The first time I saw Teresa she was wearing a long cotton dress and a big hat. Flowers on the hat, flowers on the dress. Predominantly burgundy and blue in color with small red touches.

She knocked on the door to my painting studio and breathlessly introduced herself. "Hi! I'm Teresa. I have the room down the hall."

The last time I talked to her she didn't want to see me. Something to do with having gained a lot of weight and so, she didn't want to be seen. I guess I will never figure it out.

I have a happier memory of seeing her stooping over a fire in the sand out behind her folk's cottage on the north shore of Lake Michigan, the south shore of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. She had wrapped several potatoes in foil and was tossing them in among the driftwood coals to bake. I can't recall if there was anything else to eat. The potatoes were delicious and probably that was enough.

Her skirt was white with big bunches of grapes hanging about her hips and knees and ankles looking sweet and juicy. Stems in place with green leaves and curly bits of stuff near them darkly defining the colors of the design. A purple pull over her favorite color, defining her ample and soft figure, she was happy, loving the feeling of the warm sand on her bare feet as the sun began to sink toward the horizon above the lower penninsula just beyond our vision, lingering there as a line the sun would penetrate after flattening out a little on the land entry. All that marking the end of a very pleasant day when we had walked her dog in the woods and caught up with each other's news, friends across the years between us that probably numbered 15 or so. She saw me as her senior wiser friend. I saw her as a talented girl with problem parents.

Then, I remember when she had fled the parents influence taking off to parts west to see what she could see. Back then, seeing her across from me in a cable car that spans the big river that winds through the City of Spokane. If I knew how to contact her I would ask her the name of the river, though it might be so mundanely named that it ought to spring to mind without a confab, or a requested prompting. She had brought a camera along and took a picture of me wearing her Stetson hat. The wind tore my hair over to one side so I looked like some kind of a bust sculpted in black and white. Excited in the wind and with the sway of the car as we crossed over the river, my eyes wide with what could have been fear but had gone beyond that to something akin to a manufactured hysteria. We had split a worm from a bottle of tequila or mescal, in a local bar where we had something to eat just before the cable car ride. So we were on a jaunt, which was fairly typical of us back then, 1980, I think.

Ladies of the 80s we were, looking for fun and frolic, and we did (not really too often) manage to find it.

She had one of those old Volkswagen bus things and had headed out of Haslett, Michigan to bigger and better things out Washington Way. She never did find it, it seems.

Last I heard she was illin' with something like Lupus, or fibro-neuralgia...probably, methinks, something to do with the lithium she was required to take to settle her from those wonderful highs and lows she used to glide about with and around and among.

Those, the latter of the above, being something to do with the parental expectations and controls and money and well, you know, like that. Mostly chemistry thought one school of therapy, myself, I thought it mostly problem parents. Parents who would not honor any of the parts of her that were happy, they saw her as a failure...a ne're do well. So, of course, that's how she saw herself. All that sweetness and personal individuality that was so hard for her to extract on paper as the writer she wanted to be, and all the difficulty she negotiated whenever she played her beloved keyboard...the pauses, the tears, the futility of allowing her soul to soar over the keys with the music of her being stifled by heavy parental denial and retention of any shreds of permission to be happy. It broke my heart. I could not see how the therapists she saw were helping her, poking her and prodding her to more or less lithium...the panacea of the small minded professional too quick to employ the easy fix.

I won't know what happened to her. She's just "moved on" as they say, I guess. More of the something, something, something to do with self disdain foisted off on their young, a kind of hostility in the form of negative parental injunctions and such.

I have seen it too many times. Really, I do not care to continue to look.