She stood there with her eyes closed; face slightly upwards towards the sky. “I’m listening to the wind.”
I grew up in the sunny Southwest with watermelon pink mountains and never ending blue skies. My brother and I would spend hours playing outside, from sunrise to sunset. On the weekends my grandma would take us to interesting places like cluttered trinket stores downtown and the city art museum. We would wander around the college campus, running through the concrete walls that form the “Center of the Universe” sculpture and feed bread pieces to the ducks while playing on the rocks of the not so cleverly named Duck Pond.
When we weren’t exploring the city, we spent our days at her house making up games and playing with random odds and ends like my aunt’s old horse back riding equipment. Most afternoons, my grandma would set me up at her round kitchen table with water, paints and a big pad of paper. Unlike most grandma type kitchens, her kitchen never smelled like baking cookies or warm bread, but rather the rich scent of potting soil. My grandma has the greenest of thumbs and can bring any dying plant back to life. When sitting at her table, under the wall of white shutter covered windows, plants of all shapes and sizes surround you. I would sit there for hours in the warm sunlight, surrounded by green, painting swirls and strokes of different colors across the thick, white water color paper. When I would finish a painting, my grandma would hang it on the walls right next to all the artwork she had done as a young college student. Later in the afternoon, when my brother and I would lay down to rest, my grandma would tell us story after story about growing up in New York City. She could tell stories so detailed they would paint the most vivid images in my mind. Her stories would span from being a young child playing with her cousins, to the years she spent modeling as a young adult.
In college, my grandma studied photography at the same fine arts program as I got my degree. When my brother and I learned she still had the entire set of equipment to develop photographs stuffed away in boxes in the garage, we convinced her to let us transform her laundry room into a fully functioning darkroom. She taught us how to use the enlarger and how to correctly move the photographs through the different steps of chemicals to reveal black and white photographs at the end. My whole life, my grandma has always wanted to photograph the moon. When I was younger, we would stand on the street corner and watch it rise over the mountain. “Look Erin, look! It’s going to be huge!” Sometimes her excitement of a full moon peaking over the very top of the mountain would be so great, she would scare me from looking at it.
My grandma has always been in awe of the beauty around us. She has always loved the sky and the clouds and the desert landscape of New Mexico. My grandma taught me how to find the beauty in every life and how to notice the small, but beautiful details. I learned to be creative from my grandma, how to see the world differently and how to always appreciate the rich life that surrounds us.
This is a continuation of a story telling exercise we did with the founder of BDW, David Slayden. Here is his recent article on what we, Cohort 7, need to be thinking about as we near graduation and enter into our careers.
