Jimsonweed, by Norma Barksdale

Jimson Weed, by Georgia O'Keeffe (USA) 1936

Jimsonweed
 
I walk the narrow valley that bounds my property, as I do every morning. A perfect clear day is emerging, any clouds whisking away to the horizon, leaving Jingo and me under the wide circle of blue sky. He romps ahead, joyful on the slopes, his dark mane glowing vermilion in the dawn. Now bounding back, nuzzling his snout into my palm, sweet and plaintive after I left him in the courtyard all night when he would not stop whining for my supper. We pick our way through the winding creek bed, dried out long before I came to New Mexico.
 
I have painted these hills before, many times and in all seasons, but it’s the light at the beginning and end of the day that shows them at their best, cast in pale greens and lilacs, their shadows and undulations as silky as water. From the top of this rise, I can see over the adobe walls into my garden. The plants are just starting to wake to the spring, the monotony of winter kale and carrots, endless cabbage, almost over. Manny and Mr. Lopez have been busying themselves these past few weeks with preparing the vegetable garden for new plantings, pruning dead limbs from the fruit trees. Both of them full of the hushed excitement they have each year with the arrival of the equinox. Soon, from this hill crest, I will be able to see explosions of peony and marigold, the rapture of the peach tree blossoms.
 
It starts as a softness in the center of my eye, spreading slowly outwards.  A graying of focus that dissipates across my vision. The garden melts into hazy brown, a pale orange halo all around. I hold my breath and will my eyes to clear. 
 
I have moved beyond the impulse to wipe at my eyes, to clear the imaginary dust, as I tried to do during those first months of losing my sight. If I strain, I can force the landscape into focus, at least for a moment. My eyes taunt me in this way most days—when I wake in the pre-dawn morning, clear-sighted, I am filled with a cruel optimism, half-believing that the degeneration has reversed or that the blurriness of the past many months was a nightmare. Not long after the sun is up, sometimes an hour, sometimes immediately, my eyes begin to fatigue and the haze returns.
 
A year ago, I dismissed a faint fuzziness, thinking I needed, finally, in my eighties, to wear glasses. It were as though the slightest gray veil descended between me and the world, gauzy and fine. But by the time this winter arrived, on the worst days, I was unable to read or mix the colors for my paints. One morning in December, on my walk, I didn’t see the roots of a cottonwood tree and I fell, bruising my hip. An optometrist in Santa Fe told me that my sight will be gone in five years. A retinologist in New York confirmed the diagnosis. I will be blind for the last years of my life. 
 
After our walk, Jingo and I go about our chores in the garden. Yesterday, Manny and Mr. Lopez dug up the tremaining potatoes, and today I go through and turn over the soil with my shovel, mixing in fresh fertilizer. The growing sun on my back and the damp, rich smell of the earth make me feel ten years younger. I don’t work out here as much as I should anymore, avoiding the labor on days when my eyes tax me. I have become conscious of getting in the way, of being an inconvenience and a nuisance. I would irritate myself with endless questions to Manny about which green ball is a cabbage, and could he help me find the pruning shears I set down somewhere? (When Mr. Lopez reached old age, Manny began giving his father one or two small tasks in the morning—weeding a patch or sorting between seedlings—before sitting him on a bench in the sun. I do not wish to be put away on a bench to nap through the afternoon.) Manny says my garden is not too much work for one man. Mr. Lopez brought Manny to these gardens when he was a toddler, and after he finished high school I hired him permanently. The gardens have flourished, lush and fruitful, ever since. But my property wall surrounds several acres, and I have noticed how Manny works longer into the evening than he used to, when Mr. Lopez was younger and I contributed what little I could. We will need to hire more help soon. 
 
The Lopezes and Paulette are off today, Sunday, and I get to dig my hands into the soil greedily, without interruption or supervision. The dirt feels miraculous between my fingers. Jingo barks at a magpie strutting along the wall.
 
Early season jimsonweed grows at the wall’s base. Dark jagged leaves cloak the small white blossoms. The flowers haven’t bloomed yet this year, but one night soon I will come out here and see them shining in the moonlight, their translucent white petals opening and reaching up toward the sky, revealing the purple stain within. As though someone spilled a capful of ink into the flower’s center. Mr. Lopez planted these many years ago. At the time, he told me jimsonweed was a nightshade, a pernicious herb that would spread if not kept in check. At their first spring blossom I fell in love with the flowers, and instructed him to let the plant seed freely.
 
