Yahara Journal 2021

Monk, Mother, Mystery: The Woman in the Incomplete Portrait Lia Smith-Redmann “My children don’t know who I really am,” she would say. A portrait evades true revelation without the full picture. A book could be written deciphering the motifs and the moments of her life, and it would still only tell half of her story.

Utilitarian, heel-chewed jeans, and dirt-smeared Skechers sneakers, eyes that droop with the weight of her Slovene and Austrian ancestry, to which she is a stranger, and easily caramelized skin imprinted by transient freckles and sunspots—when Facebook comments from former classmates and distant cousins tell her she’s beautiful, she doesn’t believe it.

Curated like the Louvre, the books in her library fill floor-toceiling shelves, enshrined by their purpose: The Natural Pharmacy poses separately from Picasso: A Biography, and Shanghai Girls receives allocation to an eye-level shelf. Upstairs in the barn, a collection of her father’s best paintings sits stacked against the wall, made phantoms by a dusty sheet, to protect them from sun bleaching and so that she doesn’t have to look at them.

During her Sturgeon Bay, “big city” runs, she is Daniel Craig on a James Bond mission, campaigning through selective aisles with cutthroat efficiency. She takes fast steps and sharp corners, swishing her ponytail. When at home, her wiggling toes metronome her methodical movements as her social anxiety deflates.

Worn but practiced slogans and phrases are like survivalist badges, indicating some of the challenges she has suffered.

“I hate surprises.”

“Family is not blood. You choose family.”

“Death always comes in threes.”

Death trained her. Pancreatic cancer in ’86 took her father. In ’88, her mother followed with liver cancer, and in the icy grip of Clark Lake’s water in the winter of ’03, she lost her brother, leaving her with 31