Prose Sketch: Who Am I? Page Two, As E-Mailed To JustSandi from Eve Adam
When I was a child I loved to draw. I drew a lot of sunsets and sunrises, and when people asked me which they were I said they could be either. I have always enjoyed ambiguity, even when I didn't know what the word meant. I also drew a lot of trees. All these were in color by crayons or watercolor.
My grandfather bought me an adult's book about art. It was a very large book, but since it was about art, it had many pictures. As I got older, I learned to read the text that went with the pictures. The pictures of horses were very interesting to me, and there were suggestions on drawing horses by drawing circles and connecting them. At one time when I was pre-school age we had a horse that a neighbor took care of for us. I thought it was ours, but it could have been his, just brought to our place to do the plowing. I never got good (by adult standards) at drawing horses.
When I was older I would look in the mirror and study how a face should look. I drew pencil sketches of girls' heads, using myself as a model. I liked to make clay models of people and pets. Three dimensions were always easier for me than two. Sculpture was easier than drawing, and I was puzzled by the comments of the people who admired my sculptures. They would always say that sculpture was more difficult than drawing. I remember looking at my sleeping kitten and making a duplicate of her in clay. I once looked at a picture of Lincoln in a book about presidents for the front view and a penny for the side view. Between the two of them I made a bust of Lincoln. Someone borrowed it and never returned it.
My favorite piece was of figures attached to each other. It was of a family group: a mother, father, son, daughter, and baby. It was almost finished. I had it in the milk house to dry slowly. The milk house was a small stone building left over from the original time when the house was built. It was needed before electrical refrigeration was invented. We had never torn down this structure when my grandfather and grandmother remodelled the house.
The sculpture of the family meant a lot to me because it represented the family I hoped to have someday. I was so sad when it fell down off the ledge I had put it on to dry slowly. When it fell, that, too, was symbolic of the family I was to have someday. That someday is now in the past. The baby was never born because I was not happy in the marriage and did not want to prolong it. The girl and boy grew to adulthood, but the boy took his own life at the age of twenty-one. The girl moved two time zones away from the mother (me) and the father found another woman to marry the first chance he could get. If I had known how the real life version would turn out, I would have been even sadder at the destruction of the sculpture.
~~~EVE ADAM April 2001~~~
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Eve Adam, a.k.a. Harmonic Eve