My Special Place:
Oak Hill was my "Fern Hill"
written for the
Endless Mountains Rural Places Rural Lives Exhibit
curated by Ruth Tonachel of 
The Northern Tier Cultural Alliance
http://www.ntculturalalliance.org/rural-places-rural-lives-exhibit/

My special place was my back yard: an ordinary kid's haven with swing set and teeter totter that just so happened to be topographically spooning with a necropolis: the Oak Hill Cemetery. The post-mortem residents of the cemetery were not merely my neighbors - they shared my very address. This was because my father (who could not tolerate working in factories) was the cemetery's caretaker. Thus, we got to live, rent-free, in the cemetery house. 

Contrary to what you may imagine, living here was far from morbid.

By day, "the cem" was a lush, verdant habitat for a myriad of LIVING creatures. Since it was situated at the edge of town, woods leading to a creek (Sugar Creek) edged up against the finely manicured grounds. Today, condominiums and the Rte. 220 bypass have "paved paradise," urbanizing the surrounding woodlands, but when I was a child, the cemetery was still a secret entryway to arboreal, pastoral and wetlands ecosystems - a portal to other worlds.

And, just like the trees in the Garden of Eden, my sister and I could explore them all – but one.

We enjoyed a Huck Finn like existence playing in the cemetery itself, the meadows, the woods and the creek where we observed a myriad of birds, deer, small mammals (including an abandoned baby woodchuck we found on the rocks by the creek whom we named "Rocky"), insects, amphibians and other flora and fauna.

Oh, and the occasional fleet-footed doppelganger!

Indeed, by night, the Oak Hill Cemetery transmogrified from a melodious glade bristling with plant and animal life into, well, the necropolis it most certainly was. I grew to relish it all—the light and the skin-tingly dark of it.

Sometimes, on balmy, summer nights, we would venture outside with flashlights to play hide and seek or catch fireflies by the light of the moon. Unlike afternoon outings, we would restrict our nocturnal wanderings to the yard itself, ever aware of the cemetery looming luridly in the periphery of our vision like the grim reaper with a huge, gaping stomach, growling for cheeky little rascals such as us.

Sometimes this deliciously prickly effect could almost be replicated during the daylight hours: let’s say a gloomy, ominous afternoon before a storm. When feeling particularly adventurous or bored, my sister, my friends, cousins and I would be inexplicably drawn into the cemetery at precisely these moments as if we were unwitting actors in an Alfred Hitchcock film – you know the ones where usually a woman or a child, as if in a trance – can’t seem to resist opening the creaking door and venturing down the steps to the cellar to investigate the ethereal sound emanating there in spite of the warning shouts of we, the TV viewers screaming “Don’t go there!! Turn back!!”

My sister and a friend who lived up the street (Theresa) and myself were not only explorers, but we prided ourselves on being architects and carpenters as well. When we were in middle school, the three of us collected some old boards, some of my father's tools and built ourselves a tree-house in the woodlot bordering the cemetery. We hung out there to hide, to play games, or get into mischief (which we did frequently). Sometimes we even slept in our lofty fort all night long.

My father remained the caretaker of the cemetery for a few more years until he became disabled and my mother (who worked hard well into her 70's) became the sole breadwinner. Yet he continued to take an interest in the cemetery and to this day, I believe I look at cemeteries in a way that is slightly different. Cemeteries are sanctuaries for memories, yes. Their grounds are sacred, YES. But cemeteries are also for the living and (YES!) for babes in the woods.

Whenever my husband and I travel, we are always sure to visit the cemeteries. In the Cimetiere du Pere Lachaise in Paris, we saw the final resting places of the likes of Oscar Wilde, Isadora Duncan, Gertrude Stein and Jim Morrison, among others. I was genuinely moved by the statuary and personal mementos people had placed near the tombs to remember their loved ones.

