Helena Writes

The snow has at last melted here. Three solid days of rain, and the daffodils are bursting! In the days before I painted flowers from my garden, and also in the days before my investigation of the use of yellow grew deep enough to dazzle me, I’d take note of the daffodils I’d brought up here, from my garden on Long Island, and how they poked through the leaves first, the garden still bedraggled and delinquent...

Outside my studio window… I begin so many things I write with those words—letters to friends and family, these blog writings. And there, today, my woods are in the infancy of spring. Fine, crescent-shaped young leaves, yellow, on the witch hazel bushes, the scene looking lacy...

At the supermarket two weeks ago, I encountered a man. He’d knocked down a display. I couldn’t pass by with my wagon while he was picking it up. I said, “I’ll wait…it’s usually me that does that…” –very female. I am protecting his pride. He smiles. “You’re a good citizen,” I add. He says, “If you knock something over you pick it up.” A principle. A morality play. But we had connected...

When I was in kindergarten, at four years old because I had a January birthday, I met Donna Pukatch, who would become my best friend until I left Brooklyn, when my family moved to Queens. We were already bonded by the time of this recollection...

I saw one crimson maple leaf, very small, brilliant, on my driveway next to my mailbox. Last week! No! I cried. I don’t want to see you! I veiled my eyes against that gorgeous thing. It’s hard to accept that summer is waning. Everyone here feels it. People talk about it in dropped voices, low tones. It’s the bad news that supersedes the roiling of the world and its agonies...

The five of us, myself and the four writers who registered for the retreat, had dined together. We then drove to the place that would be home base for the next four days: The Lazy Pond Bed and Breakfast, in the town of Liberty, New York, where I live. Lazy Pond is just down my road, but the others had traveled from all over the country.

One of the first stories I wrote to submit to the children’s book market, and therefore, first, to the writers group, the one I’ve written about here, in these blog posts, was called, “A Long Way For Tinker.” “You can write,” one of the writers in the group told me after she’d read it. “But I don’t think this one will sell either.”

One of the things I love to paint in my long lineup Still Life paintings is a group of vintage cans I’ve accumulated—tobacco cans, powder cans, baking powder cans. I love the look of their graphics, their beautiful colors, and the way they remind me of another time: childhood...

Many years ago, my sister and I went on a house tour, a walking exploration of some of the great old houses in Oyster Bay, on Long Island, the peninsula that extends east from New York Harbor, sitting in the Great South Bay where it meets the Atlantic Ocean. The house tour was something I was less interested in than was my sister, but it was a way for us to spend time together...

The winter challenges me in this woods place where I live. Once the snows come, the fog—fogged in, iced in, or waiting for the plow to clear my driveway, the sander to free me—I am here, awaiting people I’ve come to depend on to free me. People who are so reliable they are like family. Gratitude becomes very clear to me in winter...