The Masterpiece by Kelly Swanson

By Kelly Swanson

My grandmother knew the true art of biscuit making. How I used to love watching her work in the early hours of winter in that tiny kitchen with the checkered curtains. I remember the way the sunlight used to stream down on the lines in her weathered face. The way her gnarled fingers would knead the dough with the tenderness and strength that had come from years of faith and hardship. The smile on her face as she took her time sifting the flour, humming about Jesus and bringing in the sheaves. The tears that fell into the flour when Grandpa Jimmy died. The fierceness with which she pounded the dough when they told her that she was too old to drive. The way her body moved with the rolling pin as if it were a long time dance partner. Each step precisely coordinated. Each ingredient measured with an exactness and precision as natural to her as breathing. A process that changed in tune with the world around her and yet stayed as familiar as the look on her face when my daddy walked into the room. Years of tweaking and fine tuning created biscuits that were as a personal to her as the scent that clung to her fingers throughout the day. I used to try to make biscuits like hers but I could never come close. I was never willing to put the sweat and the tears into them that my grandmother did. Those biscuits were her masterpiece just as your speech is your masterpiece. If you want your speech to stand out in the sea of familiarity, you have to be able to put the sweat and tears into the process. For it is only when we push ourselves that we find the buried treasure underneath.

Where the spirit does not work with the hand there is no art. Leonardo Da Vinci

I know that to paint the sea really well, you need to look at it every hour of every day in the same place so that you can understand its way in that particular spot and that is why I am working on the same motifs over and over again, four or six times even. Claude Monet

If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful at all. Michelangelo

A Quiet House is an Empty House

I am in that stage of parenting that they never warned me about. Okay, so maybe they did warn me, I just didn’t listen. That stage they so laughingly refer to as the terrible two’s only my child is three and not so terrible. But still. It’s that stage where you engage in countless conversations from the second you wake up until the second you close your eyes at night and if you want to be truthful, even continues while you sleep. What kind of conversations you of the childless persuasion ask? Every kind of conversation from do you want apple juice or grape juice, the pink cup or the orange cup, the plate with the bear or the plate with the train, be still so I can zip your pants, don’t whine, don’t you dare hit mommy, that sign says stop, Mommy is a girl and Daddy is a boy, Nana can’t come pick you up today, no tomorrow we go to the zoo, and I’ve told you that we don’t pick our nose in public. When you’re a parent, there is nothing off limits and it’s guaranteed that your child will outlast you every time unless you sedate him and even then there’s no guarantee.

I remember when our house was a place of solace, with lit candles and Enya crooning softly from a radio not covered with Sponge Bob stickers. Not anymore. Now the house actually shakes with the endless marching in his favorite cowboy boots. He’s jumping on beds and throwing things into the sink while he “helps” me clean the kitchen. He shrieks of joy every time Daddy or the UPS man comes – we won’t reveal who gets the louder shrieks. He’s singing Jesus Loves Me in the bathtub and the cartoons are blaring as we bribe him to go potty. Our house is never quiet even when my child is not in it for he undoubtedly leaves random toys that he has instructed to go off at a moment’s notice from behind a couch or a chair when I’m alone in the shower. The noise of my child carries into the car, the grocery store, the auto shop, the doctor’s office. I can’t remember the last time I experienced complete and total silence. Until today.

Today while my child was at preschool I decided not to run errands. I decided not to have my hair cut or my nails done. Instead I went to my mother’s house which was the closest place I could find to the school to avoid wasting one second of beloved “me” time driving. I chose to go to my mother’s empty house and write. Or at least that’s what I told people. I was really going to just sit and be. To drink in the delicious taste of silence. And that’s what I did.

At first it was nice. Really nice. And I drank enough of it to last me at least until he’s four. It was quiet. Really quiet. I tried to hear something and couldn’t. No whir of a distant lawn mower. No air conditioner sputtering. No ice dropping in the freezer. Just a faint ticking clock which I say doesn’t count and was probably just something loose rattling inside my head.

After a while though it became too quiet. After a while, I really started to feel what a house sounds like when the children are gone and the toys are shipped off. When the fingerprints are no longer on the door handle and the nose prints have been wiped off the glass. No tiny shoes and socks strewn in the hall. No mysterious items found in toilets and drains. Everything in its place. No more conversations. No sign that children were ever here. And you know what? It made me sad. Because it gave me a taste of what life will be like one day when my son has moved away. It reminded me that every day with my shrieking three-year-old is a blessing and that one day I will look up and have my quiet house and will probably give anything for one of these days back again.