a wreath of trefoiled shiny leaves—just like ivy

© Mary Snyder Behrens 2002

Above  Mary Snyder Behrens, American Canvas No 006.  Mixed media, assemblage (©2002).  5.5 x 4 in. Private collection.

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Rockwell Kent, It's Me O Lord: The Autobiography of Rockwell Kent. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1955, p. 21-22 [recalling his early childhood]—

…above all, and forever dear to my thoughts, there was Rosa, our young nurse from Austria. It was Rosa who dressed me in the morning and put me to bed at night. It was Rosa who taught me to say my prayers, and to believe in them…

It was always in German, of course, that with Rosa I prayed, and German—long before I spoke English—that I spoke. And it was Rosa who read us Struwwelpeter aloud, teaching us how wicked it was to kill birds and hunt hards, how sinful it was to make fun of little black boys, how disastrous it was to not watch your step and to tilt back in your chair at table, and how fatal it was to play with matches or not eat your supper every night. It was Rosa who walked with us in the fields and woods, who made us daisy chains and garlands of flowers, and who, sitting with us under the great oak tree—a veritable "charter oak"—wove me a wreath of trefoiled leaves, green shiny leaves just tinged with russet red, wove me the wreath and put it round my brow. Such pretty shiny leaves, like ivy! Ivy indeed it was: poison ivy. It was the doctor who prescribed the milky lotion, sugar of lead, for a swollen and disfigured child. And it was that child who got hold of it and drank it, and who almost died. It was Rosa who, more than any other, fills my memory of those years.

Nasty, Brutish and Short

From Michael Winter, The Big Why: A Novel (NY: Bloomsbury, 2004), an "historical fiction" about the life of American artist Rockwell Kent (1882-1971), who was a student of Abbott H. Thayer and contributed to Thayer's work on protective coloration or natural camouflage. Among Kent's friends was Thayer's son, naturalist Gerald H. Thayer, author of Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom—

Gerald Thayer once said to me, I'm afraid of dying. He was afraid, he said, that there might be a life after death. He was afraid that he believed there might be a God. He did not want it. He could not bear the thought of living again, after death. Seventy years, yes. But forever? It depressed the hell out of him. A short life excited him. He thought that when [Thomas] Hobbes said life was nasty, brutish, and short, he meant the last quality as a relief.