For Cedric 2.

Good God it's gorgeous out here. You ever been out west in springtime, Cedric? You wake up one morning dressed in your winter pajamas with a double comforter and you look out the window and it's as if the trees have suddenly exploded with tiny green buds tipped with white and pink and purple, and I tell you the buds are all over the place, and then there are little green shoots rising out of perennials you thought had been dug up and eaten by squirrels way back in October. Honest, Cedric, it was rainy and miserable just yesterday and now here I am swinging my bare feet out over the edge of the porch and licking a drippy orange popsicle with the sticky stuff running down my elbows (which has attracted all the floating red-and-gray dog hairs in the vicinity like a supermagnet) and wearing nothing but a t-shirt and yoga pants! Just when you think everything has gone to hell and you just cannot stand another day of rain and wet underwear and damp mildewey stink lingering in your kitchen coating your broccoli and salmon fillet with its sharp penetrating odor, and just when the dog has come in one too many times with wet ears that lead to ear infections because, for God's sake, of course I got stuck with the only dog in Washington that's practically allergic to water – just when life's all coming up around your ears and you have to bend your neck all the way back to suck in the air that remains above the rising tides, that's when you wake up on a day like this and remember why it is you even bother to breathe. The air is so sweet, so suddenly sweet with new green buds and birds hopping around in the branches that all there really is to do, at least at first, is sit and absorb the soft sun bouncing off the dew drops that glint on the teeny tiny green bits (which are really just everywhere, you know). Honest, Cedric, you must take a visit out here sometime in your life and soak some of this up, it's got to be the best spring there is anywhere. 

Maybe even better than back home. 

Oh you remember those delicious spring days after school was out and we'd all just tear out of the building and hold hopscotch races and watermelon-seed spitting contests! Or... well that may have taken place a bit before you awoke from....well you know. Anyway, Cedric, I have diverted from my purpose in writing this letter. I remember how you always seemed drawn by colors, mixing colors and using colors (and wearing them, God knows you wore a good half a mishmashed rainbow on the daily), but good God Cedric we all thought you'd go on to be an....Oh I don't know, a mailman or a...something, anyway. But a Painter! How free! How comfortable it would be to wake up mornings and think, I am a Painter and I will have my cup of coffee and then I will Paint something, because that is what Painters like me do. I think this, probably, because clocking in every day at work is tiresome and I am chained to my desk like a prisoner held hostage with a weight on my ankles and striped tattered clothes until five, when I am allowed to clock out. If I were to want a cup of coffee, it had better be before nine or after five, because otherwise I am stuck sipping that tepid brown-colored water that comes out of the machine at the offices. 

I do remember your pretty eyes, Cedric. They were stormy sea green flecked with tiny bits of gold and outlined in bold by your heavy lashes and I sort of always (in the back of my mind, you know) wished I could paint them and show them to you, because it seemed you never stopped to look at anything much, especially your own reflection. But, being the equivalent of a tone-deaf singer when it comes to art, I have only ever been able to sit and look and never touch a brush myself. But those eyes, and now a day like today, they make me want  – so badly – to be able to paint even a little. When I close my eyes to it though and let the colors dance for that splitsecond behind my lids...Honest Cedric, it's better than any painting I've ever seen. To answer your question-that-was-not-really-a-question, Cedric – yep, I've done that sort of a lot especially today because it's my eyes that are painting, and it's the closest I ever get to making art. 

Is that what you paint, Cedric? 

Nikki