We had an art store and studio. One sunny summer day two elderly people came through the open door and stood in front of my desk. They introduced themselves as cousins and smiled warmly at me because I had married into the family. The woman had on a cotton housedress of the kind we do not usually see in California although there are famous photographs of farming women in California's Central Valley taken during the Great Depression wearing such dresses. Flowered dresses, modest, badly cut. She was tall, stout, white haired and beautiful. She had pink cheeks, bright blue eyes, lovely teeth in a wide smile. I had never seen such beauty in my life. Her husband was smaller. He smilled but there was no twinkle. He wore   suspender overalls, a work shirt and thick work boots. His face was sun browned and so were his hands but his arms from his wrists to the rolled up shirtsleeves were pale with golden hairs. My husband came from the back room and greeted them with wildly pumping handshakes, laughter and so much delight he was all but dancing and the man was not known to dance at all. Of course they were invited to dinner and to stay as long as they pleased. My husband took them into the studio in the back of the store and I went out to get food, to cook and to try to tidy  up our house.  

About five o'clock they trooped in. We had a modest little  house, a good library, a whole lot of paintings and sculpture. Both my husband and I were artists and not only were the walls hung with our  work but the work of other artists. Canvases were stacked here and there. Books everywhere, on tables, chairs, the floor, the mantle. I had done the best I could but beyond picking up the newspapers off the floor and running the vacuum around the carpet I had been able to to do little more than clear the clutter in the kitchen and get dinner cooked, the table set, the bed in the spare room changed.  

My husband slipped into the kitchen to get coffee and the man shuffled behind him quietly talking about things, "back home." The woman took  few steps beyond the front door. She stood in one place with a look of reverence, of wonder. It was as if she had found herself in a palace with golden furniture, with walls of amber, with paintings by Rembrandt. Her face was aglow as if lit by some inner light. I was so startled by her beauty and intensity that I too stood still. I gaped at her.  

"Books," she said,"Books." " Paintings, so many paintings." And again, "Books, books." Tears streamed down her wonderful face.  

She seemed to force herself out of her trance. She helped me get the food on the table. She joined her husband in bringing my husband up to date on their dozens of aunts, uncles, cousins, second cousins, grandparents and children.  

After dinner I came out of the kitchen to find her alone in the living room, standing in front of the fireplace with that look of awe, with that glorious expression on her lovely face. She came and sat very close to me on the couch and began to talk. I was not surprised at her warm appreciation of myhusband's work. She had known his work for years. They were skillfully executed representational works. I cannot remember   anyone who did not like them.  I was astounded at her comments on my work.  My paintings were abstract, very large, and colourful. Almost entirely they were ignored except  for the kind of sophisticates one finds around museums of modern art or galleries given to showing experimental and abstract work. I not only wanted to cuddle her in appreciation but I did. I loved her. She was old and extraordinarily alive. There was little reflected in her body movements. The people in that clan did not dance. They did not make any body movements that would be seen as being giddy  and unseemly. It was all in her face and in the quick and gentle movements of her hands. There were no wide-armed gestures, just the fluttering of hands, quick, pointing. I saw a strange cupping of her hands as if she were  collecting precious stones, jewels, things of enormous value. I saw her glowing face with her  eyes seeming to eat up everything in the room, every painting, piece of furniture, every book on the shelves, on the floor, the tables and chairs.  

In the morning they left, the woman casting a long, longing look back at our house as they were escorted to their car.  

I think it must have been the next summer that we were in Upstate New York visiting my husband's parents. I insisted on calling on Raymond's cousin, actually his mother's first cousin. I had brought a  book for her, one of those great big  books full of coloured prints of master pieces from ancient to modern times.  

Their home was a little wooden house, sparcely furnished. Everything was old  and well used. The home-made braided rugs were almost worn out. The dinner plates did not match and all were worn and scratched, a few chipped. The floor and windows, and everything else ,were scrubbed clean. There was a bible on a  little shelf by itself and a row of old school readers lined up on another shelf. Except for some photographs there were no pictures. There was a middle aged daughter I had not been told about. She was mentally retarded. The clan never spoke openly, if at all, about members who were not normal, who were "different." Except for a few guarded comments  from my husband I never heard talk about Down's syndrome  babies, no mention, ever, about cases of senility or insanity. Her eyes downcast, the daughter sat with us, but she did not speak.  

After dinner the men wandered off to look in at the animals. We two women took cups of tea and went to sit outdoors on the front steps. I asked about her daughter and  I told her I had a brother  who had been born mentally retarded. Clutching to her chest the book I had brought  she began to talk.  

She had married at the age of seventeen. It was not long before she realized her husband was mentally slow. It took longer to realize her baby was "different." She had been given only one piece of furniture in all the years she had been married.  It was the rocking chair that her husband had brought home after the baby was born. She had endured six years of looking after her nasty mother-in-law in that old woman's  last years. The only books she had were the readers she had rescued from the dump after the school had thrown them out, and her bible. My gift  was the first time anyone had ever given her a book. And then weeping and weeping she told me another part of her story. In front of us was about a quarter acre of cleared land, just plain dirt, scraped clean, not even a sprout of new grass or weed on it.  Off in another direction were  the chicken houses,the barn,  the pig pen, the farm implements.  

She told me that every year she made an arrangement on that quarter acre. She made little paths and she showed me where they would be. She strewed pebbles on them, pebbles she brought up from the brook.  She planted flowers, rhubard, patches of wheat, barley, oats. She placed bundles of grain here and there, singly and in groups. She placed stalks of straw  by the paths, around the garden beds, between the plants. She used old fence boards, chicken wire and feathers from the chickens she plucked, stones that had been tossed from the grain fields,  anything she could find, as part of her design.  

As she talked she began to wander  over the yard telling me where she had placed this and that. I followed her. I became aware she was describing a huge abstract work of art. She did not plant her flowers in the way traditional among the farmers' wives where they lined straight paths, usually starting at the front door. They certainly did not plant rhubarb in the front yard, not to mention patches of wheat and other grains. Her plants were integrated into her design, an important part of the whole thing. I never saw one of her creations, but she described them in such a way I knew exactly what they  must have looked like. They were huge and glorious works of abstract art. They were cousins to the abstract expressionistic work popular at that time. She understood abstraction. She understood organization, beauty, creativity, innovatrion and above all she understood how to express her own vital self. Her strewn straw was used as most artists would use line, lines drawn by a brush. She understood these things without any input from anyone at any time. She simply produced a magnificent work of art every year. No one ever commented. She knew why of course. One did not comment on strange behavior. One hid the different. She could not even complain when every year her husband scraped and ploughed her work away. It had recently been ploughed away because we were coming to visit. She fell into my arms and told me I was the only person who had listened to her, who knew what she had tried to do, who understood.  

I never saw her again, although we did write to one another, warmly and intimately, until we had word she had died. I believe I was friends with a great genius.