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Eliza was 84 years old and wrote poetry every day on flattened envelopes she kept pressed in her Christian Science Book.. It was so stuffed with loose pieces of paper it was shaped like a fan. She took pleasure in reading poems to me.
As I sat and listened to her poetry, I looked about her tidy kitchen . My eye traced the outline of the little iron Bridge Beach stove that had no upper storage areas. All four legs rested on bricks to add height to such a short stove. A five-foot chimney flue was bent into a hole in the wall and a box of wooden matches hung behind the stove next to the dish towel rack. Fuel was stored either in a wooden apple basket or a battered Del Monte cannery cardboard box.
A wooden sewing spool, dangling on a string from the naked light bulb above the stove, helped for her find and turn on the light in darkness. She just waved her arm around in the dark in that general area until she bumped the spool. She then had to catch the swaying spool in the dark so she could pull the string.
She had been living in this little cottage since 1918 and the kitchen portion of the house was added as a lean-to structure. My eyes passed over the room as I listened to her read those many poems. I noted the crack where the sloping kitchen ceiling joined the original old house. It was obvious this marriage of buildings was in the process of a nasty divorce. Eliza blocked the cool drafts coming from this fissure by stuffing the cracks with rolled-up copies of the Christian Science Monitor newspaper.
Her lace curtains were strung onto a javelin used when her daughter was in high school and that daughter was nearing 70 years old. A large loose piece of linoleum covered but one-half of the kitchen floor and the edge had a nasty bulge in the main traffic area. An oval throw rug covered this tripping hazard.
I studied this room many times as I listened to her read poems and I wanted to capture it on a canvas. When I asked her permission, she seemed pleased at the idea and so was I. It was February and too cool to paint outdoors. I could be productive indoors and she knew she had a built-in listener as she read her poems, a listener who wouldn't be reaching for the car keys too soon. Poets need listeners like painters need viewers.
It took several visits, and at least a hundred poems, but I painted a picture of each end of her kitchen as she murmured and explained her many verses.
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