Pegasus Home Page

Current Show

Featured Artists

Classes at Pegasus

Our History

Upcoming Events

 Books for Sale

Catalog Index

Contact Pegasus Owner

Eva's Column    

Bridge at Big Pine Canyon

Big Pine falls,  North Fork

Toward Mount Montgomery

Moon and Bishop

        Eva’s Spring Column

I never stop missing my mother. When I wrote the date here—May 10—it brought back to me another May day when I was ten years old. I was a lonely child sitting in a porch hammock, trying to write a poem. 

                        It’s a beautiful May day

                        But Mother is still away….

That’s about as far as I got with the poem. The emptiness and loss I felt from her absence just would not translate from sorrow and tears in head to words so far away on paper.

            Why do we so love our parents?—no matter their weaknesses, their often incomprehensible behavior, their occasional brainless cruelties? Perhaps it’s a stupid question. I’ve not been a mother. Would I know the answer better if I’d been a mother?

            I have certainly been a daughter.

            My mother always seemed like the most beautiful person in the world to me. Her skin was fair, but her hair was raven dark, and her brown eyes were a study in passion. Men did pause in catching sight of her. I was proud to hold her hand as we walked down the streets of the medium-sized town in the Midwest where I grew up. There were tall plate glass windows in the A & P grocery store, Monkey Wards, J.C. Penney’s, and Barden’s Department Store lining the sidewalks we walked, hand in hand, and I remember how I loved seeing our reflection—ours—not hers or mine, but ours. I was so glad she was my mother.

            She was never deliberately mean to me. Her sins—if there are such things—I like to think of sins simply as errors…  Her errors, then, were simply errors of omission: things she omitted doing because the emotions teeming inside her kept her looking, sometimes, far away from me. Even when she held my hand, sometimes, her mind was looking away, often back, at memories I’d never really see, not as she did.

            Many, many years later—not long before she died—she told me one thing she may have been seeing when she stared far from me when I was the proud little girl holding her also small hand. She told me she’d had two abortions. “Two,” she said, “not just one.”

            She thought she’d be made to wander in the desert eternally for this…error. Once, when I was in my late 30’s and she was staying with me in California, I woke in the morning just in time to find her, padded in three layers of clothing, ready to open the plate glass doors of my little mobile home, about to set off into the Mojave for her punishment….

            I would talk to her about Jesus. She loved Jesus. I would say “Remember what he said on the cross, to the thief and the murderer…. ‘Today you will be with me in paradise.’”

            She never heard me when I suggested that refusing forgiveness might just be…an error….

            What is not an error is my love for her, love despite all error. Love has a way of absorbing error and sorrow and transforming them, somehow making all the love you carry yet more radiant with life and tenderness and understanding.

            Because of my mother I’ve been drawn to those who feel that they’ve made some terrible, unforgivable mistake.

My love for my mother has colored my life with the habit of repeatedly trying to transform despair into beauty. It’s hard to break a habit when it’s one you developed before you knew what a habit was….

December 2007

It Haunts Me, that song, “I’ll Be Home for Christmas”

            In all those long Wisconsin winters I don’t remember one Christmas without snow. And, yes, I remember mistletoe too—though it wasn’t important until I hit twelve or so, and became more interested in kissing. I liked kissing boys even when I was half that age, and I remember kissing a few girls then too: experimentation, I thought, learning how. My tongue always seemed to surprise little girls more than little boys. But I digress….

The presents were never on the tree, as the song requests; they were under the tree. It’s taken me 60 years to figure out that presents might be on the tree only if they are small and then probably jewelry, and expensive—and, of course, that left us out….

            “You can plan on me. I’ll be home for Christmas.”

            I’m always home for Christmas. I’m on my way there now, loving old Dickens all over again…. No, not his Christmas Carol so much as his Tale of Two Cities, for the way he began the latter: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times….” Isn’t that what we all remember?—the best and the worst? What else would we remember? It was the most mediocre of times? Let’s not be ridiculous.

Of course it’s the Best of Times when you, and I, go home for Christmas.

            The Very Best.

