the PDF of her book - National Aphasia Association

Tales from the Other Side of Language 67
unaware of anyone or the studio. A voice accosts my brooding, and I pull
my face around to the sound. A young, sweet-faced student looks up at me,
disbelief and curiosity in her eyes,
“Are these really your feelings?”
I look down toward her as if miles of ether wobble the air between us. I
can’t speak anything to her chaste look. She knows nothing about such grief,
and I have no way in the vast distance between us, and in the bedlam in my
heart, to tell her anything in words just now.
I want to hang the trio on the wall in my office, but I’ve made the clay
too thick, bulky. It won’t hang anywhere, even on the side of my garage. I
find a place for it in the bottom of my garden, hidden under a bushy, redtwig
dogwood.
Leigh and I take many classes together, enormously enjoying each
other’s zest in quietly rowdying up students and teachers. We are having a
quiet tea together one Saturday in my apartment. Nothing is ever quiet with
Leigh, and we get high on enthusiasm. Suddenly I say, “You paint one way,
and I, totally differently. What do you think what would happen if we painted
together on the same piece of paper—an experiment?”
“Awesome!” she says. “But not at the same time. You start one, give it
to me, we’ll go back and forth with it, and see what happens.”
I start in my studio with a swash blue-scarlet color, an arc on large,
rough, half-elephant size watercolor paper, a starting gesture. I hand it off to
her and wait. In her studio she adds a jaunty house and a long, fragile ladder
up the side. I add, she adds, and we pass it back and forth in a dance with it.
She uses contained symbols: arrows, stop signs, house forms, and ladders. I
use brash gestural strokes with my abstracted bits of flower forms.
I get mad when she paints over everything I’ve done. Her painting is
like archeology, layers and layers heaped on one another. I want fresh bits
of paper left.
The colors in the paintings we make are bright, in motion, alive. A white
tower sits at a precarious angle in a swirl of black, green, and red. Its top is
crowned in golden yellows with arcs of white and black arrows whizzing