What I see now of the jimsonweed is my memory of the herb. My eyes have relaxed somewhat since my walk, but the plant appears a wiry cluster of green and white below the red mass of the wall. If I turn my head to the side, the leaves and buds snap into focus in my periphery—but I don’t need to do that. I know what the plant looks like. 
 
Vegetable beds surround me. I am on the east side of the house, the late morning light pouring in. Beneath the portico leading to the fruit trees, a burst of green with purple flares—wild hyacinth—and at its base, small red and white pinpricks, the flowering rattlesnake weed. Manny plants for all seasons; there is never a time when my garden does not have blooms. I think it is a clear day, but cannot be sure. Of the losses I will sustain as my sight worsens, the clouds will be among the most painful. It is difficult to force the sky into the periphery of one’s vision, requiring an ugly twisting and stooping from which I prefer to refrain. Years ago, after I began to travel by airplane, I painted a field of clouds on a faint blue sky. My first flight, I cried upon seeing the vast expanse of pebbled clouds that quilted the sky beneath me. To have lived half a century before then, seeing just the bottoms of clouds, taking the half as proof of the whole—I had no idea. That there were mountain ranges floating through the sky. 
            
When Paulette brought me yesterday’s mail there was a letter from Maria. Paulette read the note to me. I can’t remember everything Maria wrote, but she was pressing the idea of me coming to see her in Albuquerque, clearly the express intent of the letter even if she tried to play the invitation as an afterthought.
 
That, and checking in on my eyes. Maria came to visit in December, after I had written to tell her of my condition, and grew overly concerned, reading into every movement I made, any moment of misplacing something or stumbling on a root during our walks. She entreated me to stay in the house, to relax and drink endless cups of restorative teas. Hiking through the hills together, I sensed her hand hovering inches from my elbow, darting to support me at any little dip or rise. As if I were a cripple! 
 
In her letter—I remember this part best—Maria encouraged me to recommit myself to my painting and proposed that my eventual blindness will strengthen my “inner vision.” I was appalled to the point of laughter when Paulette reached that line. “Inner vision.” Maria must think of me as a child who needs consoling and magical thinking. To insinuate that I am not still painting, though—that is a step too far.
 
She is perhaps my closest friend. Maria was my assistant when I restored this house, which had been left for ruin in the Abiquiu hills, and she knows every corner better than I do. Her fingerprints are in the walls. She was practically a girl when she came to work for me, and grew into a young woman and an artist in these rooms. Now she is in her middle age, a matronly, doting lady who has slipped into the fashionable spiritualism of the age. A large malachite she brought sits on my living room mantle. The crystal has a mesmerizing geometry, a deep velvety greenness, and none of the healing powers she promised.       
 
On the last night of her visit, I misplaced a knife in the kitchen—putting it somewhere out of sight while we cooked supper. My hand must have passed over it later on the countertop, nicking my palm and spilling blood onto the floor. Maria raised her voice, reprimanding me, saying that I shouldn’t use knives, shouldn’t cook, when I can’t see what’s right in front of me. 
 
She knew she had misspoken and apologized many times, but the air was sour when she left the next morning. We have exchanged a few letters since then, returning to our warm and tender tones, but I do not think I want to be under a roof with her in the near future, not until I have found some new equilibrium or understanding of how to move through the world. This sudden infantilization, the expectation of dependency . . . I do not, cannot, live my life that way. I have always been better off on my own. Did Maria not notice that I was the one who bandaged my hand after cutting it?
 
I make a salad with garden kale and eat it with pinto bean soup Paulette cooked yesterday, and then go to the studio. The good meal has rejuvenated me, and I set about mixing my oils, eager to get paint onto the canvas before the haze settles over my eyes again. A few days ago on an evening walk I came across a marvelously black rock, smooth and big as my two fists. I managed to carry it home by myself and arranged it in a corner where the window light pours onto it, giving the rock a dark pulsing outline and a white gleam across the middle. In my painting, the rock looms, expanding across the surface of the canvas, much larger than it is in the studio. I have painted stones from my walks before, set against gentle blues and whites. Today I am craving oxblood red.  I dip my brush in the rich color and surround the painted stone with rapid strokes, contrasting its grays and ivories.  I pool dusky shadows beneath the rock, in tans and dark ochres. 
 
Jingo watches me from the corner of my studio, lolling on top of a big corduroy cushion I keep there for him. We are fast friends again after last night’s trouble with his begging. Likely helped by my giving him a generous bowl of chicken leftovers for his dinner. I do love to spoil him when the house staff isn’t here, to remind him who his real mistress is.
 
