Sunday, July 20, 2014

Josephine's mandalas: #2 of 21



















A house is a home A house is a home A house is a home A house is a home A house is a home A house is a home A house is a home A house is a home A house is a home

Statement or question?

(Click on image to see additional details)

What house or home could my mother have been thinking about?  As a 20-year-old woman in the 1930s she lived in Hermosa Beach, California, after moving from St. Paul, Minnesota, not long after her mother died of gallbladder cancer in bed at home.   My mother came to California with her father, her brother and sister-in-law, and her young niece.  She lived in several different places in L.A. County and entered a brief marriage some years before marrying my father in 1948 and moving to the Marina District in San Francisco where she and my father lived in an apartment until I was born in 1949.  A week after I was born, we moved south 20 miles to San Mateo where we lived in another apartment.  Mostly because of my father's job, we moved three times after that, ending up in Redwood City, California, in 1957, and that was where our home/house was for the next 16 years.

Could she have been thinking about all the houses and homes that she had lived in throughout her life?  I don't see any evidence of her last home in her drawing.  She and my father lived for 20 years in a small house on the bluffs above the Pacific Ocean in Gualala, California, a tiny coastal town at the southwestern border of Mendocino County, right next to the Gualala River.  There was plenty of space between houses there, and the vast Pacific Ocean dominated the landscape.

I don't see any sign of the ocean in her drawing, but I do see what might be a river or lakes.  She grew up near the Mississippi River in the land of 10,000 lakes,  Maybe that is an image from her early memories in Minnesota.

Is the tilt intentional?  I thought I had looked closely at this mandala previously.  Just now I can see the entire image as a sun with a face.  There is so much to see in my mother that I couldn't see when she was alive.

Is a home a house?


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

A very interesting meditation and question.