            In our usually-worst-of-times house, Christmas shone like the Bethlehem star over us. The old dump—we called it that—the old dump took on a radiance.

            My father gave up his throne, the raggedy armchair in the front room niche where he sat nightly, usually, next to the tall, floor-model Zenith radio and phonograph and did his logarithms with his trusty slide rule. He gave up his quiet, orderly place, and he went out with us into the slush and dragged home the sweetest-smelling, green-needled treasure we could find, and afford, so we could argue how to make it straight in the rickety metal stand, and whether or not low branches, the pokey-out ones, should be sawed off and stuck in—nailed?—somewhere higher to make the little darling from the forest more perfectly cone-esque.

            Indeed, the Best of Times. Even when I, at 10, crawled behind the spiffily decorated tree to place one last ornament, nudging the branches with my small behind…just enough to make the green-armed angel crash out of the niche, headfirst into the boxes and the midst of the family, the family members who’d just stepped back into the living room’s heart to admire one thing, finally, they’d made beautiful together…. Even then, it was the best of times: only quick frowns, no reprimands spanked me, no real sadness. I think they eventually even laughed at me, and even hugged me OK.

            Hugged. One of the few Best of times.

            I remember the light, silky feel of the curls in my father’s hair when he let me stand behind the arm of the sofa where his head rested, let me comb--as he lay admiring the re-done angel tree.

            You can plan on me…. Christmas…will find me…home….

I would stay up very late, though I was the youngest. Sometimes I could be the last, there in the dark, magic living room, only the bright reds and golds and greens and blues and whites of the tree’s jewels talking to me, smiling at me. They would sometimes fall silent, as still as the midnight-blue snow, quiet beyond the windows behind them.

            Every thing, every person, was my friend during The Best of Times, during Christmas. Stars knew my name. Even my crabby neighbors lit up at Christmas time and didn’t yell at me for having made snow angels in their yard. (Late twilight was the best time to be sure of this, the best time for lying in the fluffy new drifts, eyeing the moon, pretending to swim to God, small, jacketed back and hooded head, both icy cold and flat to Earth….)

            And there was my dog, our dog, Pal. You’ll barely be able to see him in the sparkling, rainbow-twinkling dark, him all wrapped up against me, me alone in the corner of the sofa where so recently rested my father’s shoulders and the nape of his neck, where still linger the sweet pungent tang of the curls in his hair and of his body…. 

Pal—all black, a dog we saved from the gas chamber at the pound, literally: he scratched desperately on the glass door of the small chamber built into one corner of the room, the room they allowed my two brothers and me into—not one of us over 12!—so that we could select a new buddy….

Pal. So for him, it was the Best of Times from the get-go with us…. Pal could smile and kiss, and growl and bite. But he saved the last two for grouchy visitors, and of course he, too, forgot those acts during the snow, during the mistletoe, during the late winter nights when I whispered secrets under the smooth, wavy flaps of his ears.

He’ll be home for Christmas, and so will I.

I’ll come two days early so I can be that girl again, that little girl who tried to find amazing treasures for two brothers, a sister, a father, a mother, and a dog…at the dime store. I’ll be home two days early to be that girl again, to ride that long-gone escalator to the mezzanine of Woolworth’s where the treasures lay innocent, priced at bargain rates, awaiting small, excited hands, pulled out of pockets and mittens, rubbed back to warmth so to touch treasures: a miniature deck of cards, a tiny bottle of perfume, a twisty loop and soap bubbles ready to be iridized, Life Savers (spearmint and root beer, peppermint and mixed, in tiny cardboard drawers of a silver-papered box), an Uncle Scrooge comic book, a puzzle of Mt. Rushmore, five hundred pieces, a diary with a tiny lock, a carnival glass piggy bank, miniature cups and saucers with George and Martha Washington painted on them…. Treasures….

            The Best of Times….I’ll be home for that.

You can plan on me.

And I’m planning on you, all of you. Get on up now, all of you. Rub those numb, knobby joints. Put back on your mittens. Ignore the cold, hard, frozen earth….

