Yellow Is
Today is my mom's 68th birthday. This piece will always be for her. Here's to a woman of many hats and strengths, who always reminds me how to love better in this lifetime.
A piece by Mila Phelps Friedl, with love to Denise & Deb
There is something so special in this moment, watching these three women — one who raised me, two who have nurtured my every whim of creativity, gathered around the print-making table.
My mother’s hair, only just growing back, gossamer and silver, barely traces the outline of her head. As she bends over freshly poured paint cans, you can see where the silvery strands meet at the nape of her neck into a strangely beautiful triangular crease. I settle nearby, scribbling notes to the tick of the clock. Clean blank sheets before them, a pointed spritz of water, and they begin.
She breathes in the studio around her, eyes pausing on her people and a slight smile slipping into the corners of her lips. She reaches first for yellow which, to me — is sunlight and lemonade and the feeling of contentedness.
It makes my heart stretch a bit to see her doing what, when I was a child in this very studio, came so naturally.
Once she told me that if I didn’t learn to let my heart stretch out every now and again, that I wasn’t really living.
Being back in this place, among the people and things that have always been there, I can see my mother’s heart glowing, while mine feels heavier. Heavier in the sense that it has stretched at least three sizes since everything changed back in March.
My mother brushes her fingertips against the top sheet of her first print, pulling at the corner to reveal spots of color and lengths of white. I imagine we all have white periods in our lives — times when color and purpose seem elusive and impossible. However, in the absence of paint, white gives the pattern space to breathe.
Despite the artwork on the walls, hospitals seem to drain color. Even the people there, turning a sallow kind of pale, doctor’s scrubs the same muted hues of garish mauve and off-tone blue.
From the beginning, my mom resisted — wearing colorful yellow kerchiefs even, and maybe especially, when I know she didn’t feel the color yellow.
She’d lay in the garden, head on my lap, breathing in the air with the humming bees. Breathing in baby blue hyacinth and dusty pink roses. And then the chemotherapy alarm would sound, and she’d wistfully return to her room.
But here, among these powerful women who have known her, and know her, and love her, even when there’s a bit of uncertainty to herself, she begins to smile easily.
Around some people, we are just so absolutely ourselves.
To the soundtrack of gentle laughter, the whisk of paper, and the humming methodology of print-making, I can suddenly see a million little moments that the three of them have shared — unspoken and extending through the years.
Deb’s first memory of my mom is of her singing. At the live music bar of a funny little restaurant nestled in between two storefronts on 4th street in Ashland, Oregon. My only memory of that place is that the walls curved into the floors and provided some distraction in the form of attempting to slide down them, instead of watching the performance. It’s funny the things we remember.
My mom went on to be a teacher’s aid at a local elementary school where Deb would eventually hire her to sing for morning classes. Tears spring at the corners of Deb’s eyes as she recalls my mom’s rendition of “Here’s to Cheshire, Here’s to Cheese” and, like clockwork, the timbre of my mother’s voice quietly begins to sing in my head —
“here’s to the pears and the apple trees, and here’s to the lovely strawberries… ding, dang, dong go the wedding bells.”
She sang that song with a surety and a softened smile. I remember feeling incredibly proud and more than a little protective that it was my mother, who sang and made others want to sing, like it was her goddamn job here on planet earth. Crappy teacher’s pay be damned.
Denise had a similar first impression, in a different Ashland venue. The Key of C Coffee House and Bakery on Lithia Way, which had mediocre poppyseed muffins and iffy-at-best acoustics. Later on, my mother took an art class from Denise, eventually beginning to help in the studio in exchange for use of the space herself. When I was born, she’d bring me along, and now 21 something years later, we’re all back here again.
The studio is filled with the smell of inky blues and heady reds, stamped with postcards and notecards, orderly cupboards of paper, and translucent jars of colored pencils in varying states of usefulness. In her pink dress and sun-faded tiara, a full-size cardboard cutout of Glinda the Good Witch watches us from the balcony above. She seemed much bigger when I was five.
