For the afternoon I am back in my familiar surroundings where I have taught for a year and a half. The married couple who have many infirmities is there and I set everyone up with watercolors.
Then a woman with a bright plaid coat arrives. Her southern accent is comforting and I ask her where she is from. "Mississippi" she drawls and I regale her briefly with tales of my Texas past. In asking her what she wants to paint she tells me that she wants to paint a mockingbird in a magnolia tree. That's the state bird of Mississippi. She's been away from her home for over 64 years, but still has her stately drawl and the image in her heart is the state bird. I google the image on my phone and a nice image comes up, from an old print. I draw it for her and she carefully sets to work, painting the creamy fragrant leaves white with yellow overtones. I can almost smell it. She works through the feathers on the bird with care. As we all work around the table we note that she and another woman who is weaving away are both from Mississippi.
How unusual is that I think? Before long, they're exchanging stories of picking cotton and we recite our holy litany of southern food; fried chicken, cornbread, turnip greens, peach cobbler, iced tea and black eyed peas....
Its just past the New Year and I didn't eat my traditional black eyed peas after all. She tells me that for every black eyed pea you eat, it will be a dollar that you be getting. So I remain poor. But actually I'm a millionaire as I sit here with my elderly people who paint with such beauty and depth. Showing me how rich the creative spirit is and how it bypasses infirmity, how it doesn't care if memory doesn't support it anymore...how it is there curled up quietly inside the heart and soul, ready to be releashed like the butterflies I drew quickly today that were then painted by those with memory loss
later in the afternoon.
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