Meet Joanna
7 years ago, my husband Mike died of throat cancer. Mike was an artist. Mike was a craftsman. Mike could build and make anything. Mike could create anything I thought up. He and I manifested this particular skill of ours with our metal work. That man could listen to me talk in short, non-connective sentences about the vision I had in my brain about what our next piece of art was going to be and then...make it. I’d never experienced that with another person, before I met him and have not experienced it with another person since his death.
The world is without the evolution of Mike’s artistry. And I feel really sad about that. I feel it physically in my body. My body hurts over it. I wonder how he would have grown as an artist over the past seven years. I wonder what he and I would have created together, over the past seven years.
I realized several days ago that, creatively, the closest I’ve come to feeling the sense of accomplishment and joy that I felt with him- is the way I feel about my flowers. My writing, though I suppose considered creative, isn’t formed with my hands. It isn’t taking a raw piece of something physical and nurturing and turning it into something completely different and unexpected. It isn’t sweaty and bodily exhausting.
The metal was. The flowers are. The sun and little bouts of rain beat me down. I toil and toil in the dirt. I love it. Today I meandered among the amaranth, pondered the delicacy of the cosmos, screamed to the sunflowers and propped up the zinnias. I saw a white butterfly, a cardinal and tons of dragonflies. Mike was there.
