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Elizabeth Hunter
Big Butterfly Day
Simple drawings have come to be a way to recognize what each day affords.
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Elizabeth Hunter
Garden Paths
Simple drawings have come to be a way to recognize what each day affords.
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Elizabeth Hunter
Three Chipping Sparrows
Simple drawings have come to be a way to recognize what each day affords.
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Elizabeth Hunter
Bandana Expedition
Simple drawings have come to be a way to recognize what each day affords.
Back in 1995, when this magazine was seven years old and I was approaching 50, I wrote a column entitled, “The Gift of Days.” What I said struck a chord with many readers; we got a lot of mail in response. I just re-read the column and – unsurprisingly – agree with the gist of it: that what we can acquire with money (faster cars and computers, clearer TVs; this was before we all also had to have smartphones, iPods, iPads and the zillion other 21st-century bare necessities of life) is poor exchange for the time we devote to making money to buy those things.
But there was one thing I wrote that brought me up short. After listing a number of things we value that, no matter how much money we make, we can’t count on obtaining – “abiding love, children who turn out well, respect of peers, and a home we love” – I said the one valuable thing we could count on was “the gift of days.”
How’s that again?
Two years ago, my brother Graham, two years my junior, didn’t wake up one morning. Nothing brought the fact that my days are finite home to me quite like his death. And yet, the farther I get from March 24, 2011, the easier it has been for me to forget to embrace the particular day I’m living in, and to look for its particular gift.
Just before Christmas last year, I undertook a project aimed at rectifying this oversight. At other times, I’d created a file on my computer I’d attempted to visit every day, to list that day’s gift, but my efforts had always petered out. This time, I tried a different tack: I made myself a little book with enough pages to get me from December 23 to March 31 if I allotted each day a page. I color-coded the pages (blue for December, tan for January, pale blue for February, light green for March), and numbered them in pencil. My idea was to identify each day’s gift, and do a drawing to illustrate it.
I assigned myself a drawing rather than a written notation for a couple of reasons. For one, I’ve been keeping a journal for years – I have a whole shelf of them – and I have never had the least desire to reread anything I’ve written in them. (Whenever I have taken one down and tried to get myself to read it, I’ve been bored by its banality, and quickly returned it to the shelf.) The only thing about the journals that remains interesting to me are the things I’ve pasted in – a poem I liked from Writer’s Almanac, a photo I’ve taken, a card from a friend. But I didn’t want to make a scrapbook. I’d tried that too, and lost interest. I did, however, want to make myself draw regularly. Drawing is something I’d done a fair amount of in my young middle age, and acquired a certain proficiency. But somehow it always fell to the bottom of my priority list, whenever I got busy (and sometimes even when I wasn’t). Could I make my Gift of Days book address both my lack of attention to each day’s gift and my seeming inability to draw regularly? I knew I would fall behind on the drawings when I was busy, so I made a rule: at least identify and write down each day’s gift. Catch up on the drawings when I had time to do it.
In the four months that I’ve kept this up I’ve fallen as many as 10 days behind on the drawings. But I still managed to keep the list current, and devoted one soggy, dreary February weekend to catching up on the drawings. Not wanting to do that again, I set aside time now when a few days elapse without drawing. Usually I draw at my kitchen counter. I’ve had to overcome other little barriers, not the least of which was not to let a bad drawing (or a major mistake in an otherwise acceptable drawing) derail me. I’ve learned that a bad drawing, as the drawings accumulate, recedes into insignificance, just the way all but the worst bad days do, as life continues. I feel a lot freer now, when I pick up my pencil, to just go ahead and try something. I linger over some drawings – I’ve worked on a few for hours – but most are completed in less than an hour, some in a few minutes.
Most day’s gifts are simple: a full moon in a black sky on Jan. 27; snowdrops blooming in the yard on Feb. 13; setting out vegetable seedlings on St. Patrick’s Day. On March 19, seeing the female red-bellied woodpecker who had come alone to the deck for sunflower seed all winter followed by a handsome suitor. On March 27, “bright green grass emerging from snow – spring peeking through.” On April 8, my first big butterfly day; on the 16th, a male ruby-throated hummingbird at my feeder. Some involve companions, human and otherwise: lunch with friends; friends helping out with house renovations. Our community’s Bandana Club get-togethers: a night of music at Joan and Roy’s, a potluck at the community center, an expedition to a flea market. On April 13, I welcomed the reappearance of the black snake who resides in my garden shed; the next day I enjoyed time spent with my friend Judy cleaning up the Orchard’s butterfly garden.
There are days that contain so many gifts I have trouble deciding which one to illustrate. My February 5 walk yielded “an embarrassment of riches: frog chorus (excited chatter), two frogs up from the mud, salamanders, and frogs’ eggs! Overhead: three circling redtails, one turkey vulture.” My drawing was of the little pond I like to stop by at. It’s a lousy drawing, but looking at it my heart remembers how it leapt when I saw the gelatinous clumps of eggs. Spring was coming!
Discovering some days’ gifts isn’t easy. What’s to celebrate (or draw) on what feels like the 40th consecutive drizzly, gray winter day? What’s the gift on the anniversary of Graham’s death, or the day I had to have my cat Fiona euthanized? I found I didn’t want to gloss over those bone-deep sorrows, but to honor those who’d run out of their gift of days. My drawing for March 20: a portrait of Fiona based on a photo I’d taken of her two weeks earlier, when I had no inkling I’d soon lose her. (I had to skip that page for a week or two, so I could bear looking at the photograph long enough to make the portrait accurate. It took hours and it made me weepy. But it also made me laugh, thinking about our difference of opinion as to whether my life’s work involved letting her onto the back porch, and a few minutes later, letting her back in.) For March 24th, I drew the way I imagined Graham’s gravestone would look in the snow, from my memory of the spring afternoon we buried his ashes. The gift? “All the years shared.”
An unexpected dividend of the project is the pleasure I take in deciding how to represent each day’s gift. I don’t try to make two facing drawings work together. If their styles are wildly different, well, so are a 70-degree day followed by a snowstorm. I now appreciate how hard it is to draw birds, even with field guide illustrations for reference, and how fun it is to draw maps. I’m heartened to have filled the first of the year’s books, and be nearly a third of the way through the second. Can I keep it up? I don’t know. But I do know that it’s all been worth it. Because, unlike those written journals, I like looking back through these little books, at the gifts each day has afforded me. They’re no less valuable for being utterly ordinary.