Skip to main content

A Maple Branch

 

When my friend Phyllis looked out a window she saw a painting.

This morning I looked out a window and saw a painting:

The leaves on a branch of the maple tree, green, filigreed,

And quivering, yes, but with the sun upon them,

 pure gold

not the whole tree, just the branch of a tree,

 reaching out in front of a forest of trees,

 an army of greens, marching in place.

Catching the occassional ray of sun,

 Moving as the breeze moves

the burnished leaves intricately cut and alive

waved to me with a tease of the breeze,

golden from a brush of the sun.

 


Phyllis painted, not the tops, nor the bottoms

 but whatever part of a tree might be captured

within the limitations of a  window frame.

It was the frame that made the picture

, the frame and the skill of the painter.

Fingers bent and twisted could hardly grasp the paintbrush,

 (Phyllis had rheumatoid arthritis).

But sense of color sharp to the end , they applied paint

to suggest wonder and surprise in the familiar.

Framed so that the ordinary became the extraordinary .

 

Phyllis seldom went out, but with her eyes

and love of the natural world

 She went out every time she passed a window.

When she could no longer walk in the woods

She moved from landscape painting to  window framed paintings

A clump of birch trees, an apple tree in full blossom,  

the striking red midriff of a fall maple,

 larger than life,

 

What does it mean: the beauty in a stippled bark,

or a maple leaf polished by sun?

How much we see when our vision is limited?

The importance of focus?

The DNA of a New England fall, or a Maine summer; i

n a selected slice, -  everything?

 

 I do not know, but I know that

When Phyllis left this world

she left to us her way of seeing,

already framed. 

 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

 Kathleen Heidi Watts, 1931-2026 ---  A lifelong learner, educator, writer, and defender of social justice and peace, Kathleen Heidi Watts died on Sunday March 15, 2026. She was 94. Heidi called her journey from this world her “last great adventure,” and that spirit most captured her enthusiasm for the unknown, and her acceptance and curiosity about the world.   Born in Chelsea, Mass. in 1931, one of two daughters to Constance and Richard Walter, Heidi lived a rich and full life, across many continents and people. She brought an optimistic spirit, a willingness to laugh at her mistakes and a strong love for the people and places she visited.  Heidi had a lifelong passion for education, starting with her first teaching job in Washington state in her early 20s, later at the Putney Central School of Vermont, the Westminister West school she helped found, and with graduate students and teachers at Antioch University. Along the way she earned degrees from Pembr...
3 comments
Read more

Welcome to my blog!

  Welcome!! On this site you will find work in progress and published work from the last fifty-five years. It is, in essence, an archive of published and unpublished work. I have tried to indicate the date each piece was first written and the date it was revised and published, either here or by some other means. This selection includes, or will include essays on education and nature, poems,  memoirs, travel logs, stories and random thoughts. There are  four  categories, including Memoirs, Nature, Nova Scotia and Travel.  My literary career began in approximately 1946, when I became the editor of our school newspaper, The Mock Turtle. It was a proper newsletter, printed on rather dingy white paper by that modern wonder, a mimeograph machine with a hand crank, which tended to go rogue and spit either ink or paper around the room. But it was a proper Newsletter with a picture of the Mock Turtle  on the masthead borrowed from Edward Tenniel, and a byline from...
Post a Comment
Read more

That first summer, June 1968

I was unprepared for the beauty of a June day on the La Have islands: old homesteads surrounded with perennials: daffodils waving bravely in a fierce wind; narcissus decorating  stone outcroppings and perfuming the air; blooming lilacs drawing in as much of the surrounding land as they could manage in a year and so slowly eating up the paths and fields around them; wood trails carpeted with  four petaled bunch berry, the white petals morphing into red berries by winter.   I was unprepared for just about everything that first summer in Nova Scotia. The previous summer we had traveled by VW bus like a mess of itinerant gypsies to stay   in my sister’s house on Bell Island. I had two small children, my English mother-in-law and an increasingly difficult case of morning sickness; Simon had a broken wrist and his arm in a cast but managed, nonetheless, to put the small sailboat   we were trailing behind the bus into the water and sail off (literally) single-hande...
3 comments
Read more