They each take turns sweeping paint across the blank white pages. Talking gently as they work, they use combs and forks and the edges of gears to scrape out landscapes on the paper. Someone turns the radio on, instruments warble through the sunlit room. My mother laughs.
Deb’s paper swims with rust and joy and algae green, pink forming along the outline of the page as she stamps an old ink cartridge into the wallows of the paint. Denise dusts a lusty blue sky across the page, so sure in her strokes that they seem to match her heartbeat. Wiping her palms across the thighs of her ink-dappled jeans, she looks to my mom and her gaze softens. In a well-practiced motion, she pulls back a paint-dampened stencil, revealing a black row of birds against that first stroke of blue sky. It is the same blue sky my mother drank in as she sat in the gardens of Stanford Hospital.
My mom uses broad marks with the brush, scuffing some turquoise into the white, leaving only a single strip devoid of color. Like a breath amidst it all. She presses down a stencil and lets out a deep sigh. I wonder, could she breathe when she didn’t feel any color? When she was too tired to sing or write or play the guitar? What does she think as she spreads a brackish purple over the layers of yellow? Covering up the light with dark.
Of all the versions of my mother I’d ever imagined her being, a world in which she couldn’t do the very things that made her feel like herself, wasn’t one of them. It made me wish for things to be as they were, instead of as they are. But not even Glinda the Good Witch could work magic of that kind unless there’s a different version of The Wizard of Oz. Glinda was really more of a guide and Dorothy did most of the work. Hospitals, biopsies, chemo, oh my!
But when my mom pulls back the page, it’s yellow I see. Bright yellow birds are carved into the paint, perching against the dark background. Despite wishing that things could be different, I let my mind settle on the good of what is. I stop taking notes to remember this moment; my mother smiling and strong, Denise laughing with flecks of paint along her right cheekbone, and Deb, so intently focused on her print that she doesn’t notice her skirt [is] steadily gathering color.
Time in this space is tender — and all too fleeting. Yet here they are, turning every second into art, creating without speaking. Just loving, and letting that fact breathe without the unnecessary reminders of “how much,” or “how long.”
The finished pieces are lined up against the windows, late August light filtering over snapshots of dust clouds spirals, mulchy autumn leaves, lime green pine forests, sunsets etched in pinks and blues, a raging fire in the depth of its embering, glowing on the once blank page.
My favorite step in the print-making process is what remains when they pull the print from the table. A blank spot ridged with color. Wet sponges dilute the reds to pinks, the pinks to rose, until the water runs clear, dancing in small streams that catch the sunlight as they drip. I imagine the cancer leaving my mother’s body in a similar fashion, hope diluting the darkness until only light remains. When I look back at the table, the outlines of color are gone, only white remains.
It has taken a few months now for certain pieces of her to learn how to be in and of the world again. Six months in and out of hospitals takes something from you. Cancer can take even more if you let it. Despite everything, you have to be willing to fight for it — to get whatever “it,” is back again. Nobody said it would be easy. Sometimes people don’t know what to say at all.
But, as a wise woman once said, if your heart isn’t stretching and growing, then you are not really living. We’ve all stretched a bit in the last six months. We’re likely to stretch a bit more.
Ursula the dog pads slowly over the faded blue floor, a blue that reminds me of hyacinths. The gentle giant curls to rest below my chair as I watch the quiet bustle in this version of home.
I look up at Glinda the Good Witch and wonder if she knew any of this was going to happen from her perch high above. But the notion of “if’s,” can become all too powerful, especially when they have no real say in the state of the present.
This is our present, and maybe even very Good Witches can’t change the hard parts of life, because without those times we’d never appreciate the power of the people who know you, and love you, and remind you of that something good.
A blank white space can hold the same intention, reminding us why, and when we need a little, or a lot, of color.
Once again my mother reaches for the yellow, and as I watch her enfolded in steadiness, emanating sureness, surrounded by her people, by our people… I decide. I decide that no matter what the future holds, after six months of uncertainty, certainty is the color yellow.
Happy birthday to my sweet mama. If you enjoyed this piece, please consider subscribing to read more about the humans that I love.