Charcoal Drawing

Art New England, Hamilton College (2022)

My mother had macular degeneration. I think she saw a dark patch in the middle and more clarity in her peripheral vision. It reminds me of a door. But I’m not quite sure how she experienced it. It’s a kind of blindness, something that gets in the way of seeing. Wherever you look, there 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’ve kept looking at it, thinking we should get it fixed, that it’s unsightly, it lets the bugs in, etc. 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 hole in the screen). We watched them flap around the porch, not sure why they couldn’t find the large hole to exit. Later that day, a friend who was coming to stay with us arrived. 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 – like the bird had macular degeneration and could not see things in the center. Therefore 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.