Lia Smith-Redmann

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

a family business she never wanted to run and a future she couldn’t retrieve. Grief and ego became weapons that her sister used to kill their sisterhood. She hates funerals and memorials, possibly because she knows them from the inside out.

The doctrines of her everyday rituals could fill a bible. One must follow the proper way to make a grilled cheese and study the intricacies of making a BLT; when shopping, always park next to the same cart corral; chocolate should be eaten after a garlicky meal. Four decades of journals, religiously tended every day, reveal the most reliable catalogue of memories: the birth of her daughter, every move—the Clark Lake House, the Sylvan View House, the Garden House, the Half Mile Bridge House, finally to the Red House, all of which she built or designed—every vacation, from hiking the grease-black lava rock at the edge of the lava flows in Hawaii when the kids were four and five, to her middle school son surfing in Mexico, to midnight walks in Paris and biking down the Italian Alps as teenagers. Undiagnosed PTSD and amnesia had taken these memories away.

It is not her routines, however, that define her. Ungirdled by relentless common sense, her craving for dance pours through her: ballet, modern, jazz, swing, tap, Hawaiian, Native American, Javanese, Irish, African, Afro-Brazilian, Bharatanatyam, and Tai Chi. More than the mental liberation of writing, more than the perfectionism of drawing or painting, more than the house-rattling power of her singing alto voice, the physical shackle-shattering of choreography makes her whole.

She is whole when she sits, perched atop a stump at the edge of her East-facing bluff that spills abruptly into the valley that hides Fish Creek, where a patchwork of pines woven into the deciduous forest bends together as though meditating on a ritual to begin. Here, she and her off-the-record therapy dog, Tiki, an orange-socked German Shepherd, address her sage and adoring “Inner Monk.”

“How do I connect to all people, like Donald Trump, through love? What is next for me?”

She is whole, even though her portrait contends itself like the battling colors of an Andy Warhol painting: a sage and a child, insecure and confident, spiritual yet fastidiously grounded, loving and sometimes judgmental, and hospitable but private. Conservatism in a small-town cherry farming community, in which she grew up bookended by only two neighbors for several miles, allowed her to

develop judgments about certain people: blondes are manipulative, southern drawls make a person sound unintelligent, conservationists drive Subarus.

Despite this, she touches with a healer’s hands—a modern witch, brewing essential oil blends for aches and ailments. Three of her potions—“Tummy Truce,” “Belly Balm,” “Elimination Stimulation”— cure three different kinds of belly aches alone. The encyclopedia-like nature of her spirituality allows her to draw from the Hindu beliefs of the Bhagavad Gita, from Tibetan therapies, from the neuroscience of binaural beats, from Buddhist meditation, from massage, and from countless spiritual and philosophical thinkers and teachers. She heals to survive. She is a mother of two children and a dozen others: the underdogs, the artists, the intellectuals, and the LGBT kids severed from the pedestal of popularity at the local school.

She is whole, even though years of name-calling and harrying by her older sister, the lifelong traces of teenage bulimia, and 15 years in the customer service industry as the owner of an inn have diminished her self-confidence. Facebook challenges, constantly updating technology, Fox News, CNN, reality TV, insurance companies, political abuse, climate change—this chaos, the kind that shatters her routine and timetables, she combats with cooking good food, feeding the tender rabbits hiding in the yard, maintaining her garden, and watching MASH on weeknights.

Dinner and birthday parties become showroom spectacles. Christmas Day breakfast is a live-action recount of a delicate painting delineating nobility at a Parisian table. A night out at the Door Community Auditorium becomes an art, made intense by the search for the perfect pair of earrings to match her floral, black-and-white Goodwill skirt. The mosaic of these moments, made important by her touch, still does not piece together the whole picture.

The language of her love speaks through the intimacy of her details: attending her daughter’s musical rehearsals to offer critiques on her dancing, driving her son throughout Door County villages to help him sell his photographs to the local paper, taking time out of each morning to share coffee with her husband on the porch—even though it may dismantle the routine of her entire day.

She knows that how she is remembered makes up only the framework of what would be her lasting memory. Like the Mona Lisa, she lives the life of the muse of a portrait whose mystery only she knows.