how she came to be - (Lil'Ian)

In the cabin where she grew up hangs a picture her mother painted before she left. Lillian always felt there was a message in this painting, some kind of signal to explain what went wrong. She’d study it with her eyes and follow the ridges with her fingers, feeling for a language like brail. The painting is of a leveled landscape, gnarled with trees and brush. The greens and browns and yellows and blues all come together in intricate, frenzied knots. The only thing that makes sense about the painting are the little vertical strokes of green you can see jutting out of the rubble in lines swaying up and down over the undulating land in a tight grid across the canvas. “Baby trees,” Lil’s father said when she asked him what they were. She was eleven years old. Like me, Lil thought. And she was right. For out of a complicated mess, out of the destruction of the forest before, Lil took root, and in the sunshine that bears down on emptiness, grew up strong.