Sour Orange Tree

The Tree of Life motif formed the inspiration for the textile collage I made for my mother for Christmas. I wanted the piece to evoke my mother's childhood in South Texas. She grew up in a very small town, and my grandmother and my great-grandmother were both avid gardeners. My great-grandmother's house in town, where my mother lived, had a thick green lawn of coarse St. Augustine grass and a sour orange tree. My mother ate so many sour oranges as a kid that she lost the enamel on her front teeth. I had fun with the green canopy of the sour orange tree, printing on the fabric the lyrics and music of a children's barnyard tune from a vintage songbook.



This picture of my mom at nine months, with her chubby cheeks and sparse hair, looks remarkably like my daughter and my niece at that age. I showed her sitting on a white wooden chair made in Mexico, whose border was close to where my mom grew up and where my mom went with my grandmother to shop. The Mexican border markets were filled with an amazing array of inexpensive merchandise. My grandmother would buy herbs and other medicines; the most amazing candies (coconut, pumpkin, and caramels) and big boxes of Mexican Gamesa cookies; brightly painted wooden toys and vibrant pinatas; cinnamon sticks, vanilla, and chocolate; tequila and other inexpensive booze; and ollas and other pottery for cooking and feasting.



The three sour oranges hanging from the tree match the color of the monarch butterfly wings I placed behind my mom, a reminder of the thick colonies of the orange butterflies we would see as they migrated to their winter homes in Mexico.




Both of my mother's grandparents had ranches, and she spent a lot of time with her cousins running wild in the dusty chaparral and cactus lands. The chickens pecking in the dirt in front of the prickly pear cactus remind me of the birds that are fixtures on those South Texas ranches. My mom always thought it was a treat to go to the ranch and collect the brown eggs for a hearty breakfast of huevos rancheros.

That vibrant sour orange tree from my mother's childhood is long gone, and my mother's connection to her home town has slowly dwindled over the years. Time and distance have dulled some of the images from her childhood, and I hope that this textile collage will help her preserve the unique landscape of her youth. After all, its the soil to which I'm rooted in spirit as well, and through me my kids.