When I left Portland six months ago, the process of packing took eight full weeks. A two-story house filled with memories, furniture, and artwork, all with a deadline for dissemination. Things I’d made, loved and saved needed to be purged.
I ripped through storage, ruthlessly trashing drawings and half-stitched clothing ideas. 2D items worthy of salvation were hastily pasted into scrapbooks. Paintings deemed somewhat interesting were auctioned online. The entire house was a labeled, sorted frenzy of STUFF.
It was a hard, cold time of harsh decisions, made even more painful by my cat’s death. I took her collar and left it under her favorite tree, under a little bush.
This tree was a favorite of another animal, a fat and furry squirrel. He was named Meatball, a corn-loving dominator, defending the holy peanut butter-slathered corn from other, treeless, poverty-stricken squirrels. Meatball was the last family member left.
Until Meatball revealed himself to be a female and disappeared quickly thereafter. Nothing was as it seemed. All expectations were off. Life was leaving me.
I could only rely on the trees. I would put on sneakers and my hoodie to embark on a raging, rejected and chilly run when I ran out of tape or Sharpie juice. I’d tear through the Oregon parks, then slow to a walk, looking up in tree branches to hear squirrel chatter, the little nervous voices stirred up by a human presence.
I was leaving the Oregon trees soon and I decided to leave something to them.
All the disjointed, experimental paintings that were so hard to throw away but unworthy of in-home display could find another place, to shout out to forest wanderers like myself, people looking for teeny signs of life and communication among the planted giants. I began taking paintings, a hammer and nails on my runs, smuggling them in a tote bag, seeking and running and looking for the right opportunity to put up my shout out.
I felt bad about nailing the paintings directly into the trees. It was loud and weird when someone noticed my work. A young woman stops short from a sprint to reach into her awkwardly large tote bag and begin nailing a bizarre painting to a mature tree in the middle of a park.
Not entirely comfortable pounding paintings into live wood, I decided to nail paintings into street posts instead.
I took 3D sculptures and dioramas I’d documented and left them under bushes, trailed dolls across sidewalks, tucked little sculpey people into knotholes.
I was giving bits to the city against its will. I was leaving a mark on the wood and pine of Oregon, the same way it carved its depressing, rainy, obstinate habits into my life for five years.
The paintings may be gone now, and I’m sure the ones on cardboard have disintegrated. But like the fading of acrylic on wood, the pain of Portland is fading away as well.
