The Portrait of Samantha

One winter's day in England, I woke up and the sky was bright blue and I leapt for joy. But the day was even more extraordinary than that, and it involved food and chance-meetings with memorable strangers. And food.

Between a delicious Nutella crepe from Michel's and a movie at the Odeon, I spent a couple of hours wandering through the city. Most everyone I knew in town had evacuated for the holidays, and I was determined to begin my month of general solitude by finding ways to appreciate where I was even in the absence of familiar faces. Heading along St. Aldate's, I doubled back a little and decided to take the "scenic route" past Christ Church - past its trees, its veinous vines and its forbidden grass (so tempting) - toward the Thames.


Naturally I had already devoured my crepe of chocolate love and hazelnut happiness, so with slightly sticky but otherwise conveniently free hands I unleashed my camera on the world, taking the clear skies as an opportunity for shutterbuggin'. My camera at the time was decidedly moody and decidedly not compatible with Britain. It didn't function well with grey any better than I did.

Along the broad path, an elderly woman rested on one of the benches, a great willow tree behind her and the leaves of the tall oaks enveloping her in shade. She wore a light green hat and a cozy white coat, layered over which was a white apron. On her lap she worked at a large piece of paper, already quite far along with branches of graphite splaying across the sheet.


We exchanged greetings at a distance; shared our satisfaction with the weather. I regaled her with my bit about my anti-cloud camera and was pleased to see her smile, even though it didn't seem she needed a reason. She was simply pleasant, enchanting. Before long we were thoroughly engaged in conversation, and she showed me bits of her work. She considers herself an artist and a poet, and "perhaps a sort of philosopher." She loves nature. She ponders humanity, life, innocence. She pointed me in the direction of the last poem in her collection, one about youth.

"I wrote that after I saw a child skipping ahead of me one day," she explained. "I was a child once. But where did I go? I swallowed myself."

Hm. Paraphrasing there. I suppose philosophy is one of those things that sounds equally cryptic whether or not you've quoted correctly.

She would draw the trees from one college campus after another. Often the images would eventually be scaled down to be placed on cards. She spoke of one young woman who asked her to design her wedding invitations. The couple were married in a forest and have since lived in a tree house somewhere.

The trees must have been her favorite. She would speak to the trees; she would hear them. I'm not one to believe vehemently that plants and inanimate objects have personality or communication, but then my science professor that year had told me that I anthropomorphize everything, and he generally needed to explain whatever neurological process I'd just butchered in actual scientific terms that would not lend emotion and motivation to ions and synapses. I decided not to tell him that I've also named half my appliances, or that I speak aloud in a specifically quirky voice to signify translating for my dog. And when this woman admitted to me that after dropping a spoon she set it down elsewhere and said, "I'm putting you in solitary confinement!" my inward chuckle was quickly quelled with a thought of - well, a moody camera. Let's leave it at that. So I won't judge.

I listened. Just listened.

She extracted a card from her unusual portfolio, full of scribbled pages and scraps of fabric. "I saw these two little acorns and this is what they told me," she said. She opened the card, and inside with another image of the acorns it read, 'We will be two trees.' She smiled when she read it.

She described Joseph, an oak, and Samantha, the great willow behind her. There were several designs incorporating Samantha in particular. She'd written a book about her called The Portrait of Samantha, and seemed to feel especially fond of her. She said that one day, Samantha asked, "Do you think I'm beautiful?" and so she drew her, as well as a self-portrait, and placed them side-by-side, and Samantha thanked her.

She seemed to remember every person, every face, every name; what's more, she knew each of their stories, as though no life were to go unnoticed or forgotten. That young man is a maths student from America; he has another year here. The runner over there - he comes by the river every day at this time. They all acknowledged her in passing with smiles and salutations.

"This man," she later explained, nodding unobtrusively down the path to a man in a long black coat, "was a professor at Christ Church. He's retired now, and he's become an alcoholic. Falls asleep sometimes here amongst the trees."

As she continued I listened silently, both intrigued and concerned, not daring to glance at him and trying to find a balance in remaining respectful of both the speaker and the unknowing subject.

"Look," she whispered more fervently, her brows raising into her wrinkled forehead, and finally I did.

The red of his entire face only accentuated his bulbous nose and droopy eyes. A bit of saliva or such dribbled at the side of his lip a good way down his chin. What most captivated me, however, was the addition he had made to his long black coat: a flower, an entire flower complete with about 18 inches of its stem, held assumedly through a button-hole near his lapel. He looked absolutely sorrowful, as though in perpetual mourning. Slowly he passed us, and I thought he was going to continue to plod down the path without a word, but he nodded to us and said quietly, "Good luck," before departing.

There was little more to our visit. We talked more of art and writing. Suddenly it seemed not to matter that inside I knew my passion for both was dwindling; it was exciting just to share the appreciation for it with someone. Without knowing all this, she told me, "I can see the writer in you." It was an unexpected comment - one that, along with all the intriguing parts of the afternoon, gave me a subtle spark of the creative passion that I'd so missed. It isn't often that an acquaintance acknowledges something, anything, in you. I should add this to my repertoire of day-brighteners. I should be so fortunate to lift someone in that way.

Her name was Zoe Peterssen, and on a whim I later searched for her online. Apparently people have spoken of meeting her in this fashion at least as early as 1998. Learning this, I only feel all the more honored to be a part of this decade or so of people who have been somehow enchanted with this woman, so much so that she has been immortalized not only through her work but also through stories told everywhere.

Before I left I bought one of her cards, one of the portraits of Samantha. I liked it because it was in fact the tree behind her as we spoke that day, but also because it had made an impression on me as I looked through her collection.

Inside it reads simply: 'Not alone.'

Perhaps God speaks through the trees; perhaps through portraits of them.

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This is a revision of an entry from my old travel journal, December 2008.