My studio window is tall and wide, taking up most of the eastern wall. From here, you can see far over the Rio Chama and the surrounding hills. My house on top of a hill affords me this expansive view, and keeps me apart from the traffic on the highway below (not that too many people pass through this village, but I would rather not be confronted with every car and truck blaring by). The afternoon sun renders the hills in azure and lavender; the land seems an infinite bowl of ripening peaches, tufts of wheatgrass glimmering as the sun moves behind the house. 
 
March 25, 1971
Dear Maria,
 
I am not, as you say, “dwelling on my sight,” but quite busy. Have started a new painting of a stone I found on a walk—a stalwart, imposing, solid black stone—and I am consumed with committing that feeling into the painting. I will fail to communicate whatever it is I feel, as usual, but am trying once again, nevertheless.
 
If Albuquerque is anything like Santa Fe right now I’m not sure I’m up for a visit. Manny and I went into town a couple of weeks ago—I bullied him into letting me drive for once—to stock up on seeds and fertilizer, and the sidewalks were full of young and not-so-young-people loafing and laying about. One blonde girl came up to me as we were parking to ask for money. She had a New Jersey accent. I asked where she was from exactly and she said Millington, that she’d come to New Mexico a month ago. She was “stoned,” I realized, looking somewhere above my head, talking slowly, mouth hanging open. Manny gave her a dollar . . . but I saw how straight and white her teeth were, clearly a product of orthodontia. She did not need my money.
 
Manny says Santa Fe’s population has practically doubled although none of the new folks want jobs. He tells me they’re smoking marijuana and drinking jimsonweed tea to see visions. As you know I couldn’t care less about their intoxication, or what have you, but what is the point of this aimlessness? What do they hope to gain from drugging themselves and letting the years melt away? I cannot understand what they see in meddling with their brains. 
 
All that to say, I am not eager at the moment to be spending time in any cities. There is too much to be done here in Abiquiu. Thank you for the invitation.
 
With love, as ever,
Georgia
 
I found Maria’s letter where Paulette left it in the living room and sat at my desk to reply at once. Paulette will put my response in the post tomorrow. 
 
I do not like writing to my friend in such a tone, rejecting what are only warm feelings from her, however, it is hard to see how else to assert my needs. And, yes, it was a low blow to goad her with news of my driving, but I couldn’t resist.
            
In the living room, a long shelf runs around the walls, filled with my bones and rocks and branches. Maria’s malachite. A photograph of my hands sits propped next to a pair of antelope antlers. This is the only photograph of myself in the house, the only way I see myself—I had all the mirrors removed ages ago. Alfred took the picture. I must have been around 40, as it was taken soon after I began living in New Mexico for most of the year, away from him. He took hundreds of portraits of me, my face, my breasts, my stomach, but he always returned to my hands. In this photograph, my hands caress a horse skull, fingers poking the eye socket, prying into the mouth. The skull itself is now outside, sitting in a flower bed. What would he think of me now, wrinkled and half-blind? He didn’t look so different than that, at the end. 
 
I was still madly in love with Alfred when I began my slow move out west, but his need for care and devotion exceeded what I could give, and there were many other willing young artists who sought his approval. Being in New York, seeing how he fluffed up when a pretty new ceramicist or portraitist flattered him, became too painful. His letters in those later years were filled with mentions of intimate dinners and weekends in the Hamptons, undoubtedly with beautiful women. Did he truly spite me, or was it that toward the end of his life I became an invisible presence—“my faraway one,” he called me—more of an idea than a wife?
 
Still, I loved him. Although if there is anything I know to be true after my long life, it is easier to love from a distance, and easier to love Alfred’s memory than the man.
 
The sun sinks low and shadows fill the garden. Jingo and I set out for our twilight walk. This is the sweetest time of day, when my eyes relax as the sun sets. We take a different trail than we did this morning, going down from the house and crossing the highway to a cleft between two hills. Scrubby plants and rocks crunch underneath my feet. For a while we make our way through the growing gloom before the trail climbs up quite high, and we are higher than the house, with a sudden view of the sun as it gives a last bursting glow. 
 
I see myself from above, the vision so clear and sharp that I stop breathing, for a moment. A small, old woman standing like a fencepost at the crest of a hill, with a dog panting at her feet. Her white dress billowing out, a shadow stretching far behind her. The figure flattens and shrinks as the landscape diminishes beneath my vision, red and brown cliffs growing darker and smaller. The woman turns in a circle, wavers. The dog barks and trots to her side, holding her up where she leans.
 