When I went to a rural section of Germany, known as the Eiffel, I stood, transfixed at the comparatively simple graves of unknown strangers and was equally moved by the meticulous care the people took of the plots. The plots in this German village were more like little gardens than grave-sites.

In Zermatt, Switzerland, I saw graves adorned with photographs of intrepid souls who failed to make it to the summit of the Matterhorn, but instead succeeded in a sort of immortality.

And in New Orleans, the above ground crypts containing far too many 19th century victims of yellow fever seemed as exotic as anything I experienced in Europe.

A few years back, I had the privilege to view a burial place that predates anything I had previously seen - the spectacular necropolis at Hierapolis in Turkey. Here the breathtakingly beautiful hillside was littered with mausolea and sarcophagi (some intact, some in ruins) immortalizing the souls who had perished as far back as the first century BC.

Closer to home, there is a cemetery on top of Barclay Mountain in the ghost town of Laquin (another special place), which was a thriving coal town around the turn of the 20th century. I’ve been told that small pox killed many of the residents and when the economy failed, the survivors fled. The coal mines were abandoned, the trains stopped running, and nature slowly reclaimed the homes. Today, all that remains are some foundations and the cemetery – some plots contain the headstones of entire families who had tragically succumbed to small pox. “Budded in earth, to bloom in heaven,” reads the poignant script on the headstone of an infant.

And then there’s the Memorial Cemetery in Burlington, Pa. where the tombstones lie absolutely flat so the mowers have an unobstructed path to mow. Compared to almost every other cemetery I’ve visited, this one is remarkable only for its plainness and uniformity. No hierarchy of ostentatious monuments immortalizing local luminaries here – just plain folk with simple plaques for markers. Flowers, flags and small kitschy statues are the only mementos to identify one grave from the other. The one I visit has a flag flying over it.

The soul buried there passed through the one portal in the Oak Hill Cemetery my sister, friends, cousins and I were forbidden to explore.

My father died September 22, 1991 at the age of 60. If he were alive today, he’d be 83 years old. He had been a son without a father, a truant sent to reform school, a Marine, husband, father, professional fireman, factory worker, pizza maker, carpet cleaner, and a shining, flawed character, who, for several years, served as a sort of merry ferryman ushering people across the River Styx and through the portal on the other side of the cemetery I grew to love. He wore work clothes and boots in a suit and tie neighborhood and held his head high even when some of the neighbors didn’t bother saying “Hi.”  

My father was the caretaker of "Oak Hill:" my "Fern Hill," my nature preserve, my haunted, hallowed grounds...my very special place. 
 

More pictures of Sugar Creek and surrounding woods to come!

The Writing on the Walls: Memories of Joanie and Chris

The Writing on the Walls: Memories of Joanie and Chris

I have written some memories of the remarkable couple that was Chris and my cousin, Joanie, each of whom I knew a little for a brief while and each of whom died tragically young in their mid-thirties, leaving behind eight beautiful children.

A lot of studies have been done on memory which indicate memories actually change and decay with age. Therefore, I begin this story with a disclaimer; memories may actually tell you more about the one remembering than they do about those remembered.

And, too, I can remember Joanie's voice as if I had spoken to her yesterday, and I can surely remember the essences of conversations we've had, but with few exceptions (those actual quotes which follow), I cannot remember the actual words from those conversations 30 years ago and more.

And yet, I do not think I'm totally mistaken in my perceptions...

Although I was only three or four years older than she, Joanie was one of my "younger" cousins growing up. The thing I remember most about her as a child was her reputed intelligence. Aunt Mary always noted that Joanie, (unlike myself), and unlike her nineteen siblings (yes, my aunt and uncle had twenty single birth biological children) who all sported impressive verbal chops, was also good at math! The possession of such a rarefied aptitude in our family was thought to herald a brilliant future at, you know, figuring things out.

But Joanie was also raised to value family and spiritual integrity over worldly aspirations such as status and prestige. Thus, Joanie's gift with numbers was celebrated only anecdotally - a special idiosyncrasy to add to the constellation of Joanie's many other qualities. Indeed, in my mind, Joanie seemed to be a real rockstar of a Kelly!

