Ponderosa

“What do ya think?” she asked.

“It’s a canvas,” I said.

“What do ya think it’s of?”

“A white canvas?”

“Yeah. But it’s also a canvas with every color reflecting at once. It’s everything, and it’s nothing.” She paused. A long pause. “Or, ya know, an albino cow in a blizzard.” And when she saw that I was laughing, her straight, deadpan face broke with mine into a smile and then a giggle, building like the steady pattering start of a rainstorm. And when she finally laughed, she snorted.

She pulled me by the hand around the small entry room of her apartment and showed me every single painting. A few were by artists I knew of, most were by her students, and some were her own. She showed me a painting of herself that her student, Carson, painted for her. She fixated on the painting, her tongue peeking out of the right side of her mouth like a child focused on learning to ride a bicycle. “He got the proportions of a face right for the first time in this painting,” she told me. “And look,” she said, pointing to a rather unflattering, large brown spot painted on the center of her nose, “he even captured my freckle.” She turned to me and pointed to what in real life was a tiny spot. “It’s in the exact center of my nose. I measured for him.” Each of her own paintings were signed with her first and middle initials in an orange the color of Garfield’s fur. “A.A.” Amalie, after a mathematician who was a major contributor to abstract algebra, and Amber, even though her eyes were the green of ponderosa pine needles. She smelled like ponderosas too when I breathed in the scent of her blonde hair, all vanilla and butterscotch.

I could get on board with albino cows, I thought, and pulled her in close to my chest.