|
|
My husband Bob found the makeshift portfolio when he accompanied volunteers from Service International to Michelle's trailer home after the flood of March 2008.
Michelle and her dog Charley lived with us for a time after the flood and Bob became her advocate, negotiating with FEMA for the buyout of her home and arranging to have it demolished and removed from the property.
Inside the flood-ravaged trailer was a marvel of order and chaos. All the furniture and loose items below the 6-foot mark were completely destroyed. But inside closed cupboards, the upper shelves contained row upon row of personal and household items, all arranged by size and shape.
She was a hoarder, to tell the truth about it. She would have 10 jars of identical shampoo, a dozen tubes of toothpaste, another dozen plastic containers of sanitized hand cleaner, all stacked in order.
Towels and washcloths were folded in precise squares and stacked by size and color. In her kitchen cabinets she had 10 jars of the same grape jelly and as many jars of peanut butter. Large plastic containers held 50-pound bags of dog food for Charley and birdseed for the 50 of so bird feeders that were strewn around her little enclave.
"I built those bird feeders," she told us. That happened to be true, but when we first met this tiny waif of a lady it seemed like a fanciful story. As it turned out, she built a room on the side of her trailer and an entry porch with her own hands. She was a wonder with wood. Bob found a 14-inch-long steamboat that she had built, accurate to the tiniest detail. One of the cabinets had a bas-relief that she had carved on the front.
The Service International volunteers were in awe of the combination of beauty and ugliness jumbled against each other in Michelle's former home. They carefully picked up each item to see what was still good. They placed her canned groceries, bottled cleaning and personal supplies and handcrafted wooden items into boxes.
One lady looked at the rows of towels and linens, that were rank with the smell of wet cloth, took them home with her, laundered them and brought them back folded in a large plastic container.
We placed all the items on our covered patio while Bob, Michelle and her friend Pat Finger figured out how Michelle could have a home of her own again. They eventually found her a wonderful two-bedroom trailer on a lake in the same trailer park where Pat lived.
Bob and I hung about a dozen of her framed pictures on the wall of her new living room. He stuck the portfolio in the spare bedroom and there they stayed until we got the idea to show Michelle's art during a benefit for barber Guy Kircher, who is suffering from esophageal cancer.
"I don't think there's much left," she said.
"There's more than you think, Michelle," we said.
We called it a one-woman show and made a few prints of some of her drawings to sell for the benefit. Michelle came to see her artwork on display and posed for pictures with Pacific residents who had known her for years but many had no idea she was an artist.
At that time Michelle was living temporarily at Grandview Healthcare Center in Washington. Twyla Noe, Grandview activities director, called me to see if Bob and I would organize another one-woman show of Michelle's art. She wanted to hold a fundraising benefit to buy a magnifying reader for Grandview residents.
We asked Michelle, "Would you want to do it again?" She said if it would help someone she would be happy to use her art.
We took some of her prints and made packages of note cards to sell. Others we used to make prints and framed them. Because we ran out of things to sell at Guy's fundraiser, we made more note cards and prints this time.
I have to tell you . . . Nothing prepared us for the drama of the showroom that Twyla created in the Grandview Healthcare Center recreation room. Wide strips of Burgundy and black swooped down from the ceiling and covered the walls. In a U-shaped row tables were covered with black tablecloths and the top were draped with strings of lights wrapped in white gossamer.
At the center of the U was a large easel draped in gold fabric. This was the spot for Michelle's 36- by 36-inch oil painting, Christ in the Garden. An overhead light cast a glow on the large painting. Around the rows of tables were easels for the framed work. Twyla lay the unframed pictures on the tables and taped others to the entry doors.
Trays of cheese and fruit were on the table closest to one side of the entrance. On the other side, a covered stand held tall pretty bottles of sparkling fruit juice, several bottles of wine and fluted wine glasses.
Suddenly the used frames and handcrafted mats that Michelle had used to frame her work took on a magical appearance.
Fellow residents created a wheelchair parade around the room staring at the pictures of Michigan barns, fishing villages, lighthouses, and remote farms with intricate fence rows and bridges that crossed small streams.
Visitors, standing and in wheelchairs balanced their plastic plates of fruit and cheese on their laps and held their fancy glasses, marveling at the wonder of the room.
Fellow residents said they never dreamed that Michelle could have drawn all those pictures. They hugged her, patted her hand. "You're a genius," they said.
A solo violinist stood near the entrance and played the entire score from "Fiddler on the Roof," a large sampling of Broadway show songs, and a smattering of tunes from the 1940s and 1950s.
This allowed Bob and me to tell the story of when Michelle built violins when she was a junior and senior in high school in Dayton, Ohio. Each day as she walked home from school she passed the shop where an elderly man was shaping wood into violins.
Occasionally she stood and listened as he picked up a bow and played beautiful music. One day she stopped and asked if he would teach her to build violins. He would, he said, if she was serious and reliable. For two years, each day of her junior and senior years, she went to the violin shop after school where she learned to cut, sand, glue and sand some more until the violins became a reality.
"I never learned to play them," she said.
She related the story to me sitting at my dining room table.
"It was a wonderful time," she said. "I never forgot how to work with wood."
Although she has given away many of the beautiful things she collected or created during her 87 years, there are some things she kept close to her.
On the day of Twyla's show, Michelle wore the blue University of Dayton jacket that identified the school where she studied art in the 1940s.
"I've had this all my life," she said.
Some visitors tried to buy the original pieces of her art but that wasn't what the show was about. The whole body of work is part and parcel of Michelle's life.
At the end of the day we had sold 40 sets of note cards, about 20 framed prints, at least that many unframed prints of Michelle's work, and had taken three orders for items that were sold out. The one-woman show didn't earn enough for the magnifying reader that Twyla wanted to buy, but it was a good start.
"I never had a bad day when I was drawing or painting pictures," she said. "I'm happy that someone can enjoy them now."