I can remember hanging out in the barn with Joanie and her sisters and brothers who all seemed to harbor secrets my brother-less and slightly envious self found to be thrilling. Their collective aura of cryptic teenage omniscience was reinforced when, upon walking upstairs in their house, one could discern writing scrawled directly on the walls. A moment's inspection revealed the graffiti to be no ordinary vandalism, but pure poetry! But who was the author? I don't even remember what the words said, but the sight of them astonished me no less than would have the sight of petroglyphs carved into the pink wall in the girl's bathroom stall or in finding a sanskrit illuminated manuscript underneath my pedal pushers in my dresser drawer.

The writer of the poetry remains a mystery to this day. In fact, none of the cousins I recently queried seem to remember the writing on the walls at all. Thus, I have become quite convinced the bard was none other than Joanie herself.

In addition to being the possessor of what I imagined to be an esoteric intellect, I also found Joanie to be physically beautiful as well. She had long, straight, brown hair, high cheekbones and intense, deep-set, blue eyes. The Kellys were very poor in material things, of course, so Joanie's clothes were well-worn, but she wore them well. And besides, it was the 60's and 70's. Joanie was never out of style in jeans and t-shirts or peasant style blouses and dresses; in short, she cut the figure of an exceptionally lovely flower child.

Of course, Joanie did not follow flower child protocol. She had very strong views on things and the Catholicism with which she was raised would always exert a tremendous influence on her character, even when she underwent a "rebellious" phase as a teenager. My memory of this, however, is only as reliable as 30 year old confessions from Joanie or reports from second and third party sources can be.

Although the drive to the Kellys only took a couple hours, it seemed as if my cousins lived in another time and country; thus, we did not visit them nearly often enough for my taste. I remember one trip which included a harrowing drive in the snow down a narrow, winding road through mountain rock cuts. It seemed as if our car would go careening over the cliff at any moment!

Just a few months ago, Theresa described the area near their house as having been the site of a ghost town. Indeed, all the buildings - including their house - which I recall as having been denuded of paint, seemed to all be in the process of reclamation by nature. In short, I found the land, the buildings, the poetry on the walls - to be nothing less than enchanted.

As happens, our teen years flew by and like many others from rural, socioeconomically challenged milieu, most of us could not wait to leave home, fall in love and get married. I married before the age of twenty, as did many of my cousins, including Joanie.

My husband and I bought a trailer and lived in "Jackson's Trailer Court" for a year or two before moving it to twenty acres we eventually bought further out in the country. The property had been the site of an abandoned hippie commune that burned to the ground. The farmers who had been neighbors to the "long-hairs" in residence reported scandalous "goings on" there, including goats roaming freely through the house to serve as Satanic midwives to she-hippies who frequented skinny-dipping parties and were perpetually giving birth to - good god - more miniature hippies!

These rumors only imbued the property with a greater ambience for me - property which included three distinct habitats: mature forest, meadow, and, best of all...hippie steeped wetlands. I relished exploring the grounds and would sit by one of three ponds with binoculars in hand observing the aviary of birds from all three ecosystems that shared the land with us: baltimore orioles, bluebirds, great blue herons, little green herons, flickers, warblers, cedar waxwings and on and on. Needless to say, it was a melodious plot and I was one happy amateur ornithologist!

It was at this point in time that Joanie would enter my life again - not merely as a younger sister in the Kelly clan this time, but as a young newlywed who just moved to my hometown!

It began with a phone call from Joanie to me to announce her new residence. Her husband, Chris (who just so happened to be from the Bronx!), had just landed a job at DuPont, one of three local industries in town. DuPont was reputed to be "the best place to work" around. It was the cleanest factory and DuPont employees - even those who worked in production - enjoyed good salaries. If I remember correctly, Chris was a computer programmer, so he fared even better than others I knew.

