What to Craft?

She felt compelled to pick up the pencil. When she did, she started to roll it between her fingers, noting it was her favorite kind and she hadn’t seen these for sale in the shops around home, navy and white striped with smooth writing lead, the ones you can sharpen nicely without the end breaking off.

She picked up a dozen of them and also a new journal and gummy, art eraser. She was the kind of girl, who grew up into the woman who hadn’t changed much when it comes to nice drawing supplies. She could spend hours milling about at Dot’s and Doodles and this morning she had all of the time in the world. At the counter, ready to pay, a bright box of paint markers spoke to her and she told LeRoy to add them, thinking she’d like to paint the fronts of the smooth black rocks she’d carefully picked at Indian Beach--write poem starts on the backs. She thought how she could leave these about town for people to discover and that way she wouldn’t be filling her house with more odds and ends.

Really she most enjoyed the process, not holding onto all of her creations and not expecting to sell them or be noticed for them, just that feeling of joy she got, when she was entirely focused within the colors and rounding word combinations, images arising from blank material, her mind in form to be manipulated in any direction she wanted.

“Did you hear that Mike called the company president an asshole?" he asked. Thad, walked past her into the kitchen, opening the fridge and digging around for something to eat. She didn’t answer, just kept on shaping the eye she was painting in brilliant green, slick and wet and so bright on the black background of ocean-rolled basalt, her natural canvas.

He trudged into the living room where she was sitting cross-legged at the thick maple coffee table strewn with rocks, markers, poetry books, her notebooks, glue sticks, and several magazine cut-out’s she was arranging into possible hodge-podge for her soul collages. He picked one of these dreams she’d glued down last night, an ethereal woman, her arms above her head, colors swirling behind her with a black crow, his thin legs tangled in her hair. He peered into it while he took a bite of the burrito he’d made with last nights’ pinto beans, added cilantro and cabbage, which she pointed out without speaking that he was dropping bits from the end of the white wrap onto her work.

He picked up a loose bean and the cabbage, threw them into his mouth.

“So, I’m thinking I’m just going to have to say something to Mike Monday about getting a van. The guy under me is driving one now and he hasn’t even been there as long as me! I’m tired of them pushing me around, forcing me to take the weekend on-call phone when I’ve technically got more hours. And, Mike is the real asshole because the president believes all of his crap.”

“MMMMhhhhmmm,” she responds, as she places the cap back on the green marker and reaches for the black.

“This is the third flat tire I’ve had in two months driving my own truck onto all of these job sites, I have to pay to fix everything on my own truck and maintenance is required, clearly I’m getting shit on in this deal.”

She started to say something, but he just as quickly interrupted her and kept on about the new guy and Mike and how he was sick of being jerked around and overlooked and he was too good for this place and couldn’t wait until the apprenticeship was over and he was soon going to start his own business and be the one taking jobs away from them.

He wiped his hands on his pants after taking the last big bite of his burrito and picked up the blue marker, started to form the outlines of what must be clouds in the sky she thought. His shading and ability to paint far surpassed her own and she knew that was really his nature, not to become a plumber. But, you can’t tell young people what to do, for now, he was more driven by some part of himself that wanted dearly to fit in with the good old boys of the town. He being a kid whose father was essentially absent, was now a young man struggling to make some mark in the world.

She’d often enough encouraged him to continue on to art school where his theatrics and creative thinking would be applauded rather than him being dubbed the “intellectual type,” as he hauled up one hundred and twenty-two toilets at the new apartment complex on the water. His two-year, general education paid for entirely by winning a full-ride art scholarship and then him taking almost entirely math classes while he attended, trying to fit some formula of male acceptance he carried in his head.

He finished the scene on his rock and set it down. Picked up one of hers and noticed she’d been writing on the backs, she offered how much fun she’d had leaving them about town. He smiled, picked up his rock and the black pen, “Well, I’m going to write a message to Mike, all right! And, throw it in the cab of his truck!”

Photo: The collage is mine, based on a dream of a crow landing on my head, his hands catching in my hair