Because I don’t drive, when I was artist in residence in the wilds of Oregon last fall, Jer had to accompany me as my driver. It turned out that he garnered multiple roles in the process. He soon became my educator — as I painted, he read about the geology books and told me about his readings. The information he fed me became a vital part of my own musings and visionings of the landscape. When the wind came up, he rescued my papers and paints while I grabbed the painting. He became great at packing lunches for us because (I think) he realized that he could make the food decisions without interference while I packed the car. The Park Service pressed him into its volunteer work, signed him on officially, and gave him a shirt. This meant tourists could ask him freely about serious matters, like “where’s the rest rooms?”

Before we started the month I fretted that the residency was a bad idea. As it happened it was perhaps one of the highlights of our long established relationship. It helps that I always got hungry first and that our apartment behind the post office had a dial-up capacity for the computer.

Doug does sound like someone who is good at sharing “bliss” well.