraid to ride her bike because there is a dip in the road at one point that she can feel. It makes her stomach flutter and her bike speed up. The other truth Harper shows here is that she did it. She pedaled down the road, again and again until the sun set and dusk settled and we said it was time to read Harry Potter and go to bed. And she smiled as she is smiling in the picture.  In fact, if she were standing next to you explaining the picture she’d tell you she had to swallow laughter because she was having so much fun and didn’t want to stop having fun for a laugh. That’s her phrase, swallowing laughter.

Over the weekend, I weathered our dining room chairs.

While I worked, Harper checked in on our tomatoes,

and picked a strawberry.

She helped Hadley go worm-hunting,

but came back to the garage because, “Mommy, I don’t think worm hunting is such a good idea. Remember when we saw that anaconda in a little glass case at the zoo? He has nobody to play with and nowhere to go. That worm Hadley just dug up had this whole field to play in and now he’s in a little red bucket.”

I nodded and said that’s a pretty good point, then suggested she help me sand the chairs.

While we worked, Harper said she remembered when I painted these chairs the first time. “We were coming home from the zoo and we walked past a store and saw a beautiful turquoise chair, and you said, ‘I love that chair,’ and the next thing I knew you were on the deck painting all our chairs that same color.”

She sanded for a while then said, “That one chair in that store totally inspired you!”

Harper is right, I was inspired by that chair the three of us saw in a window of Crate and Barrel. We were on our way to the zoo, and stopped for coffee, and I decided while we walked around and looked at the anacondas (because we always go to the reptile house), that I would paint those chairs; not just because I wanted a Crate and Barrel look alike, but because I needed something to take my mind off Desiderius Erasmus’ In Praise of Folly. I needed to distract myself from how badly I felt that I didn’t understand a word of what that man was writing about. I needed to take my mind off of how afraid I was to go back to Santa Fe.

I wish I could explain how much I loved and feared those residencies. I wonder if it’s a little how Harper felt riding in the alleyway. I remember watching her the first time she decided she didn’t need to walk her bike down the slant. She stood for a long time at one end and yelled to me, “Mommy, I’m scared. There’s a dip, Mommy. I don’t want to fall,” but she stayed on her bike – one foot on a pedal and one tiptoed and ready to push off on the ground – as she said it.  I told her I knew about the dip. I told her I knew her stomach would lift and her bike would go fast. I told her I knew she was afraid. And after awhile, she pushed herself from the curb and pedaled toward the dip; swallowing laughter and flying full speed towards fear.