For Daughter’s Gifts, Part I, click here.
For Daughter’s Gifts, Part II, click here.
Daughter’s Gifts, Part III
On the wall above my bed hanging two inches from the ceiling is a painting my daughter made when she was eleven. She wanted to work big, and asked for paper from the big six-foot roll I kept behind my bedroom door. As I cut off a length, I handled the box cutter blade with some haste which made my line wonky. When I stapled it to her drawing board, the uneven edge trailed off and down so that the bottom right corner resembled the protruding tip of a giant cartoon word bubble.
She began to work right of center painting small black circles. Her circular strokes of black paint created islands of white, small light dots surrounded by darkness. After she had laid down about a dozen dots she turned to the between spaces, filling them with black. Stars coming to life in a patch of night sky.
She paused, then rinsed out her brush and squeezed a dollop of white paint onto her palette. As she dabbed white into the interstellar space the stars began to multiply by the dozens. After several minutes, she stepped back and beheld her work — a black splotch filled with stars floating on the right side of the almost rectangle. She reloaded her brush with white. In the upper right hand corner, she hung a crescent moon.
She needed a bigger brush now. We headed to the art store and purchased a cheap house painting brush and another bottle of black paint. Back home, she began to fill the unstarred white space with broad black strokes. Then, seeing the scale of her task and making a quick change of course, the stars began began to disappear. With a few broad strokes, she had eclipsed them all. The darkness was bigger than her now and growing larger, an expanding black cloud overtaking the white, advancing on the edges of the paper in broad swaths. It seemed to envelop her. The stars were gone. Only the sliver of moon remained.
I watch her work but I pretend not to. I spy from the hallway, from the kitchen, from the corner of my eye, snapping pictures surreptitiously. These days, my interest in her artistic expressions is most unwelcome, even disruptive. I watch her work but have learned to leave her alone and enjoy my happiness in private. I have a friend who said daughters go away from their fathers around age ten and come back about ten years later. I hope it isn’t entirely true.
The next day she picks up the smaller brush again. Against the field of black, she lays down a new cluster of stars — not small dots this time, but much larger shapes with radiating points. One, two, three, four, five, and more and more until the field glitters with punches of white paint which now appear slightly yellow against the black. Each star is a solid form, thick and goopy with four, five, six or eight arms fanning outward, reaching for one another. Along the uneven bottom edge, she returns with the house painting brush and swoops in with bold strokes of light blue in a series of spiraling and overlapping curlicues. Maybe waves. Maybe wind. Maybe something else.
Recently, she picked two leaves from the flowering bush outside our front door and scotch taped them to my bedroom ceiling. She installed them directly above my pillow so that when I lay on my back the leaves are in my direct line of sight. Below them she stuck a line of seven small, two-inch tall post-in notes, each with a single letter written in thick blue marker spelling out the word L-E-A-V-E-S, followed by an arrow pointing back to the leaves like a punctuation mark.
Post-it adhesive alone wouldn’t hold, so she reinforced her work with small loops of scotch tape on the back of each paper. Weeks later, the leaves and the post-its were curling at their edges, but the tape held.
Looking up from this position, the painting is upside down so that the top section of night sky stretches across the upper portion of my field of view. On the ceiling below, the leaves and notes are unmoored, floating in a field of white as though they had just shaken loose and had fallen from the sky, hovering in an empty and vast sea, untethered and free.
This was so lovely. It was the bit of writing I really, really needed tonight.