I Was Lucky
By Sophie Sheppard
Book cover artwork by Sophie Sheppard.
I am lucky to have been raised by two people who considered the making of beauty a worthwhile occupation for adults—as if the creation of beauty and the making of paintings and sculpture were as normal as making money or building things or having a job like the other parents did that lived on Primrose Street where I grew up. The first of the postwar developments put small houses and tidy streets in what had been a dairy pasture on the west edge of Reno. Westfield Village it was called. A whole neighborhood of families like ours, with a mom and a dad and kids and a dog or two in the backyard if you were lucky.
The other lucky thing is that my parents liked to escape the confines of Reno on long camping trips. Newcomers to Nevada from Oklahoma, our family explored the wild deserts of the Great Basin. Gear loaded in the back, with water and gas cans strapped to the sides, my dad headed Hiccup the Pickup, a 1950’s Dodge Pickup painted gray with a brush, out onto a rough dirt road, usually with no destination in mind. All that wild country. No fences. We slept under the stars.
We live now in the emptiest part of the Great Basin my husband and I could find. It hasn’t changed much since I was a kid. You can see where we live if you fly over at night. It is that big, dark empty area that has only a few tiny lights. When we first came here, over 40 years ago, the place seemed remote to me. But after 40 years, the idea of remote no longer exists in my mind. It is simply the place where we live and as such, is the center of my universe where stars loom large and bright each night above this incredible planet we are lucky enough to call home.
A third-generation painter, Sophie Sheppard lives and works in the remote northwest corner of the Great Basin where the distances are vast, and the silences are deep. Her paintings and writing are place-based in this land where she, her husband, Lynn Nardella, and three generations of their family practice regenerative agriculture and put carbon back in the soil where it belongs. Sophie and her book, The Moon's Tear: A Desert Night's Dream, will be representing Nevada, in the youth title division, at the 2024 National Book Festival in Washington, DC. This story is based on a dream she had while sleeping under clear desert night skies.
Double Down blogger photo by Kathleen Kuo.