Still, I worried a little bit about how my cousins would fare as newcomers to Towanda. I knew the locals frequently resented "city people" invading their territory. But Chris was not just any city person, he was a non-Caucasian city person! Most shocking of all was that he and Joanie were a mixed race couple! I honestly believe that Chris was the only black person in Towanda at the time and I am certain that he and Joanie comprised the solitary mixed race married couple.

This fact made me only love and admire Joanie all the more for her courage in being true to herself and to her new husband. Likewise, I admired Chris from the start for the same reasons as well as his courage in starting a new life in a place that could be so hostile - even racist - to outsiders.

What an enrichment it was to get to know Joanie better and Chris for the first time. Chris was a tall, soft-spoken gentle man and one of the things that impressed me the most about Chris was his humility. Although he was from a comparatively well-to-do family from the big city, he never looked down on the provincials that we truly were. In fact, he even took my husband and me to stay a few days with his parents in NYC. It was our first time in the city!

Our roles had reversed, as this time, Hugh and I were the outsiders. I remember that Chris was really proud to show us around. When he drove us into Manhattan, we heard lots of loud bangs which we found unnerving to say the least. Since we were always told how "dangerous" the big bad city was, our first thought was gunfire! Without calling out our hillbilly naivete, Chris simply chuckled good-naturedly and reminded us what day it was: the fourth of July!

He took us to the Bronx Zoo, the Museum of Natural History, to his parents' lovely condo and introduced us to White Castle hamburgers! Chris's parents were just as gracious as Chris was. They showed us the utmost hospitality and took time to share with us stories about their lives in the city as a teacher (his mom) and postal worker (his dad).

In addition to the NYC trip, Chris and Joanie and Hugh and I got together on a few occasions to have dinner or go driving on the mountains or hiking out on our property which Chris and Joanie loved as much as we did. Whether we met at our trailer or in Chris and Joanie's apartment, the atmosphere was always very relaxed with a "what's mine is yours" sort of ethic always prevailing.

One time, Chris asked to brush his teeth in our bathroom. "Sure," I said, "go right ahead." It was then I realized he didn't have his own toothbrush, but wanted to use mine! I knew that he would have been perfectly happy to share his toothbrush with me, so how could I refuse him the implement I stuck in my mouth twice a day to remove plaque from my teeth and anaerobes from betwixt the papillae and taste-buds on my tongue? "Go for it," I said, and he did!

Indeed, Chris was the kind of person who would have given you the shirt off his back if you needed it, and it was this total unconcern for "things of this world" which always imbued both Chris and Joanie with this aura of actually being "not of this world" even when they were very much with us. In retrospect, it would be easy to believe that they had stepped down from the very ether to coexist with those of us mortal beings who were much more attached to the stuff and the "goings on" of the material world than they were.

At this time in their lives, Chris and Joanie did not drink or smoke or express any desire to attend parties - not ever. They felt no desire or need to impress others with their appearances, their possessions or their "achievements." They were content to live quietly and simply with each other, their ADORABLE baby boy and "another one on the way." Their purpose in life was to live the life they believed God wanted them to live. And so they did with as much courage, patience, faith, humility and integrity as I have ever seen.

As I already mentioned, Joanie was unattached to material things, but she was positively passionate about life and her values. She was "pro-life" in the biggest sense of the word. It caused her great pain to live in a world in which abortion happened, but it also caused her great pain to live in a world in which any living thing suffered. For Joanie, all life was precious - even animal life. She was not a vegetarian, but would not hesitate to help an animal in need if it was within her capability to do so. Neither she, nor Chris, hunted, and although she supported those serving in the military (she would have brothers who would do so), the thought of war or any kind of violence also caused her great pain.

The current debate over gun control prompts me to wonder WWJD? ("J" for Joanie, not Jesus here!) In all honesty (as in I am not just writing this to bolster my own politics), the thought of Chris and Joanie being gun-owners today is all but unfathomable to me. To imagine either of them packing heat would be about as absurd as seeing Gandhi with a Bushmaster slung over his shoulder exchanging pleasantries with Ted Nugent. Just wouldn't have happened!

