Seeing Things That Aren’t There (3.5 minute read)
I leaned over to inspect what I was sure was a turd on the rug in the foyer. It looked exactly like a small, hours-old gift from Pixie. As I got closer, I realized I had misinterpreted the shape of a leaf. It’s the blessing and the curse of being an artist.
I see things out of the corner of my eye. Most of the time, I think I’m seeing a bug. That probably came from having a daddy that owned a pest control company, as much as from being an artist. That is the other thing I often misinterpret a leaf for… is a roach. And because of my heritage, I know what roach shit and mouse shit look like. There is lots of small debris that looks like that. Some of the mats at my gym are old, black and crumbly. Those rubber crumbs look exactly like roach and mouse droppings.
My earliest memory of seeing shapes is the following. We lived in a new, brick house across the street from the Navy School in Athens, Georgia. I had respiratory issues and my mother ran a vaporizer in my bedroom at night. I don’t know how long this went on, but it’s a STRONG memory. I would see shapes in the vapor. That’s all I remember. I don’t know if I saw bunny rabbits or Michelangelo’s David. I just know that I saw shapes.
Growing up in the South, I remember seeing plenty of animal shapes in the kudzu that covered everything by the side of the road in the country. For a lot of years, we lived a four-hour car ride to my grandparents’ houses. This meant hours in the car, not just on the big holidays, but quite a bit throughout the year. Riding in the backseat, I looked out the window and acquainted myself with the scenery. There was a perfect giraffe outside of Athens. Kudzu grew up the guide wire of the telephone pole and created the silhouette.
My favorite roadside shape was of Toto, from the Wizard of Oz. It was up high on the rim of the canyon, on the left side, if you were driving on 84 from Bozeman to Bridger Bowl Ski Area. I attended Montana State University as a National Exchange Student my junior year of college. Winter quarter of 1981, I took snow skiing for a P.E. class. For a Southern girl who had never skied, I took to it pretty well… even though I frequently found it scared the hell out of me. Anyway, I must have been on the bus that ran from campus to Bridger when I first noticed Toto, because I didn’t dare take my eyes off the road when I was driving through that narrow, frozen canyon. Toto may have been formed by a juniper shrub, as they are evergreen and grow abundantly in the mountain west.
Going down a rabbit trail in the fuzzy part of my distant memories, I remember seeing a pretty bad sci-fi movie in Athens the year before I went to Montana. It was a midnight movie at the Alps Road Cinema, called Zardoz; it had secretive and obscure references to The Wizard of Oz. Between that and my lifelong passion for the original movie, Toto was an image that had taken up residency in my brain. I looked for that dog-shaped shrub coming and going from ski class – it was such that it looked like Toto from both sides. I pointed him out to friends, and most of them could see Toto, too.
My junior year of college in Bozeman, Montana ended all too quickly. But I had fallen in love with the place: the awe-inspiring mountains and the down-to-earth people that lived there. I went back as often as possible. And every time I went back to ski, I looked for Toto in that canyon. He continued to be there for many years; I can remember pointing him out to my sons when we vacationed there. At some point in the last 20 years, Toto disappeared. He could have been the casualty of a drought. He could have been subject to soil erosion, being so near to the edge of the cliff. It doesn’t matter. I can clearly see him in my memory.
