Yellow
by Judith Kitchen
(Reprinted by permission of the author from Distance and Direction, Coffee House Press, 2001, this essay first appeared in the Great River Review.)

Lately the rush hour traffic begins before you have to put your headlights on. The season’s turned. I’m thinking back to summer solstice, thirty-five years ago, in Denmark. Hard to picture the elderly couple, by now most probably dead, who took us up the coast to where we could look across water and see the coast of Sweden–lined with a thousand small fires–holding darkness at bay. So why do I, now, picture the folding table they pulled from their trunk, the starched white tablecloth, the pure white porcelain cups of steaming coffee as we stirred the night away? Why do I hear the clink of spoon on saucer and the silence between us, not awkward, but the companionable silence of people who do not speak each other’s language, so smile and gesture, turning inward to where words find their isolated echoes? Who could have known then that we should memorize that couple’s name, their faces, the wrinkled backs of their hands, the man’s slight limp as he set up the folding chairs, the woman’s white hair, her pride in the silver coffee pot into which she poured the coffee from the thermos before she poured it onto our cups. The next night there would be another family, another country. Soon we’d be eating fresh cherries overlooking the Rhine. And later we’d have the thrill of crossing the wall into East Berlin where two guards with machine guns would take our passports and make us spill the contents of our pockets and handbags onto the table until everyone laughed. Even that did not seem all that unusual. We were young, and summer was wearing on. I had a wedding to go to–my own–and summer school in London. Barbara Hepworth and Benjamin Britten were still in my future. Everything stretched before me, like a clean linen cloth. There was nothing to recapture then, the longest day of the year. The slow sun sinking into the sea was just another distant bonfire.

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The Separation of Work and Thought
by Judith Kitchen

Never ask a man a question when he’s cooking. Not if you want to eat, that is. He’ll stop whatever it is that he’s doing, turn to you and begin to talk. He will talk it through, maybe even digress a bit, but never mind, because you won’t be listening. You’ll be looking at what is happening on the stove–the boiling over, the burning up–or you’ll wonder if he notices that the tip of the knife he was holding is coming dangerously close to his eye as he talks. Or you’ll simply start to get hungry again.

Men, I’ve decided, cannot think and work. Which is, perhaps, their genius. Women have learned to think and work; or perhaps we don’t have to learn this because, long ago, it was evolutionary. We ponder as we wash the dishes. We contemplate as we peel the potatoes. We meditate over the laundry. Still, even though we pretend that separating light from dark comes as second nature, there is the moment when we stop, pull one blouse out of the washer, saving it for a lighter batch. The train of thought stops too, though we may pick it up again. But what has been lost in those few seconds when the mind switched gear, rescued the blouse from certain ruin? I like to think that my best thoughts would have occurred right then–if only I had been allowed to have them.

 My husband stops work in order to think, and still the colors run or the cotton shirts shrink, so maybe he stops thinking in order to work as well. Besides, his job is thinking.

All this thinking (while not working) comes from the photograph I’ve rescued from whatever obscurity it was enjoying between the green leather bindings of my mother’s album. It’s almost impossible to describe, but I rise to that challenge. Dead center, a young woman wearing a dark hat, in shirtsleeves, is sitting on what, under very close examination, appears to be a sled. If you look hard, you’ll see the runners, almost lost in what she has piled around her. They’re difficult to see because there is no snow, or almost no snow, underneath the sled, though snow appears to be melting in patches on either side, the ground dappled as though with shadow. Behind her, three small trees (well, really their trunks and a smattering of leaves) cut the vertical plane.

Leaves? Snow? An early snowfall, I would guess. Surprise snowfall, though behind her an expanse of white and then a line of tiny houses at its far edge suggests a small lake, or a very large pond. If so, the frozen expanse has welcomed the snow, so maybe it’s late spring–again, a surprise. All I know is that she’s wearing shirtsleeves, and she doesn’t appear to be shivering.

All this comes later, though. At first the eye is drawn to the objects she is holding, the odd assortment of items: the pure thingyness of it all. Quickly recognized: cooking tins with lids and round wire handles–large tins, the twelve to twenty quart variety, and behind them what looks like more old buckets. A shovel: the blunt-ended shovel you can’t quite call a spade, more like the kind to shovel coal. Not a snow shovel. The kind that looks a bit like a hoe. And behind her, angling up like a fourth tree, a broom: a sturdy collection of twigs bundled tightly at the bottom. Rough and ready–a broom for the ground, not for a floor. She’s holding something that looks like a bellows, but isn’t. There’s more I can’t identify, plenty more.

But that comes later, too. Because, on her lap, a phonograph. Yes, the old-fashioned kind with a handle to wind it, and a large round needle to place on the record when the winding is done. It’s open on its hinges, so you can see the needle on the middle of the platter, tipped a little on her lap. Or maybe not tipped, since the whole scene tips, and to straighten the lake is to nearly topple her over, so you realize the camera itself must be at an angle. Or something.

The questions abound. Who is she, her hair hidden in her hat? Is it short, or just tucked in, and under? Who is she, this warm, snow-struck day? What is she listening to? Her mouth is pursed and her eyes are slits. She closes her eyes in order to hear. Or squints into the sun.

But the music? It crosses the snow-covered pond, carried through icebound air. It picks its way through the long-lost elms, a tenor from Italy settling in the tops of the trees, swooping in, like starlings, then sticking around. She winds the handle, and it rises again, lifting raucous from branches to fill the sky. The snow recedes under its onslaught. It is summer in Italy. Summer in his voice.