But it was the thought of abortion which disturbed Joanie the most. She spoke of it EVERY time we were together. I must admit that while I admired her conviction and her willingness to speak out, her obsession with abortion could be exhausting for this listener. The simple truth is that we had different views in this regard. While the thought of abortion greatly disturbed me, too, I also felt great compassion for young women who experienced unwanted pregnancies for one reason or another. I know Joanie also felt empathy for these girls, but it was her opinion that the horror - and guilt - of abortion would only make their situations harder. I disagreed that this was always the case and/or felt that the undue horror and guilt some girls experienced were culturally imposed upon them. I subdued my own opinions, however, in deference to Joanie's all-consuming conviction. After all, my whole family felt so strongly about the issue, I feared their wrath or my own father's displeasure were I to come out as a heretic, blasphemer, feminist and LIBERAL!

This conflict within me - the part that wanted to express my very strong opinions vs. the part that wanted to keep the peace - would become so great, I would eventually estrange myself from people I loved, but with whom I strongly disagreed about too many things. I am now wishing I had had the strength of character to have been able to express my views at family gatherings and let the chips fall where they may. Instead, I just found it easier to avoid any potential drama and my own guilt that would be sure to follow.

Of course, Joanie's pro-life stance also sprung from her love of children and what I saw as her desire to emulate her own mother whom she clearly loved to pieces. I remember her affectionately joking about Aunt Mary, "My mother is crazy. Who has twenty children? Nobody does that!" (I think Adam was born by then, but I could be wrong). Of course, Joanie would go on to have eight children of her own in a time when having two children - if any at all - was the norm!

In contrast to Chris and Joanie, Hugh and I were very much part of the world. I have to admit that the words "selfish" and "hedonistic" would not have been completely out of place in a sentence containing our names. We had no intention of having children immediately and were very much into partying with friends, experiencing new things and acquiring worldly knowledge. I had been attending college part time and when I was 24, Hugh and I would go off to the university full-time.

This was very difficult for Joanie to understand. "Why would you want to move away when you worked so hard to acquire your land?" In Joanie's mind, we already had it all - more than any person could possibly want, in fact. Although we lived in a trailer and I worked as a secretary and my husband as a factory worker, we were rich compared to many others in my family, so she was right. Still, I was intolerably restless. My ambition, my curiosity and desire to learn new things and meet new people could not be suppressed, so Hugh and I moved three hours away to go to college and Chris and Joanie moved away to to a new life, new job and new burgeoning family in Texas.

Thus, the brief time we lived in the same community came to an end and, tragically and regrettably, I would never see Joanie or Chris again. A lot of concentrated life happened in the years immediately following our moves. Hugh and I moved away from home for the first time, we began college as non-traditional students, I began a new job as a teacher, my father got sick with cancer and died and, at 34, I had a baby boy of my own. I had imagined that Chris and Joanie had become equally immersed in their new lives and since neither Joanie, nor I, were good at writing letters we completely lost touch. If only we had facebook and e-mail back then!

In many ways, however, Chris and Joanie do not feel any farther away today than when we were sharing chuckles, food and toothbrushes. Although Joanie was my cousin and we shared many traits as members of most extended families do, in many respects, there was always a part of Joanie that was completely inaccessible, mysterious and, yes, ethereal to me. And her husband, Chris, was exactly the same way.

Why do tragic things happen to good people in the prime of their lives? Nobody knows the answer to that. But I do know that even if I was never moved to completely emulate Chris and Joanie's lives or subscribe to all of their religious beliefs, these two people affected me in deep and profound ways. Each of them embodied a level of decency and humanity that is rarely seen. Even today, when it is easy to despair of the seemingly omnipresent evil in the hearts of my fellow human beings, I think of Chris and Joanie and know that goodness itself prevails long after the the body has perished.

