Unmoored
At this juncture when I am miles beyond “This is not Kentucky,” “This is not Texas,” and even “This is not North Carolina,” I drive around on the weekends if only to assure myself that I am someplace familiar, someplace like home. Lately, I find myself in Wyeth country.
Christina's World
My first travels to Wyeth Country began in my teens in the early 80s. I became enamored with a copy of Christina’s World that hung in my aunt’s house. At that time I had no idea that Christina could only drag herself across that field. My sister convinced my boyfriend to buy the print for me. Suddenly, I found myself in Wyeth country in the privacy of my own bedroom.
You are in line for tomorrow
In the late 1980s, I flew to NYC to spend a day in Manhattan with my sister. I was not supposed to end up in front of Christina in the MoMA. As fate would have it, after standing on line for an hour with my sister at Sotheby’s (we were going to see the Duchess of Windsor’s jewels), we reached a sign that told us we were in line for the following day’s exhibit. We had no choice but to retreat to the MoMA.
Breeders' Cup
In the early 1990s, a cold autumn rain fell outside the window of my hospital room as I labored over a name for my firstborn. Ellis Anne? Certainly not, the monogram would be E-A-T. Ella Elizabeth? A family name, for certain. My father was at the Breeders’ Cup. My baby’s father had gone home with a cold. In my solitude, I settled instead on Ella Christina. Now, I wonder, was I returning to Wyeth for comfort at that vulnerable moment?
Faraway
This fall, as I drove my son from Lancaster to Reading, I noticed the stark brown landscape of Berks County and thought, Wyeth! The following week, as I poked around in my attic for the first time, taking stock of my possessions now confined to cardboard boxes the movers had stowed, I came upon a framed poster the home’s previous owner had left behind. I pulled it down from the beam to get a closer look at the front, which faced the eaves. To my surprise it was Wyeth’s Faraway, the squirrelly little lad with his knees pulled to his chest, his head covered by a coonskin cap.
"Depths of dirt and earth"
This weekend I traveled closer to Wyeth country than ever before, quite unexpectedly, but not uncertain of my arrival. The dotting of the bleak winter landscape with white farmhouses, the gentle roll of the hills, the quilted land, where subtle changes from one plot to the next divide the earth into rectangular grids of varying shades and heights of vegetation, had a familiar quality. That evening I learned I was only miles from Chadds Ford, Wyeth’s birthplace. In my library I found one of the Wyeth books my sister had given me and read what Wyeth had to say about Pennsylvania: “In Pennsylvania, there’s a substantial foundation underneath, of depths of dirt and earth.”
In Kentucky, bluegrass was home, in Texas, concrete, and in Carolina, pine. Here, in the bleakness of a Pennsylvania winter, I find myself intrigued by the still, brown earth. Graphic art and music certainly can coexist, but when I look at a Wyeth, or when I view the landscape in Wyeth country, all that comes to mind is silence: no score, no lyrics. Just silence.
