I started a new urban landscape painting this morning. The canvas had an outline on it that I made several months ago and I was tired of looking at it sit there, undone. Now I have two semi-finished paintings of an intersection I ride my bike through a lot. It’s Cincinnati at I-10, where the freeway is two story. I was driving on the upper deck the other day and for the first time was aware of when I crossed Cincinnati Avenue.
When I was researching my family history I found that my great-grandfather spent his high school years on Cincinnati and Elmendorf, just down the street from the freeway. Their house has since been demolished, which breaks my heart when I think about it. My grandmother had an old pillar that sat in her dining room. She had a cool, wooden statue of Jesus and a large rosary wrapped around him that sat on top. She’d had it for years and when I was telling her about the old house she turned and pointed to the pillar.
“That was from the front porch,” she said.
Man, those moments, when things come together and you realize, they really did live here, make my head swoon. There’s a photo of the house, and old victorian, with pillars that ran around the front porch. It’s true. They really lived. They existed once. It gets emotional, genealogy work. I know why people get passionate about it. I’ve read stories that have left me weeping.
They say that trauma can be multigenerational. Is it possible that I’m carrying grief, or emotions, that they originally felt? I feel like I loved that house even though it was demolished before I was even born. And what brought me here? I currently live a few blocks from there. I wasn’t even born in Texas, but here I am, blocks away from my great-grandparent’s childhood homes (my great-grandmother lived across the street on Elmendorf).
When my grandmother died I found a photo that had been cut out of the newspaper. There were three women around a tree that had just been planted in honor of my second great-grandmother (the mother of my great-grandfather who lived in the house with the pillars). At the bottom of the photo it said the tree was planted in her honor, for all the Woodlawn Lake beautification projects she’d helped with. I can’t help wondering if that tree is still there, on the island at Woodlawn Lake Park (mere blocks from my house). It’s weird how we get drawn to places.
I want to bring something to my Cincinnati and I-10 paintings, something personal. I want to capture all the emotions I feel about my ancestors. I think about them a lot when I walk or ride my bike around the neighborhood. What was it like for them? They moved to that house from Stockdale where my second great-grandfather was a pharmacist. Maybe I’ll take some time to think about them and their lives before I work on them again.