Memories from Cherry Harvest by Amy Wachspress

Author:Amy Wachspress
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781593764890
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2018-04-27T00:00:00+00:00

Two

AS I BECAME BETTER acquainted with my work group, as well as other students in the art program, I began to feel, for the first time in my life, like I had colleagues, like I had found other members of my species. Our class with Margaret met each morning. We learned in the first week that Margaret was a successful graphic artist who owned her own business. When Norma asked her why she was teaching Introduction to Design, she replied that she enjoyed helping young artists just starting out. She said it kept her on her toes.

One afternoon, a few weeks into the semester, Margaret opened the design studio for our work group to finish up a project. As we cleaned up after ourselves in the early evening, we discussed whether art mirrors reality or vice versa. Margaret invited us back to her live-in studio in the West Village to continue our discussion. TJ had to be carried up a long flight of stairs, but we were growing accustomed to the challenges we faced in going places with TJ and we all pitched in to airlift him and his wheelchair into the studio.

I loved everything about Margaret’s studio from the moment I laid eyes on it: the posters on the walls, the sound of the traffic in the street below, the smell of the paint on the easel. Margaret boiled water in a big green kettle and made Earl Grey tea for us. As she poured the hot water into each of the earth-toned mugs, which she told us she had made herself on a potter’s wheel, Norma admired them one by one. Margaret asked if any of us read poetry. We greeted her question with an embarrassed silence.

“I’m hearing crickets,” Margaret said with a slight smile.

“Why do you ask?” Norma asked.

“Because I’d like to introduce you to some poetry.” Margaret hooked her hair behind her ears and studied her bookshelf. “There was a poetry movement that emerged right after World War II called imagism. I think that as artists you would benefit from reading some of the imagists.”

“I dunno,” TJ responded skeptically. “I’m of the opinion that poets have the ability to take the simplest observations and convert them into incomprehensible equations by explaining them in language that only someone with a PhD in English can decipher.”

“Hey, give it a chance,” Dale said, poking TJ.

“What’s an example of an imagist poem?” Norma asked.

“I’ll read you one.” Margaret thumbed through a book and found a page. “Here’s a famous poem by William Carlos Williams. ‘So much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.’”

I remembered studying that poem in high school. Williams had written another one about cold plums that I vaguely remembered too.

Skip offered a polite observation. “I like it. We have a red wheelbarrow on the farm. It reminds me of home.”

“Skip wants an A in Introduction to Design,” TJ said with a grin.

“What does it mean?” Arthur asked Margaret.

“You don’t get it?” TJ asked Arthur, rolling his eyes.

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