Self-Image

O tyranny of reflective surfaces. She glimpsed herself in the mall’s plate-glass entrance, her mirror-image lumbering along. “That’s not me, that’s the opposite of me,” she told herself as she pushed the door clearly marked pull.

At home she saw herself as pithy, as in “concise and forcefully expressive,” as in succinct, crisp. Saw, as in “to know.” Know, as in “to feel,” deeply.


Many days began by the pond where the empathic tulip poplar served as confidante. It appeared awkward, all elbows, still it raised its limbs in celebration or supported a weighted sky or shrugged in despair, depending upon her mood.

Please note that use of tree personification, in this instance, is not a manifestation of lonely isolation but acknowledgement of nothing missing, something found.


She belonged to the land and felt herself to be multi-layered like the trees. Heartwood encompassed their pithy centers. Heartwood, as in a tree’s supporting pillar, good-heartedness, as in her core strength. Five senses absorbed and metabolized the world, nourishing a creative drive. Then the protective outer layer, her skin, which could, at times, be thin.

~Anatomical Study~

1. Exterior Analysis

2. Cross Section of Trunk


She loved art and music early on—drawing, working with clay, singing in the grammar school chorus. Granny examined her child-paws and said, “Look at these long fingers. You have piano-player’s hands.” She played, Chopin and Mozart, mainly in high school. However, if she’d chosen the performing instead of visual arts in college, she’d have studied dance because of her long fingers, and what she fancied would be the graceful lines of her hands’ extensions.


Everything is connected, in her thoughts at least, which moved in ways impossible to map. She forgave her mind its lapses, believing wondering and wandering to be similar—the former, a type of seeking; the latter, a way of happening upon.


She didn’t believe in God. Experience confirmed the existence of a worldly spiritual plane—how else to explain the beautiful logic of pond ice?

Earthly life, just count the rings. Hers are circular, too, but connected end-to-end, forming an ever-widening spiral of expired time. She imagined it collapsing onto itself when she died, becoming a simple surface, like a record to be played. Hers would render the single note of an oboe, held, its sound mournful, yet sweet and filling.


Cheryl Ward is a visual artist and nonfiction writer drawn to the interaction of text and image. Her work combines the two, exploring how one can offer a context for interpreting the other. Ms. Ward is currently at work on an essay collection titled To See and To Know. She lives in the Philadelphia metropolitan area and is constantly on the lookout for a German chocolate cake as good as her Grandma’s.

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