The Paper Lady

is gone. She was never easy to find. In a former copper-mining town carved into a mountain, where the listing back porches of painted ladies dangle over valleys, where wine, ice cream, and tchotchke shops crowd the tangled narrows of zig-zagging streets, she was sandwiched between a vacant building and a bordello-turned-café, behind the rusted-metal façade, dusty windows, and book-skewed shelves of her gallery. She’d emerge from her mussy workshop quietly, to say, hello. Her slim figure wrapped in a spattered apron, hands speckled with medium, gray hair fraying around time’s creases. I’d drop, breathless, onto the sagging couch. Pinned to the walls were her molded paper-pulp works: Women arrayed beneath robust trees, dogs walking invisible owners, faceless bicyclists pedaling across deserts. On mouse-chewed boards she’d painted ample nudes in blue-gray gouache leaning against ivory columns, or curving restfully above swathes of abstraction. There were monochromatic ink prints on flecked, handmade paper of wily coyotes peering around cactus. Today, though, instead, here is her daughter—with a shiny manner and smooth bob of faux-platinum hair. Here, instead, are t-shirts and mugs—like those down the street. The floor is clean. The space uncluttered. The workshop—empty. Distressed, I search for some sign, remnant, of the paper lady. There! On a worn shelf under the front window. I gently lift out a white paper mold. My fingers trace its textured surface, its raised details. I turn it over, reveling in the mold’s depths, its inner contours. How art can still be found, amid artless anonymity.