Around the winding Pennsylvania coach routes, paths and roads; during the snows of December, LJ marks her birthday…She is beautiful...

She came out of a small township, locked in rambling green hills, where the King of England, ignoring the travails and objections of the mighty native people, granted William Penn the vast, unending emerald forest.

She became a Painter, of the highest order, based in our beloved Chicago, “The City by the Lake.” In the first months of our friendship, I decided this was not a woman I could impress with anything but the substantive confidence in myself, and the ability to give her complete attention when she poured out her ideas about things. Eventually she knew I was locked in mind and body to a vast, middle region, and had never been east of the Mississippi.

When we talked about travel, a light would go on behind her green eyes when she heard about anything that could get her closer to the forest.

“We will go, and you will see the things that I did not want to leave.”

On a train from Chicago to Philadelphia she taught me the alphabet of “American Sign Language.” We molded our hands in configurations that imitated the letters, and with a slow determination, I saw the efficacy, and great good in this.

“Uncle Joe and you will hit it off. I know you will. You remind me of him.”

Uncle Joe was deaf, one child of a brood of 7 children, 3 of whom could not hear sound. His strong mother, a woman of intelligence and grit, saw the deaf children educated at the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf. They had all gone on to lead their singular, distinctive lives…moving resolutely through the world of the hearing.

_{Grandma Minnie, with some of the children, Bucks County, PA, 1920}

I was troubled. Not by any real fear, but by the din of my own ignorance. I sat in the train seat, practicing American Sign, imagining the man I would meet in a few hours.

The garden in back of the house, protected from the township road, was one of Joe’s prize accomplishments. We saw him bending down over the plants as we drove up.

Joe and I were introduced and I singed, “Glad to make you!”

He gave a high-pitched giggle and corrected my hands with his own hands. He watched patiently as I signed correctly. When I saw a rake lying off to the side, I picked it up, waved to get his attention, then I signed:

“Glad to rake you!”

Joe’s face went blank and he turned to LJ shrugging his shoulders. She told him I made a bad joke. Joe looked back at me, smiled politely then took my hand in his and shook it vigorously. We each instantly knew it would be a very fine friendship.

For Uncle Joe, the idea of rhyming words would not fit into his view of things. He told me “rhyme” had been explained to him once, and he tried to imagine what it meant, but it was just another explanation that came out of the “hearing culture” in it’s efforts to make deaf people act like everyone else. My jokes took a turn we could both understand, and the constant laughing formed a close bond that carried us through the long days.

I told him his signing was so fast. His hands were just blurs, but that was OK because the movements were beautiful to me. When Joe watched what I had to say, he would show patience, as he faced me, looking askance at my hands, smiling, and correcting my signs. He was so strong, and so good.

I found the weight of the same goodness in LJ…in the elegant way she expressed herself; the flair of her graceful hand movements. Her visual words danced with an inflexion that only affable spirits could fully grasp. I learned how Joe’s steady hand in raising her from an infant had formed the sweet, loving part of her character.

When Uncle Joe passed away, our days were lost for awhile, to the devotion we had felt, knowing he had loved us deeply, anticipating our arrival every summer, scrubbing the very walls of the farmhouse where we slept, safely tucked into the comfort his strength could never compromise.

In our earlier days, I often thought about the depth of her love for the countryside, and what LJ really meant when she told me the majority of Pennsylvania’s land mass was uninhabited.

“How could that be?” I asked. “Pennsylvania is an Eastern State. Everyone knows the east is crowded.”

She would smile gently and cup my hand in hers…

When I first saw the forests I knew her better for those wonders I had so reluctantly imagined. I was free of my suspicions of guile within her, so unfairly imagined. The long, difficult task…both of us winning trust, and the singular fears that we could so boldly lay aside, brought us closer, into this great, green passage.

I was mapping a locale in my selfish mind for her to reside, and my natural boundaries started to soften. I imagined being alone in the meadows and hills, but I vowed to enlarge that place for her, not wanting to leave, or to return anywhere without her, and for the first time in my life, my heart opened up like a vast, undiscovered, verdant clearing.

In the work she has done, creating worlds out of the stolid materials, pressing into the sobriety of blankness and encumbered certainty, there is a set of reasons to make a case against any doubt of her evolving creative territories. There is no one who has imprinted lofty ideas onto myself and her colleagues more than she.

To the present, through all the travails…through the pain of losing the elder folk, through the designs of malevolent forces where we have so doggedly prevailed…we remain walking on this marvelous journey, in splendid accord.