If she is working, what is she doing? If she is thinking, what are her thoughts? There is no context. I cannot separate work from thought. Maple sugar, I speculate, but then why the shovel? the broom? Why, for heaven’s sake, the phonograph? You can’t quite call it a victrola. Were they fooling around, fooling us, caught in the twenty-first century? Did they posit our presence? And who is this “they”?

Clearly she is not alone. No one in any photograph is alone. There is someone there, at the other side, receiving the image. Someone who winds the film. Who can ask her to move her foot, lift the handle, tip to her left so her head is caught between two trees–they lift from her shoulders like wings. Someone who squints back, in turn, thinking of us. Did they pile on everything they could find that had a handle, seat her on the sled, and wait for seventy years?

You think these are the thoughts I might have had between water and air? Between blouse and not-blouse-any-longer? What I would conjure if I didn’t think as I worked? You think I am fooling you, fashioning a photo of words, my own jar in Tennessee, so to speak? Though surely, this would be its opposite. Disorderly. Preposterous. You think I could make snow litter the ground like a large flock of pigeons? Put yourself in my place: just look.

Think of the time it took to amass the objects, to lug (or drag) them here, to the edge of a lake, one day in late October (or early May). Who has time for such an elaborate ruse? But it can’t have been planned, because who could plan this snow? Or else, who could have foreseen its melting? Spontaneity. In the end, that’s what this photograph is about. About two people with enough time on their hands to respond to the snow in some original way. People who make that kind of time. They go about gathering everything they can find to make a visual riddle. Two women, I suspect, willing to go on a lark. Two women who have suspended their work for this one afternoon of pure, unadulterated thought: this puzzlement to provoke the brain.

Historians or dealers in collectibles might be able to tell the year with pinpoint precision, but I’m going to guess 1929–the year that my mother’s work was teaching high school in a small town in Michigan. The year after she had left the farm for good, and years before her work included husband, children, household chores. My mother is free–maybe it’s Halloween, maybe Spring vacation, Easter Sunday looming and now all this snow to contend with. Hurry, while it lasts. At any rate, they’re giddy with freedom. And mischievous. The camera is new, something her new job allows her. Or it’s borrowed, and before they return it, they think of one last shot, one that will take some organizing, but still, bound to be worth it. They’ll show the photograph to their colleagues, see how long it takes them to figure it out. They’ll watch the men especially, watch their minds make a beeline for the facts. This is their conjecture: the women will spiral around the image, burrow toward solution, but the men–they will either get it quickly, or not at all.

Or maybe they are simply acting, alive in the moment, full of the visual fun of the moment. Something to remember long after it’s over. Something to retrieve from lives that have filled with what can only seem like women’s duties.

My father once told me he had had to decide which of two friends he would ask to marry him. They were both young schoolteachers, both attractive, both just a little too old to still be unmarried. He liked each of them. On thinking, though, he had finally decided on the one with the greater sense of play. The story disturbed me, mostly because I did not recognize my mother in his final choice. I knew the other one–my mother’s first best friend, my Aunt Peggy as I was allowed to call her, my “maiden” aunt–and she always seemed so carefree, so quick to laugh. Surely he meant it the other way around: he’d chosen the one who seemed more serious, more instantly responsible.

I remember my mother at the sink, my mother running the vacuum, my mother ironing the shirts. Where is my father? Safely outdoors, doing what men do, which seems to be puttering in his garden–an inordinate amount of time spent for the asparagus and corn produced. How much time does asparagus take? It pushes out of the ground each morning, phallic and ferocious. The next day you cut it–a clean, diagonal cut with the knife, near to the ground. When you’re tired of asparagus, you simply don’t cut it one day, and in a week it will reach out its feathery arms, a froth of green over the forgotten bed. And how much for corn? After the initial nursing under inverted glass bowls, there’s little to do. You hardly need to hoe once the stalks have grown above the height of the weeds. Corn is simply a lesson in waiting. A lesson in sunlight and rainfall and fear of an early frost. Corn measures out the summer, and when it is finally there–tassels bending in the breeze, yellow ear hidden inside its green jacket–summer is gone.

My sense is that my father was thinking. That he took himself outdoors in order to have the luxury of his own mind. Not the mind–the physicist’s mind–that the company bought and paid for. But his own sweet time to meander through what it was he thought of the world, and his own life within it. I understand that need. He always looked as though he were working and thinking, but I suspect he rather carefully chose the vegetables that take little thought. Fruit, as well. Just how hard is it to watch the raspberries move from green to red, to let apples suddenly appear, like finches, in the high branches? His biggest harvest, he always joked, was rocks–and he would appear with two pails full to dump at the garden’s edge. It just may be possible to pick up rocks and think at the same time.

If my mother was thinking as she ironed, she did not seem to be, though my own experience would prove otherwise. I have no idea what her thoughts might have been. When I was older, she was adamant about why to iron the collar first, though I have yet to see the sense in those instructions. If there were secret compartments in my mother, they were far too deep for us to penetrate.

You’ve seen it, though. You’ve seen the photograph, its amazing contrivance, its seventy years of secrecy. So tell me, why am I so certain she was there? Is it because I recognize the results of her prodigious energy? Sense someone I never knew, but half suspected? The phonograph winds down, the tenor’s voice slurs to distortion. Her sudden laughter fills the scene. She squints her nameless friend into focus. In her invisibility, she is everything at once: ringleader, instigator, hidden director of the play. Offstage, she snaps one answer to her mystery.