To an exile from the Southern states—lo, these fifty-four years—the sweet sound of a soft Georgian accent attracted me. When coming into town for this or that, I would notice Catherine, newly arrived to our little western town as she walked her dog, Sammy, a Golden Retriever/Basset hound mix (in my estimation). The woman wore black most of the time. I suspect the fashion choice was meant for simplicity: a black knit top and black leggings, white blonde hair falling to her shoulders, an exquisite complexion, and sporting large, gold hoop earrings. Like the sailor’s insurance.
The exact particulars of our introduction I cannot recall, as if she swept in between a breath and an exhale. She found work as a seasonal ranger at Devils Tower National Monument for a couple of summers. Living in Norway for seven years, she worked as a photographer for an advertisement firm, confessing she had come to dismiss the Norwegian social democracy for more conservative views, while calling herself “an old hippy.” Returning home to the very state I had left, Georgia, she taught at SCAD, the Savannah College of Art and Design. Catherine told me she had been married twice; a second husband had died in her arms.
Life conflated and conspired to render her a mystery. Reticent about her age, she often praised a supplement company for her youthful appearance. When invited to supper, she would make an effort to eat, but I could sense she really didn’t need sustenance in this manner. What she did require was the muse to create. This is what fed our Catherine. She once offered a class in creativity for several of us. In her workshop, Creatives-in-Training. Having no children, she had chosen the more expansive field with a wide-angle lens to capture her designs.
A series of photographs of our rural county’s one-room school houses was chosen to hang in the capitol building in Cheyenne for a period. A large and magnificent photograph of a feather, detailed to the nth degree, is now exhibited in our town museum. She offered to record her area friends’ traditional gathering each year, including herself only as “the photographer.” I am reminded of a meditation instruction: to imagine our awareness as a cameraman whose camera sees all, depending on how one pans or focuses down on a subject.
A penchant for the Japanese aesthetic of Wabi-Sabi imbued her blue and white cottage in town (and her person) with items carefully curated for beauty, minimalism, and finally, impermanence.
Catherine passed into spirit last week after a long illness, possibly brought on by a lengthy bout with covid. Her inscrutable expression once unmoored me, and only now do I suspect she lived one foot here and one foot there, wherever “there” is. What I do know is that she dearlyloved her good friend Walt. Among his myriad tender mercies, he planted flower gardens around her home, doing this work in-between his vocation of caring for our town’s flowers. A handmade sign, planted beside an Amaranthus, entreats people to—yes! Do not hurry, do not worry. Stop and smell the flowers! His Catherine, I suspect, blooms evermore as alily—incidentally, the name of her beloved white cat.
Braeburn Croft 