On the kitchen counter on a recent Saturday morning, buried under drifts of schoolwork, grocery store circulars, sports bottles and two crude ceramic objets d’ art that have occupied the same spot on the counter for two years without explanation, I uncovered a large watercolor on an oversized sheet of white paper, pasted to an even larger black construction paper backing.
It was a stylized depiction of a fruit tree, its edges etched too sharply to have been brushed free-hand, with curly green leaves and dirt-brown trunk, dotted with matching green apples seemingly suspended in air and neatly colorized with brilliant hunks of thick paint. On each apple was one of our children’s names written in black pen.
I recognized it as a family tree, lettered in the style of an old-fashioned sampler and most likely related to our youngest daughter’s recent studies of the colonial era in early America. I imagined it prominently displayed as part of a Colonial Times exhibit, staffed by a pair of giggling girls in long, safety-pinned dresses and gingham bonnets, answering canned questions about women’s work in early America.
At the base of the family tree was a hydra of snaky brown roots and my wife Maria’s name intertwined with mine in big block letters, adorned with several lovey-dovey red hearts shot through with arrows. Below our double-bill marquee, written carefully across the page in thick black marker, were the words “Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right.”
I found that our youngest boy had painted a family tree as well, as part of the same Colonial Times project at school. It had the same stenciled and colorized family tree at the top, the same “Kevin and Maria” in 40-point second-grade scrawl at the roots of the tree, and a clever phrase in large stitch-style letters rendered in magic marker below our names. Reading from top to bottom, practical wisdom became snide commentary. “Kevin and Maria: A Fool and His Money Are Soon Parted.”
They had most likely learned that in the colonial era, women embroidered samplers to show off their stitching skill, often using family trees as a subject, sometimes combined with short, clever, practical truths. They’d been supplied a list of several candidate phrases. I’m glad they hadn’t chosen “Kevin and Maria: A Stitch in Time Saves Nine.” Because we have only four children.
In our front hall, Maria has artfully hung black-and-white copies of copper plates and tintypes from her ancestral family tree — great-, great-great- or near-great-grandparents and their posses, dour Germans or pre-Abba Swedes posing for pictures, scowling and uncomfortable in their best clothes that probably buttoned up a little tighter with each passing year. Their disapproving glares seem to follow us down the hallway, keeping watchful eyes peeled for monkey-shines, hanky-panky or other deficits of sensible discipline.
My favorite photo in the montage is of Maria’s dad’s family, Memorial Day, 1954. It looks to have been taken right after church; everyone’s all dressed up in dark wool suits and hats, on an apparently hot and humid late-spring holiday in north-central Illinois.
Maria’s grandparents, Joe and LaVaun, look to be in their late 30s, while Maria’s dad is a boy of 10, surrounded by seven grinning brothers and sisters with identical buck teeth and black glasses.
Joe, the dad, holds a baby girl in a frilly white outfit out in front of him, as if he’s discovered something alarming in her diaper. He’s frowning impatiently at the camera. I recognize that impatient frown from my personal toolkit of useful dad expressions.
Perhaps he’d been working until 2 in the morning the night before, and it hurts a little to blink. Maybe the women in his family had talked him into posing for this picture after church and now he finds himself standing in an asphalt parking lot baking in the hot sun in his best wool suit, holding his beautiful new baby daughter with some sort of flaming zeppelin in her diaper while the photographer takes his time with the camera.
Conversely, his wife LaVaun beams enthusiastically, with a mouthful of white stars and a grin so embracing and seemingly genuine that by some ineluctable law of family physics her smile completely neutralizes Joe’s impatient scowl.
I married someone with a smile like that. The apple seldom falls far from the tree. Kind words turneth away wrath. And a glass might be half full, but a diaper is never half empty.
— Kevin Pottinger and his wife Maria live near Portage with their four children.
