Last week I spent several days visiting my father in central New York State, where I grew up. He lives in a different town now, but I was staying at the house he and my mother built when I was young, mostly with their own hands, on a small lake. It was extremely quiet there, unlike the busy city where I now live. We went to sleep to the sound of bullfrogs, and woke up to songbirds at dawn. Wild rabbits grazed on the clover-filled lawn, and the woodchucks and chipmunks and squirrels paid no attention to us. I saw birds I haven't seen for a long time, like flickers, orioles, and a scarlet tanager, and whenever we drove through the fields and pastures of the surrounding area, we saw deer. At night, countless fireflies illuminated the edges of the woods, and crawled on our shirts like tiny, living flashlights.
Every day I walked along the shore, watching the fish in the still edges of the water, making a mental note of the plants in bloom. I was both in the present moment, and remembering being in these exact places at different stages of my life, alone or with people who are now gone or far away. There's a stone wall that my father built along the shoreline, and one place in particular where I always liked to sit. I thought about fishing there with my mother, and swimming with friends and cousins; I saw myself at seventeen, filled with romantic dreams, waiting for my boyfriend to come driving around the lake to see me late at night. I thought of standing in that spot throwing stones out into the water, as far as I could, the day we buried my grandfather.
The lake was impassive, reflecting my memories back to me, and also insisting that I notice what was going on right then. A catbird hopped in the the trees behind me; a chipmunk chattered. Large fish broke the surface farther out. Ducks flew low, quacking. And I saw the reflections of swallows in the water before I raised my eyes to follow them in the sky, flying at dusk just the way they always have.
I had brought my sketchbook and watercolors, and I did several drawings inside the house, which has remained almost exactly the same way it was when my parents lived there. We'd stopped at a farmer's market outside Utica and bought some fresh peas in the pod to shell -- we ate all of them raw. I'd also picked some crown vetch, which is in the pea family, and put it in one of my mother's Wedgwood vases, so the drawing became a sort of ode to legumes.
After returning home this week, I did the two small watercolor sketches of the shore. I don't know why exactly, except that I enjoyed trying to capture the delicate quality of the evening light and the stillness of the water, and perhaps it was my way of staying there a little longer. I don't think I've felt like I had the skill before to tackle this particular subject in watercolor, but the practice over the past couple of months has helped. I'm happy now to have these paintings in my sketchbook -- they take me back instantly to the place and its emotional feeling in a way a photograph somehow can't -- and maybe they'll be a step toward something else.
That's the challenge with subjects to which we're somehow attached. We may want very much to draw or paint them, or write about them, but because of the familiarity as well as the emotional charge, whatever we do may always seem to fall short of the mark. But as we make those attempts, over time, they also reveal a lot about ourselves: think of Van Gogh's self-portraits. About thirty years ago I did an oil painting of the same basic view of the lake as the second watercolor; it now hangs in my parents' house. It's detailed, accurate and well-painted. Most people would probably prefer it, and when I did it I was pretty pleased. Now, not so much. These little watercolors come much closer to the feeling I have when I'm actually there, and if I pursued that even further, maybe I could come even closer. The difference between the two has less to do with skill, and more with years of living. The place may be much the same, but I'm not the same person I was then.