Heidi Watts

  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 ...

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...

Just ten years ago this month I sat in the audience  at  SUNY  Cortland and listened to my son, Richard, deliver the  Valedictorian's  address  to  6000 people.  I was  overwhelmed  with maternal pride,  heightened by my absolute  conviction  that  I  could  never  do  anything like that.   After all, I failed  Freshman  Speech  three  times  when  I  was  in  college  and  I  always get  collywobbles  every  time  I have  to  stand up in public. Asking a question in Town Meeting is a  rare  act  of  courage,  and  addressing  fifty entering P.D.. students · isn't easy. But learning from our children  -  and  our clients - - and our  experiences;  doing  things  we never  thought we could do - is what this talk is ab...