sketchbook stories: only you

alone again, naturally

This sketchbook story is the second in a summer trilogy of illustrations from my grandfather’s sketchbook. Read the first one here.

“I can climb way up in the hemlock trees and see across the valley. On rainy days I play underneath them and it’s like little houses, ‘cause the branches come right down on the ground. Oh, no…I’m not lonely, ever.”

—From The Color of the Country by my grandmother, Barbara Webster

Illustration by Edward Shenton, my grandfather, from The Color of The Country. My father was used as a model for the artwork and appears as a character in the book. Today would have been his 91st birthday.

My father, an only child. His parents, authors and artists. Growing up, he roamed the family farm. Reading nook in a hemlock tree; secret hideout in the old stone barn.

I was also an only. My siblings, characters from the books I read beneath the crabapple branches of the treehouse my father had built. At 13, my status changed when he remarried: a brother, another mother, another family.

At our core, we were solitude seekers, my father and I. Alone, but not lonely.

He passed away last June, just shy of his 90^th birthday. He was not alone. At his side, my stepbrother and I.

Not lonely, ever.