A Quiet Gift

by susankda

Her artist friends wore colorful jackets. They wore silk scarves in brilliant hues, jewelry made from their own hands; large stones and silver expressions of joy, of passion, of wonder with the world around them. They wore skirts made of linen and gauze, long and flowing ikat or flowery blossoms floating along behind them, dancing and swirling in the sparkling sunlight that seemed to wash over these women as they moved from place to place.

Her clothes were plain. The simple white tee, the dark pants, did not announce her passions when she entered a room. Her art was tamer too, tamer than her friend’s art at least. Their boldness was a vivid brush stroke upon the canvas of her day and she harbored an inner fascination for the women that wore those colors, those patterns, those textures, women whose creativity spilled from their insides out and into the lives of everyone around them. They splashed their paints onto canvases, or smashed the cobalt and ruby glass to make marvelous patterns held together with lead; melted, bent and shaped to evoke a narrative of sorts, the same narrative that they expressed through their personal style.

Had she imagined her own story was a simple one? Maybe her clothes were misleading at best. Behind the white, the darkest of blue, that were her choices of clothing, there were the colors she used to paint the sky in the landscapes she tried to capture on canvas; the umber, the ochre, the ultra marine and yes, the white. The colors in the eyes of her children, the green, the gold, the cerulean; the colors that filled their home with warmth, the browns and blues and golds, the apricots and warm yellows that surrounded her as she went through the day.

Her personal style did not reflect her artist’s soul, as her friend’s did, it wasn’t in her to reveal herself for all to see as they passed her on the street. She was glad though for those artists who had embraced her, even as her lack of flair should have given them the impression that she was not like them. Instead, they saw through her, realizing that her creative self was a quiet gift she shared with only those who knew her well.