Mother caught me admiring one of Muriel’s little illustrated notes and said, “How dear. She’s like our own Beatrix Potter, isn’t she? Only without the talent.” Christmases, Aunt might send my younger brother a ski sweater or some cowboy wallet—his name burned there in lasso script. But, upon me, Great-aunt Muriel lavished the most exquisite of art supplies. The expensive candy of Winsor Newton tubed watercolors, paper so rich with rag no frame was needed to help it stand. Such supplies were always beautifully gift-wrapped by Marshall Field’s. (Our family’s fate seemed as bound to that emporium as some clans to, say, the Roman Catholic Church.)

In Falls, North Carolina, you could only buy artist’s equipment in one corner of our better hardware store. On sale beside a tray of pink bathtub-plugs, such local paint smacked less of art than carpentry.—Just before Christmas, I would roll the best of my whole year’s work into a brown mailing tube. (She never didn’t like my efforts!) Her gifts led me to check out art books from our local library. I found one, The Underappreciated Singer Sargent, and, applying the idea of being underrated to her and to myself, renewed the book and renewed it. Muriel insured my love with her annual bundle, the finest art supplies mere money could buy. I swear, with those, she half-created me. And this.

I felt related to her. There was something in how Muriel, though cohabiting with family, lived so visibly alone. Something in her own appetite for study, her faith in the “National Geographic Society” (whose expeditions she hinted she helped fund). Something in her morbid breath-mint fear of imposing on others. Something in her gluttonous eyes, her Museum memberships, her relish for facts, her extraordinary memory and its companion, sympathy. All these drew me, like predictions.

Masquerading as a boy, I weakened with gratitude whenever Aunt—recognizing one of my emerging qualities—mailed me some sketch or playbill. My local teachers worried I “exaggerated.” They claimed I was cursed with a “perhaps morbid and surely over-vivid imagination” (a direct quote). Short of driving you to criminal acts, can the Imagination be too vivid? Can a wish have too much ballast, too much invented History? Can a person’s life be over-alive? And to Whom should we apologize for too much Seeing?

My parents fretted: Miss Mouse was overstimulating me. “Something here from one of your more elderly girlfriends,” they held her good blue stationery in their big oily paws. Such jealousy bewildered me. But then I could lock my room’s door, could settle on my bed in stocking feet, could plant the reading glasses on my snub freckled nose, could study both sides of the envelope before tearing into her fresh packet of lore.