The proof of that is evident first and foremost in the lives of their children: children both sensitive and strong enough to endure tragedy that would break many - if not most - other children. Children who have grown up with the talent and potential to continue their parent's legacy of world-changing good will. Credit for this must be given, not only to Chris and Joanie, but to their grand-parents, aunts, uncles, and other family members who took their nieces and nephews in and raised them as their own sons and daughters. Indeed, Chris and Joanie's goodness is evident in the voices and gestures of their sisters and brothers, mothers and fathers!

It is also evident in Chris and Joanie's PIONEERING examples of exceptional love and conviction in the face of racism, hate and ignorance. Because of their union, the path has been made easier for other people to follow: for ALL of us to more freely love others regardless of ethnicity, nationality, religion or any number of superficial and divisive externals that alienate us from each other. One could argue that Chris and Joanie's non-traditional union has helped pave the way for people to accept other non-traditional unions, including those within the LGBT community.

In sum, Chris and Joanie's goodness was never, in my view, exactly of this world. And that is exactly why it endures.

Indeed, this goodness, this love of theirs, is what will always be my PERFECT memory of the writing on the walls!

Karen Korell

Karen Korell (wearing her Louise Bourgeois shirt) 
1/14/44 - 8/30/10

Karen was a good friend of mine, but now Karen is gone, gone, gone. Yeah, life continues for the rest of us, but there are moments when I find the finality of Karen's death so difficult to fathom, I send an e-mail off to her - my beloved twodot - in hopes that somewhere "on the other side," the words "You've got mail" reach her "forever ear."

It amuses me to think of her interrupting some celestial chore - let's say the laundry (she's down to her last man-cut gossamer raiment, after all - still all the fashion in the firmament) - as she pauses to decode my pixels and texts to find as much mortal angst and not-so-divine comedy as I can squeeze into 37 kilobytes.

Meanwhile, back at the planet, I track her web-foot-print to find traces of her life or her work - some way to log on or link in to her consciousness. But, alas, her web-site is now parked somewhere in Japan and although the search engines offer me several Karen Korells, most of them are imposters; four of them live in Montana alone and if ever there was an unKaren-like state, it would be the home of the Unabomber!

Undaunted, I decide I will hack even into the dark net if I have to...past the terrorists, the neo-Nazi's, the child pornographers and the hate groups (Karen did several series of works including Dead French Children, Dead Russians and Unabomber). There I will search for the portal, the key, the elusive worm-hole that will teleport me through cyberspace or outerspace or afterspace: wherever Karen continues to be.

I put forth this effort because I find the idea of oblivion to be so much more heinous than death itself. I suspect Karen felt the same way. Indeed, better to have one's body - one's eyeballs, elbows, entrails and all... swept up into a funnel shaped cloud than to have one's excruciatingly catalogued slides, journals, sketchbooks - one's life's work - scatter in the very same wind.

Thus, this is my tribute to Karen Korell and, as a matter of fact, my own little protest against oblivion itself. Because - dammit - if death is the hitman, oblivion is the thieving, memory-sucking CEO of the netherworld. Is there a soul out there who isn't positively sick over its monopoly over the place? So, you might say this blog - as feeble a memorial as you might ever encounter - is simply my way to "Occupy the Void." I can hear Karen's laughter filling the abyss already; those who know her can anticipate boiled eggs and Panna to follow! (Now Karen's dietary preferences -displayed in LED as she had done - was divine comedy!)

The incidentals of Karen's life - her place of residence, how she made a living, how much money she (or anybody else) made - were never important to her, so I will not dwell on them here. Let it suffice to note that Karen lived the second half of her life very quietly in a small town where most people knew little more about her than the fact that she owned and operated 88 Printers. In the last few years of her life, a few more came to know her as an activist and creator of Splashdown Blogspot. http://splashdownpa.blogspot.com/.

Karen with friends in front of her print shop.