Get on up, up where the love light gleams.

It’s Christmas Eve.

November 2007

      I'll start my column by talking about one of the pictures above which I took in the High Sierra around Bishop during the last year. I hope you'll feel free to respond to me by email after reading the monthly column....

Why does one take a picture of one place and not another?

Because one loves that place.

Why does one love a place?

I love certain places because their memory brings glorious—yes, glorious—pictures into my mind. That rushing water under the bridge in Big Pine Canyon…that sings to me. All the water—the crashing, white, ecstatic droplets come alive in my mind. They are an effervescence of memory. I taste the sound, the white-out inside a golden, early fall day; the people I’ve met on that bridge come back to me…so clearly, as if I can touch them.

Once there, in early September, I ran into a musician-friend, Germaine, celebrating her birthday, walking with her mother. The place, the bridge, the shining, splashing water: they all bring back to me my friend’s face, smiling, happy in the memory of birth; they bring back to me how a child might—despite any  pain of shared life, and there’d been pain between Germaine and her mother, I knew—how a child might rejoice in her life with the woman who’d given it to her, no matter what else the gift wrought….

Ah…a certain place can mean life to me, accepted, cherish, relished, no matter any and every turmoil….

The Big Pine Canyon bridge…  Another year, longer in the past…after a winter of fierce snows in the High Sierra, so fierce an avalanche had buried cabins above Palisade Glacier Lodge, broken roofs, collapsed  ceilings. That summer, the summer after, I’d taken my writing class for its final session to the yard of one of those rebuilt cabins. The day we came—eight or ten of us with pens and paper and poems in our hearts—to sit inside the big quiet, the reestablished serenity—why it was gold sunlight and warmth everywhere, the smell of tall pines and a sky so blue you’d think Earth never knew winter, ever, never knew blizzards, or avalanches, or the great imagined din of whiteness burying such an idyllic eden….

There is one spot on the zig-zag trail after you cross the crashing waters and the bridge, one spot my husband and I always stopped in. That spot is a kind of cave of aspens, their trunks and branches, their arms and legs and graceful elongated hands pulling in a shadowed hiding place, so that their torso became a warm little womb where you could enter into rest and complete safety, where you could curl up in the tender quiet, and kiss….

Ah. And the bridge reminds me of the days when there was no bridge, or when I was unaware of whether or not there was such a bridge—maybe thirty years ago, before the one big avalanche of my lifetime, when one could clamber into a little jitney-like bus with a backpack early on an August morning—perfect in light and anticipation of beauty—and the little bus would cough and chug and jerk its way up what later became the path of the avalanche, pulled its little way up, up the valley toward the splitting of the fork, and you could be carted up into the wide meadow of the North Forth—the wide meadow below the bigger, higher waterfall making you think Yes, I can climb past that, I can climb to Lon Cheney’s  cabin, and beyond, to the chain of the Big Pine Lakes….

I first saw those Lakes when I was about 36 years old. An old lover had decided we should take the rickety jitney up to the North Forth trailhead—after a Friday night at the Glacier Lodge. In those days you could get Friday dinner, a room, breakfast, and the jitney to the beginning of you hike—all for some now-unbelievable weekend package price, like $35 a couple. Anyway…

The Big Pine Canyon bridge, the weekend package deal, the giddy, bumpy, stuffy ride in the back of the little jit…and the stupidly painful climb straight UP to Black Lake, the wrong choice on the loop of the Lakes, going UP to Black Lake, instead of going up to First Lake and around and then DOWN past Black Lake. No. Error: UP. Up to camp with mosquitoes near their haven of stagnant, sad waters: the definitely black waters of Black Lake, that year….

But oh at last! letting the weight of the pack slip from my shoulders, releasing all, all but the vision below, standing tall, standing high above Fourth Lake, watching the clear waters slide around the sides of a slender peninsula, looking down,down: again, water! water! all dressed in green and sunlight….

Oh that Big Pine Canyon bridge opens in my mind the expanse of beauty forever available everywhere in the High Sierra.

One walks with God in such a place, in a loved place.