Charcoal Drawing

Art New England, Hamilton College (2022)

My mother had macular degeneration. It’s a kind of blindness, something that gets in the way of seeing the center. I think she saw a dark patch in the middle and more clarity in her peripheral vision. It reminds me of a door opened into a dark hallway. Wherever you look, in the center is the dark, the closed door.

We’ve had a hole in the screen in our back porch for a year or more, left over from a squirrel invasion. I keep looking at it, thinking that it’s unsightly, that we should get it fixed. But it’s expensive and there are so many other things calling for my attention.

I sat down to draw it. The peeling black duct tape—used to cover the hole over with another piece of screen—caught my attention, as did the draped screen.

One morning, a robin—and then its mother—got trapped in the porch, having found their way in through the large hole in the screen. We watched them flap around the porch, not sure why they couldn’t find the hole to exit. Later that day, a friend who was coming to stay with us arrived and we brought her to the porch. She was brave and patient enough to coax the birds, one-by-one, into her hands so she could release them. 

I wonder if this is what the hole in the screen looked like to the bird, as if the bird had macular degeneration. Not being able to see things in the center, it did not recognize the hole as a hole, a means of escape. As we all tend to see, or not see, when we are in a panic. We stumble our way in through the hole in the dark and then are trapped like the bird. Until, if we are lucky enough, we are guided out.