The Lonely Artist and the California Vampire

           There was a time, long ago, when the only way to communicate with a friend who lived far away was to write a letter and put it in the mail. It would take days, sometimes weeks, to get an answer. This made for lonely waiting, and for Jinni, who lived alone in an old house with tall single pane windows, the waiting was the worst part of letter writing. So often, she would write excited letters hoping to find a pen pal among her distant relatives or childhood friends, but just as often, those letters went unanswered. Every day, she would check her mailbox hoping for a letter, but most days her mailbox was empty. If she ever did receive a letter in return, it would fill her heart with joy, but when opened, she became disheartened to learn that the person who wrote back either didn't remember her or didn't have much to say. Dejected, Jinni gave up writing letters and comforted herself in her solitude because she realized that writing letters was something like false hope, which was a feeling worse than loneliness.

            Luckily for Jinni, she had another way to pass the time. Jinni liked to draw. Ever since she could remember, she had been surrounded by pencils. Not only the ordinary yellow kind used for homework and tests, but all kinds. She had colored pencils with leads made from wax, leads made from watercolor, leads made from clay and even leads made from food. So many different crimsons, pinks, periwinkles, mauves, mints, cinnamons, goldenrods, ochres and gingers filled her artist's box. Even among the graphite variety, she had pencils in all shades of grey from the darkest black of an evil villain's heart of 9B all the way to the lightest, almost invisible wisp of grey, like a single strand of white hair, of a 9H. Most will be familiar with the standard HB pencil used in schools, not too dark and not too light, but for drawing, Jinni preferred a 4H graphite pencil. A 4H pencil has a harder, denser graphite core. Because of its hardness, it stays pointy longer between trips to the pencil sharpener. It draws a lighter and finer line. Mistakes cleaned up easier with an eraser which Jinni often made and 4H lead did not dirty her hand like the softer, darker leads of the B, 2B and 4B.

Using her vast supply of pencils, Jinni would spend her days and evenings drawing. She drew everything that came within sight and into her imagination. Sometimes, she drew the world outside her window. The old house she lived in sat next to a grove of California avocado trees which had grown to become very tall. The avocados were once part of a larger orchard, but like everything else in this run-down county, the owner had abandoned it and the trees grew wild, their branches twisted up with one another. Despite the poor condition of the trees, Jinni still saw beauty in the crooked branches with their green leaves and when she drew them, she sometimes embellished from her imagination what the grove used to look like when the trees were pruned into nice rows and when farmers used to come through and harvest the fruit, humming with the birds as they worked.