I like to think that there is still time left for me to evolve and see the world anew, to begin again and find radical ways to express the impossible. All my life I have attempted in my paintings to show the truth of myself and have never succeeded, not really. Perhaps I have captured fragments of who I am, but not the whole. I, Georgia, remain inaccessible. With my sight fading every day, there is nothing to lose. I find I am more willing than ever to change.
 
In the dark, I take a flashlight out to the garden. The beam crosses over the grass and benches, arcing up to the trees looming over me, their dark branches interrupting the field of stars. A coyote’s howl rises through the night air. I scan the garden wall with my light until I find the blooming jimsonweed. The flowers have opened in the moonlight, showing the pearly-green pistils hiding within their petals and the dark indigo of their center. A delicate fragrance wafts from the flowers, smelling of the secrets of nighttime. I slip on gloves, out of some contradictory precaution, as I cut away a large blossom with my shears. 
 
In the kitchen, I remove the petals and pistils, revealing the thorny seed hiding underneath. Still wearing my gloves, I wash the seed under the tap and put it into my heavy concrete mortar. I grind the seed into a paste, and spoon the barest crumb into my waiting teacup. A kettle boils on the stove, and I pour the hot water over the seed. A strand of smoky purple winds through the liquid, dying the tea lilac. I think about stirring in honey, then refrain. Best to take it as it is. 
 
The studio window is dark, framing the deep silhouettes of mountains receding into blackness. Jingo sleeps on his cushion in the corner, content as a kitten. I sit on my stool, staring into the night. A few lights from the town are visible, a slender waxing moon shining above. The cup is hot to my touch, and I blow cool air into the tea until I can take a small sip, barely dipping my tongue into the cup. The jimsonweed tastes of nothing much at first, maybe a hint of anise. When we were in Santa Fe, Manny told me that some people say the tea could be like licorice or bitter berries or mud—it all depends on the flower. 
 
A low creeping odor curls into the study. I can almost see the path it takes through the room, winding along the floor and around my easel. Is this the tea’s effect? I laugh, delighted at the thought, and wake up Jingo, who snorts and snuffs. 
            
But, no. The smell grows stronger, hot metal, and I rush back to the kitchen where the stove is still on, a fire burning beneath the empty kettle. Jingo runs after me, yelping. The flames are an orange and blue burst of heat around the red kettle, the whole stove consumed by a dense aura of red smog, and I know this is no hallucination but my own infirmity. I reach for where I know a towel will be, folded next to the sink, and hold it out in my hands like an offering until I have it wrapped around the scalding kettle and throw the whole mess into the sink. I turn the stove off and stand there, panting, breathing the acrid air, and as my pulse slows I laugh again, convulsed by my own idiocy. Paula will see the burn marks on the kettle in the morning and know exactly what a fool I am.
 
I collapse into a chair at the breakfast table and pet Jingo, who is worrying around me, upset by the smell and my excitement. His fur lovely and lustrous beneath my fingers, and without thinking I sink my face into the thick down of his neck, breathing in his musty doggy smell, the hairs tickling the insides of my nostrils. Jingo, my dearest companion. 
 
And then I remember the tea cup—I had forgotten it in the alarm. I walk back to the studio, opening windows in the hallway as I go to let out the smoke, Jingo by my side. He trots to my stool and noses the cup, and I snap at him to get away, my voice sharper than I intended. He slinks back to his cushion, and I hurry to pick up the cup, which has cooled, and take a long swallow. It is more bitter than before, I think, like rust and dirt, but not too bad that I can’t drink it. I’ve taken medicines that were much worse. All the lights of Abiquiu are extinguished now, the stars, millions of them, glistening in the sky above.
 
I wrap myself in a wool blanket and carry the tea to the courtyard where the mountain sage grows. A low bench runs the perimeter, and I settle into a corner, taking small sips of the tea. And then it tastes awful, and I gag, and the moon opens up above me. It is a jimsonweed blossom, I see now, the pistils long, tendrils reaching down to the courtyard. 
 
The sage is growing, too, bristles undulating softly. Because the moon has become huge, the patio is illuminated, and I see everything—each crack in the walls, the silver moths flying through the air, a mouse hiding in the far corner. Sharp and bright, every quiver in the air, the wind, the night, the stars raining from the sky. I see everything. Oh God, it is wonderful, it is better than I could have dreamed. ​

Norma Barksdale

Norma Barksdale is from Mississippi and am currently an MFA candidate at the University of Montana.