Viewing page 35 of 73

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

were to become soldiers marching into my mothers work battle. She was the captain, she made the war and we were going to fight.

Mom had a plan. Grannies house had to be fixed, changed, redone. As we settled into the earth of my grandmother's foundation, my mother was ready to move it. The list would go on and on, paint, fabric, flowers, furniture rearranged. The house became the arena to make war. The car had stopped moving, now we had to move the house. We were here to fight inertia. The house on Shannon Hill had settled. She wasn't here to rest in the landscape of my grandmother's body.

Social sciences said that in the early 19th century Americans were typically inner-directed, driven by personal ambition to be highly competitive, even ruthless, in their attempt to conquer their worlds. My mother had kept the goals from the pervious century alive.

As we were in the kitchen eating breakfast, artist William de Kooning was working in New York City. He was building large canvases in his loft on the Lower East Side. His painting had been abstract gestures but now there was a new subject He painted a series of paintings using the human figure. Complements of color were placed next to each other making the surface vibrate. De Kooning was painting a woman. His body moved through the canvas, this was action painting. Two large breasts faced forward, circles drawn out of black paint, the artist was freeing himself from external portraiture. The mouth was at an angle showing the teeth. Snarling. The eyes were large and the eyebrows were slanted. He was looking for an archetypal myth of a woman. The painting showed evidence of struggle. The portrait of the woman moved beyond oil paint. The expression of paint was calling all women trapped in the 50's. My mother was hearing the scream from New York. Arizona was inside De Koonings painting, turquoise, red, breast slashed on the surface of stretched cloth. We were all in my grandmother's kitchen and de Kooning was at work with my mother's portrait.

My brother Mike had sat down at the table. He slept in his striped T-shirt. My brother's clothes always looked too small. Was he growing too fast or was he ignored? As my mother made plans for reconstruction our eyes met across the table. We both looked at each other. We both got dressed and sneaked out the back door. We did not want to be in my mother's army of workers. She could bring us so far, and then we were on our own. Outside was the back yard and Shannon Hill to discover.
  
The morning in Arizona is like afternoon anywhere else. The sun is up and the temperatures already warm. The best shadows are in the early morning and late evening, making sunrises and sunsets to be photographed. The eight hours between these two events is just plain daylight. We quietly walked out into the back yard. Our view was up close looking first at the foreground, the yard, middle ground, the dirt road, and then the hills as the background. We first started with the foreground. There was a small hump in the yard where the old outside toilet used to sit. The grass on top always grew because the