Alphabet: A History (B is for Burnt Sienna)

B is for Burnt Sienna



One summer when I was eight years old, my Aunt Teresa gave me my first set of real paint. Not plastic tubs or dried tablets in a hinged box, but metal tubes full of thick acrylic goodness.

I held each tube one by one reading the names that were written underneath a small square showing the color inside. I knew right away that these were no ordinary colors, for instead of the plain red and blue and yellow I was used to, long foreign names took their place. Napthol Crimson. Indigo. Vermilion. Ultramarine. Burnt Sienna.

Teresa squeezed the brownish Burnt Sienna from one of the tubes onto a plastic palette. I watched in fascination as she mixed in a little bit of Ochre and then a dab of Titanium White. "There," she said. "Remember....the color of the grass on the sand dunes at the beach starts with Burnt Sienna."

Aunt Teresa brought more than just color into my life.

When I was in high school and had begun to have sex with my boyfriend for the first time, she wanted to talk to me about it. "I'm not going to tell you about love or diseases or birth control," she said. "I know you know all that stuff already. What I want to know is if he's giving you orgasms. Because if he's not, you need to teach him how. It's important."

Very early in my first marriage, I found that to continue to carry the baby growing inside me would result in my death. It was Teresa who sat beside me with silent streaming tears as I learned to maneuver the needles I would have to stick in my stomach for two weeks preceding the abortion.

When this same marriage failed, and no one around me knew what to say, Teresa didn't say anything. She sent me a book titled, "100 Things You Don't Need a Man For." With a $5 bill as a bookmark so that I could drink a mocha while reading it.

That same summer of 1978 when Teresa gave me the acrylic paints, she also took me to Clam Beach for a sunset picnic. She spread out a blanket behind a sand dune to shield us from the wind. Out of a brown paper bag she lifted a loaf of bread and a large thermos.

"Is that hot chocolate?" I asked, licking my hopeful lips.

"Even better," Teresa answered. She unscrewed the lid, and the richly-scented steam filled the air around us. "This is called fondue. It's made out of hot cheese. You tear off a piece of bread, dip it into the cheese and eat them together. It's sooooo good."

It sounded good to me, and it smelled even better, so I quickly ripped a hunk of bread off the loaf.

"Before you eat it, you have to promise me you won't tell your mom about the fondue," Teresa said, her voice dropping to a whisper, "because I put wine in it."

Elated that the aunt I so much admired thought I was grown up enough to eat wine, I promised her I'd never say a word. I then dipped the bread into the thermos of gooey cheese and took a small bite. It was delicious. I grabbed an even bigger hunk, drenched it with an even bigger gob of cheese and stuffed it into my mouth.

Teresa and I ate the whole loaf before falling on our backs to lick the last of the sticky fondue off our fingers, surrounded by the grass on the sand dunes, whose color started with Burnt Sienna.


My dear Aunt Teresa passed away last week after an exceptionally long battle with multiple sclerosis. She will be greatly missed.

Read Alphabet: A History (A is for Art) here.

Alphabet: A History (A is for Art)

I am joining Charlotte's Web and City Wendy , among others, in Alphabet: A History, a blog effort to write one's way through the alphabet with a series of short memoir pieces, one for each letter.

A is for Art



Last Sunday, my cousin Nathan, Mark and I drove to the hills of Rio Dell to visit my Grandma Edith. Only a few months away from 90, she still lives alone on several acres of land in a house built as a show home by Pacific Lumber Company in 1932 and made entirely of redwood.

In the 1992 earthquake, the house fell off its foundation, and in the renovation, Gram took her one chance to have white walls instead of wood - to her, a sign of gentility that she had long yearned for.

On two of the white walls in the living room, she has displayed some oil and acrylic paintings by Nathan's mother, my aunt Teresa, an accomplished artist. One of the paintings is a detailed landscape. It features a mountain top with a Native American man sitting on a horse looking out over the valley below him. Filled with saturated earth tones, it's a peaceful and beautiful scene.

Grandma Edith gave a piece of the apple fritter we had brought her to the dog, licked her fingers and then spoke to Nathan as she pointed at the painting. "See that picture? Your mom painted it when she was a teenager. Isn't it pretty?"

Nathan nodded in agreement.

"She entered it in the Humboldt County Fair," Grandma continued, "and it won third prize. When I went to see it, I couldn't believe it only won third. 'Take me to the one that won first prize,' I said. So your mom led me over to the picture that had the blue ribbon on it. Do you know what won first prize?"

She scowled at all of us, almost accusingly. We stopped chewing our donuts and shook our heads back and forth in unison. We had no idea.

"A giant tit. That beautiful picture lost to a giant tit."

"Well, Grandma," Nathan reminded her, "it was 1974."

She ignored him.

"I never had a thing to do with the fair after that. They could call me up tomorrow and beg me for money because times are tough and they can't raise enough to have a fair this year, and I'd tell them to go to hell."