The house fills up with the new evidence of my mother’s creativity: stiff watercolors first, then increasingly confident oils. She looks darker, the result of hours out in the foothills, in the stony lower reaches of the canyons, painting, and it’s as if she’s letting the colors of the place into her, her skin grown ocher, her hair stone-black and lustrous, and she takes to wearing silver bracelets, some of them studded with turquoise. What seemed strained in her, closed, opens out, as if all that air and light unclenched her. It’s a lesson, still, how a landscape in which you have faith, with which you are able to become entranced, can open and change a life. What transforms us like the experience of enchantment?

It’s also the first time I’ve known my mother to have a friend—and a startlingly different one at that. Mrs. Doyle is the closest thing to a bohemian to have appeared in my mother’s life; she wears muumuus in tropical prints of hibiscus and bird of paradise outlined in gold; she found them at Kresge’s for $2.99, bought six of them, and wears them to polish her Byzantine icons. She wears a heavy necklace of old Navajo silver, hammered squash blossoms, and half-round glasses on a knotted silk cord around her neck so that they bounce just above the slight, rounded protuberance of her belly. Helen Doyle’s life is clearly organized not around her children, or her husband, or running the household. Mr. Doyle, happily retired from his paint business, is largely invisible, puttering around sheds or the desert in pink-and-green pants Mrs. Doyle has purchased for him. She is an instance of a life given over to an entirely different set of needs than those which have shaped us so far, and she fascinates both me and my mother, though there is always that bit of inequality in their friendship brought about by the fact that my mother is the student and Helen the teacher. Like many a self-made artist, one who has willed herself into being, there is a bit of the prima donna about her: “Diego always used to say to me…” she liked to say, or “Nothing speaks to me with the force of the Byzantine.”