Sawdust

I tell my mom that, to me, she smells like sawdust.

Ripped fresh from the wood molding.

My mother can use a circular saw as if the blades were just her fingers softly caressing the pieces of wood. She made something that looked inherently violent a labor of love. She is the reason I subconsciously refuse to accept that the triangle is the strongest shape in nature; her squares and rectangles of walnut and burgundy were the first perfect thing I ever knew.

My mother is the reason I will never run from a chainsaw at a haunted house or jump when someone starts cutting wood. That sound is as comforting as the sound of her running the vacuum obsessively before company coming. She is the reason I make lines in the carpet of my apartment.

I remember being excited to take trips to the frame shop, a bleak, not at all child-friendly warehouse filled with molding and large uncut colorful mat boards. That warehouse was my castle.

It was probably the only store we went to where she never told my brother and I “don’t touch anything.”

We touched everything.

My brother and I would first seek out the cheap 50 cent vending machine carefully hidden amongst long piles of wood. The warehouse felt like a maze that only my mother could rescue us from.

On our quest to get grape soda, I would carefully run my fingers along the flawless intricate designs of the precut wood, wondering if my mother would the buy the ornate antiqued molding this time.  Wondering what those long pieces of wood would frame.

Sometimes, they framed my childhood. My dreams. My aspirations.

My mother made me appreciate art before I knew what art was, pointing out and explaining the small numbers on the limited edition prints she so carefully framed.

My mother can cut glass so beautifully that it looks like it never was cut at all but rather it kindly separated itself to bend to her will.

Our garage became a workshop and a waiting room.

I would huddle next to an old kerosene heater that I was sure would one day burn down our house, patiently watching my mother work.

My mother sounds like a piano. She can pluck notes with a joy and a ferocity that should never be able to accompany each other. She plays the piano as if each note represents a sacrifice.

My mother can play like her soul hurts for things only notes can verbalize. I didn’t realize that she could even read music until I was a teenager. Her notes don’t need a notation. They just are. Existing in the abject and somehow settling deep enough to make you cry and laugh at the same time.

Sawdust sounds like the forgotten remains of something broken and deconstructed.

Sometimes, I think I am sawdust.

But then I realize, my mother deconstructed and then reconstructed wood too carefully to leave something broken. She constructed me too.

My mother has shaped my artistic philosophy with her own passions and I love her for that.

I want to create art that sounds like music and smells like sawdust.

-les