I have pursued many forms of creative expression in my lifetime. Maybe it is incorrect for me to say that I have pursued them at all; maybe they have pursued me. Ten years ago, when I made a decision to travel south and see if there was a way that I could assist my elderly parents, I packed up my world along with a series of beadwork projects in midstream. All of it landed in baskets and boxes that were trundled down to Los Angeles in a 1979 Volvo station wagon named Blossom. There, my little world remained hidden, quiet, and mostly patient.

My bewilderment, grief and shock over how I could possibly be back in Los Angeles after feeling that I had barely escaped it when I first left in 1972 was enormous. I begged for inspiration that would slake my creative thirst and heal the wound that was reopened with my return, but there were a few restrictions: it had to be very portable, as I was not exactly living in my own home, and it had to require little or no cash outlay. After a time, my almost unconscious murmurings were answered: a freshly broken Eucalyptus branch invited me into its life. The branch had broken out of a large, gnarled and stately tree which I walked beneath every morning at the onset of my sunrise circumambulation of a nearby but little known wildlife reserve. The very next morning after it fell to the ground, I easily peeled its bark, and then began to sand and sand and sand the gently arching beast. As I sanded, a presence appeared. Over time, one end of the branch began to emerge as the head of a bird. I was not the only one to see it in this way. Most who witnessed the journey that this stick and I were taking together, quickly commented about the bird. I had no urge to carve anything…I was simply compelled to sand.

I carried the stick with me wherever I went. After the initial peeling of the bark with a Swiss Army knife that my brother had given to me some twenty years before, sheets of various grits of sandpaper became my only tools and a manila folder containing them, my toolbox. I sanded while sitting in the park where the branch had first called out to me. I would sand while sitting in the patio outside Starbucks (which my friends and I called one of my “offices”), surrounded by cigar-smoking Entertainment industry attorneys and screenplay writers working on their laptops. Later on in the day, in this reclaimed desert of southern California, I would sit out in the backyard of my childhood home.

This portion of the time I was to live in Los Angeles, came after my mother had Crossed Over. Her death left my father and I to sort things out between us – not a small project. We had all thought it was my father who was preparing to leave this world and that is what precipitated my journey far away from my adult home and back to the place of my childhood. He and I had become fierce opponents without really knowing what the precise source of our disagreement was, long ago, beginning with my entry into adolescence. We each yelped in our respective ways, as raw nerve endings were disturbed easily by our clumsy exchanges with each other. The shock of mom’s death, coupled with the difficult nature of dad’s and my relationship was excruciating. By the time we found ourselves as housemates alone together, we had been having our often-fiery misunderstandings for a long, long time.

When I first began to go out into the backyard, my father would stand at the door, harping at me through the screen. What the heck was I doing out there anyway? In the beginning, I would invite him to join me. He always refused. After a while I stopped inviting him. He had little left of his eyesight, and not that much of his hearing. Dementia was taking up residence in him as a rather pushy, uninvited guest. We were finding our way through grief, through heartbreak, he and I. Our approaches were unrecognizable to one another. I would sit out in the backyard sanding and sanding. Mourning doves would sing the late afternoon into evening. Finally a breath of coolness would tinge the air.

Often he would holler at me, when was I coming back inside? I felt like a caged animal in that house. Having lived in several small but somehow spacious cabins in the woods of the northwest for years now, residence inside the modest, late 1940’s-era house chopped up into small interior spaces, in the midst of the San Fernando Valley was closer to a prison for me. This backyard served once again as my refuge. The same refuge I had sought as a child who would one day become a woman who loved to live in the woods.

One afternoon dad finally ventured out into the cooling dusk. I was sitting outside beneath the tangerine tree that he had planted when I was just a toddler. He sat in a lawn chair next to me and again began his heckling. What could I possibly be doing out here with a stick, he demanded. I was slowly beginning to learn how to translate my father’s language…his choice of words. I understood now, that really what he was saying was that he was lonely and wanted to connect with me. I said nothing, and handed him the four-foot long stick. He was shocked when he grasped it, as his failing eyesight had enabled him only to see the bare outlines of what I worked on. He let out a long, slow whistle. He held it in his baby-soft hands…hands that had not been used for any kind of manual labor for many, many years now that he was in his nineties.

He whistled again as he felt the entire length of the branch, carefully exploring every nuance of the wood. Finally, he moved his hands back to one particular spot where a twig had once jutted out from the main branch. True to his long and well-earned reputation as a man of few words, he handed it back to me saying, “Here”. My father had found a way to work with me on this project. He became my inspector. I would sand and sand, and then hand it over to him. He used his heightened sense of touch, which he’d come to depend on increasingly as his sight faded into the background of his awareness, to direct me to the next phase of sanding. We both sat this way, connected by this branch-becoming-bird, quiet for long stretches of time, serenaded by the songs that called out to the approaching dusk. Slowly, by way of our two sets of hands caressing in turn this that was once simply a broken branch, we were beginning to meet each other soul to soul.

Darkness would fall for my father earlier than for me. At best, he lived in near dusk even at the brightest times of the day, as macular degeneration continued to commandeer his vision. He would head back into the house…getting restless about nightfall coming on. It made him nervous when I stayed out back. He could not find a way for his sense of the evening to coexist with mine – could not imagine that dusk still reigned in my world if darkness had come to his. Finally I would give in to his reckonings about the hidden dangers lurking in the nighttime that was upon us. His agitation would only increase until I either went to bed, or every once in a long while, just got in my car and left the house. Either tactic worked.

Most nights I would simply head to bed early, on his schedule, and then arise before dawn to visit the only wildness I could find: the wildlife refuge that was, ironically, perched in the armpit of the busiest freeway in southern California. Most of the inhabitants of the San Fernando Valley did not know of the hundreds of acres slowly inhaling and exhaling just below the freeway…few people that I met had ever heard of its existence. Interestingly, my father was the one who introduced me to this place long ago. It was contained in an even larger tract of land, used as a flood control basin, to contain the wild waters of the flash floods that southern Californians call “rain”. Within the boundaries of this area are two golf courses, “my” wildlife refuge, a larger, more civilized and widely used city park and then off to one edge, of all things, rows upon rows upon rows of cultivated corn, soaking up the hot desert sun.

When I was a young girl, sometimes just dad and I would go to what was for me, quite an exotic place. We would go to the produce stand on the edge of the glistening cornfields, and buy FRESH corn on the cob for dinner. Dad grew up in the Midwest, in Detroit, and he knew what real corn on the cob tasted like. He would carefully and precisely pull ears of freshly picked corn out of mountainous piles and place them in the paper bag that I proudly held out for him. All those long years ago it was my father who introduced me to this place. Most people did not know of it even then, but he did. In his way, he gave it to me as a gift that would sit, mostly still wrapped up, to be opened by me when I, and really both of us, most needed it.