Painting Grandma

Painting Grandma

Like curls of bean tendrils, memories twist green
from the old, sepia-dark photo.  It hangs crooked, clipped
to the easel, small, faded and bent at the edges. Forgotten
dreams creep into my painting, a third thing, not the memories
or the photo, but an awkward merging.  Brushed in first,
flat-bottomed brown clouds sail through a sea of brown sky,
bearing tumbles of white cotton candy.  I borrowed them
from the photo, too poignant in brown to paint in blue. 
Tall pole beans wind around rows of poles and pile
one onto the next over mounds of cloud, sepia brown
on the bottoms and gradually greening toward the top. 
I paint a woman between the rows, roundish, wearing an apron
pink  with red flowers over a faded blue housedress.
I paint her square face tea-stained brown, leathery and wrinkled
as a shed layer of sycamore bark.  The old photo invades
my dimming memories, but she is still the brightest
point in the painting.  Her thin grey-black braids wind 
around her head and she reaches with heavy arms to pluck beans
from the plants I paint before her.  The tips of their leave overlap
her reproachful face. I remember the smile that stern face
always turned toward me and I smile toward the dark visage.
"Don't," she warms my father, "Point that camera at me."
Through the shining and iridescent lens in my father's hands,
she cannot see the granddaughter who holds the brush
that traces the sun edged clouds, shape of her face,
the bean-burgeoning apron nor see, beyond me,
the great granddaughters and great, great granddaughters
who touch her still-damp face across five generations.
 

Mary Stebbins Taitt
For Nicolina Ciaranello
090721-0856-2, 1st 090719 on back of SMM Ms in pen in car