But Karen identified, first and foremost, as an artist, and although she reveled in the natural beauty of the rivers, lakes and mountains that surrounded her, she never painted a barn or a landscape. Rather, Karen's concerns - and her art - were of the mind.

For that reason, Karen never exhibited in her community (which also happens to be my hometown). She simply wasn't interested in showing her work where it would fail to be understood or appreciated. However, before moving to rural America, she had exhibited extensively in New York City (her hometown), nationally, and abroad.

Her web-page can no longer be accessed (it truly is parked in Japan), but she once wrote about her own work...

Concerns motivating my work question the nature and meaning of art and life itself, as concepts meet reality and meaning looks for language. While I have always worked as a painter, in 2 and 3 dimensions, during the early 1970's I was also an early pioneer in the public art arena. To realize an art-for-all philosophy dear to my heart, I distributed several series of printed works, "Accumulations", both as mailings, and directly, with the help of a team of artists, at specific locations in New York City. My goal was to generate unfiltered responses to art through unexpected encounters. (see Village Voice article, 10.1.70; NY Post interview, 12.14.71)

In 1971 I was honored to have been invited by Buckminster Fuller to be one of 5 artist participants in his “World Game Seminar” (NYC), an effort to prioritize and explore ways to sustainably meet humanity's needs globally. During the 70's and 80's I was also invited to contribute work to various exhibitions, both in the U.S. and abroad, notably: Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, Women’s Graphic Center, LA; Franklin Furnace Archives, NYC; Wabash Transit Gallery, Chicago; Image Bank, Vancouver; National Research Library, Ottawa; Metronom, Barcelona; in New Delhi and Australia; and to an exhibition of the letters of Ray Johnson (with whom I maintained an active art correspondence) at the North Carolina Museum of Art.

The Allotted Time, mixed media

The Diabetic Brain, illustration for Penn State University

The bulk of Karen's artwork is now in the possession of her friend who is planning on curating a retrospective of Karen's work in the not-so-distant future. While I can share only a few photographs of a few pieces of her work, we will all have to wait for the exhibition to be able to see the rest. Any memorial to Karen is pathetically incomplete without her artwork. Her artwork is the real protest against oblivion.

Art is what she loved, but the exceptional human being that was Karen Korell transcended even her art. She embraced life with a passion, intensity and humor that could not be extinguished even when confronted with the terminal illness with which she lived for a half dozen years. To be in Karen's presence - even when she faced death - was simply magical.

Karen wearing her "healing jacket," several friends collaboratively created for her.
Her friend, Judy, stitched the pieces together.

The other day I visited Karen's loft (about to be sold) to pick up a book I had loaned her, as well as a watercolor she and I had collaborated on together (which was better than I had remembered).

I entered the building hesitatingly, expecting to be overwhelmed with sadness over her absence. It was spooky to see that most of her furniture and personal accoutrements (by turns exotic and whimsical - a veritable walk-in cabinet of curiosities) were gone. Especially conspicuous in its absence was her artwork.

In her studio, however, a few of her personal journals and sketchbooks remained.

I held my breath as I turned the pages which seemed to me an almost sacred act, this post-mortem peek into another person's soul. The journals, full of notes and drawings, revealed the playful and inventive imagination of their ingenious maker. I could hear, again, Karen's ethereal laughter as I ingested her drawings, so skillfully and vividly executed, knowing they were intended for posterity.

On a couple of occasions, I had an opportunity to videotape Karen and I am so glad I did. I videotaped her with my older camera and edited it using iphoto. I plan to edit further with Premiere Pro to heighten the resolution and to make it better. The best part of it, though, is Karen whose light shines through even with poor resolution. On each occasion when I videotaped her, however, the documentation became another kind of collaboration with Karen. How fortunate I have been to know her!

This blog is a work in progress and I welcome any of Karen's friends to post memories they have of her. Include photos of her, her artwork or even videos (Blogger has made it much easier to upload videos!). Please feel free to comment or to contact me!