Who hung the four-by-five-foot, white-against- white framed bulletin board on the east wall of our bedroom? Part of my modest 4-H home improvement project; Mother’s wise choice even before that? I can’t remember. But by the time we refurbished our Ash Street bedroom, Sonja was high school freshman studious, already growing into bra sizes I wouldn’t reach until my forties. I was only a day-dreamy grade-schooler and could claim the bulletin board. The first canvas I filled with what I loved.
In my imagination, I was teacher, graphic designer, writer, the genius behind every “Ideals Magazine.” Every couple weeks, I’d rearrange the board, give it a new theme. Choose new images from Mother’s old “idea box.” It lived under my side of the bed and held muted prints of the masters, Art Deco designs, pastoral landscapes and stormy seascapes, stylized calendar paintings, and 20s dress patterns all harvested from craft magazines. Mother’s prompts to inspire her art and English classes. I’d comb my dad’s pocket appointment books for the wise sayings meant to increase his productivity. Troll for quotations in old church bulletins and Reader’s Digest “Points to Ponder.” Hunt down sunset-framed grain elevators and sunrise Flint Hills fields from Kansas magazines. Purloin copies of Life from generous friends. And then—heart in my throat—pin and re-pin the images and words into a new bulletin board tableau.
It was an early passion: clipping and pasting the beauty that the world just sent free and fulsome into my life. And it remained. All these years, I’ve spent hours saving magazine pages and postcards and poems that bring me joy and courage —and then looking for ways to place them in my line of sight. I moved on from the bulletin board on Ash Street to dorm room models and from there to a succession of kitchen doors and refrigerators. And in my Montana years, to dime store notebooks and sketch pads in which I’ve taped a thousand articles and pictures and recipes and essays and blocks of color and greeting cards that I could not consign to recycling.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve trusted that loveliness defines this life and that words change us. Forever certain that a wall or a notebook of wise sayings and gorgeous art—would this time, this time without fail, switch the steel wheels of my life over to a new line, to one going to a better destination – to a sunnier, disciplined way to live in the world. Surely, I am forever one inspiring image, one lovely line of prose curved around the corner from becoming a new person, kinder, more cheerful, braver, harder working, more creative.
Sentimentality? Naivete? Immaturity? For sure in the early years, my choices angled toward mid-century uplifting: Dale Carnegie and Walt Whitman. Social historians might gauge the times and my temperament against those preferences. But over the long haul, I’ve no apologies. Trite? Not, I think, measured against years of sturdy work, real friendships. Not, I think, to the exclusion of agonizing over children dying from hunger and men from hopelessness or kittens from searingly unthinkable torture. I wouldn’t trade joy for cynicism and despair. I wouldn’t turn the spin and color of those pages and cork into shadow. I feel surrounded still by breathing exotic worlds, wonder, wings to my imagination.
I live, though, with the question of what happens as I exchange my scraps of beauty and scotch tape for a keyboard, write life rather than pin it down. ©
