A reflection from Dec. 2023, Building Three Coffee Holiday Sale, Colorado Springs:
I recently finished reading Norman Maclean’s novella A River Runs through It. The forested mountains and rushing waters of western Montana surround the family whose story is told: Two brothers play in the woods. Their father teaches them how to fly fish after his sermons on Sundays. They grow older. The youngest brother strays. The mother hopes. The father wonders. And the oldest brother–the narrator–watches it all unfold. As the story progresses, it is the river which frames each conversation and event, ones that are both painful and beautiful. The place becomes its own character, shaping and illuminating the very souls who inhabit it.
“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it,” Maclean famously writes in the final pages. “The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.”
I marvel at what Maclean can capture with words. Maybe I can follow his example in another form–in the pages of my sketchbook.
The sampling of pen drawings and prints on this table represent places of significance to me from winters both past and present. Each place carries with it the memory of the people I was with, a conversation, or some thought that was born or reckoned with in solitude. Some of Maclean’s descriptions of Montana actually remind me of where I grew up in Idaho. If I close my eyes, I’m back walking along the frosted sagebrush in the rolling foothills with my dad. My mom sticks cloves in an orange and I dress up like a shepherd with my sister. We sing “Silent Night” by candlelight and make hand shadows against the wall. We grow older. My sister moves away. I move away. The smell of pine and sea salt and mulled wine fills a warm, stone chapel. The last of the aspen leaves fall, and they turn from gold to brown. The new slowly becomes the familiar. Loved ones die. The sunrise turns pink. A friend asks, “So you’re liking Colorado, huh?”
Drawing helps me remember. - MZ
