Love Matters

The narrow shed behind the house is where it happens. A pebbled driveway once fed it like a stream, but now it’s stranded among messy evergreens and broad-leafed weeds, white clover where the grass should be, a dangerous maze of earth concavities. You have to be mighty strong to lift its broken door. You have to care not one bit that the paint is peeling, inside and out, and that everything that belongs to him exists in raw adjacencies.

Downstairs: the battery-operated lawn mower, the architecture books, the clay sculptures, the kiln, the skulls, the tools (my father’s, his). Up the ship’s ladder: Two easels, tubes of oil paint strung up by paper clips, jars of brushes and mineral oils, a computer, a pair of speakers, books no arms can reach, and the distinguished society of his beautiful ladies—painted tiny, painted big, pinned to the walls that have turned black with kerosene.

For weeks now, he has traveled out early and stayed late to build himself a pair of tables upon which to set the saws that will one day shape the frames for his ladies in paint. The tables are complicated affairs (brackets, shelves, caster wheels) built with rudimentary things (the best two-by-fours he could wrangle, the least splintery plywood, the salvaged pieces of a broken bookshelf) and it is taking him awhile, taking longer than he imagined that it would.

To move one way, he must empty half the bottom floor onto the yard among the trees. To move another he again lifts, shifts, carries. I watch him wrangle more space out of no space from the bedroom window. I listen to his saw send wood dust into wheezing spews. I walk the long way, careful among animal holes, to offer small encouragements and praise, a few extra hands, when hands are needed. But mostly I leave him be—to his own thoughts and calculations, his own day dreams, his vision of frames surrounding the ladies who keep him company.

The question has been: How well do we know the ones we love? The question becomes: How much room do we leave another so that they might retain their mystery? Might fight their own bowed wood? Might curse their own long splinters? Might hammer their own tables and imagine their own worlds in which pristine homes are built for strange and lovely painted ladies?

Recent Kindnesses: Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday’s News: A Philadelphia Story (Tursulowe Press): FOREWORD Indies Editor’s Choice Prize in Fiction. My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera (Temple University Press), finalist for the 2025 Pattis Family Foundation Creative Arts Book Award. “Conversations with Women in Blue”: winner of the 2025 Creative Nonfiction Prize, The Porch. “Lightning Strikes,” finalist, 2025 Cleaver Magazine Visual Poetics Contest.