My sister Jeanie is ravenous when it comes to learning about artists and their work.

Jeanie has quilted for many years: created, sewn, hand-quilted, named, exhibited, sold, traded, taught. I know Jeanie as an artist, among other things. Bob, her partner, also—he paints and draws. Both have wide and varying interests and other jobs. Still, art is a part of their daily lives.

Framed paintings, drawings and prints radiate energy from their walls. On one wall in Jeanie's quilt-making room are her quilts-in-process. Beneath them, neat stacks of fabric arranged by color proceed from one wall to the other, and on top of everything, more fabric.

Jeanie has contemplated and studied artists and their work with what can only be called joy. And her involvement exists beyond what can be translated to quilt design. Their collection of art books occupies prime space, and is growing. Some are temporary, from the library or used book store, others are permanent. Thus, visiting Jeanie and Bob always includes the discovery of artists unknown to me, as well as the luxury seeing and learning more about those with whom I am familiar.

Jeanie and Bob were the first of family and friends we visited on this trip to California and back. We left on the run from their ice storm, and planned then to see them as we returned. By this time, my head and heart were full. Especially, I was still marveling over California. How everywhere we drove the roads were circuitous—except for the straightaways on the freeways—and the landscape was rounded and mounded, often covered with the wavy lines of orchards, the grapevines, and through it all, the ever-curving roads. There was more about California that haunted me, beyond my particular experience touched by the joy of seeing Jay and Ann and Chuck, and then the resulting deep feelings upon departure.

In the end, Jeanie managed to bring California full circle, in a way that satisfied the responsive artist/joyfully seeing part of me. She and Bob and I were talking after another wonderful breakfast; often our conversation turns to seeing, feeling, making. Jeanie got up excitedly and began searching for a book by David Hockney, still alive and working, and one of her favorite artists. This book included paintings and comments based on his experiences living in California; his paintings were totally influenced by his daily life there.

Jeanie opened the book, and held it as she would when reading aloud to the four-year-olds she cares for daily. I would be happy now if I could repeat exactly what she read. How David Hockney said that the curving roads and landscape and daily rhythms of living in California all became a part of him, and had to become vital elements—subjects also—of his paintings there.

Somehow, it connected my images of Jay driving us to Mendocino, or to the green mossy-treed hilltops, the farmer's market under the sun with Ann, the cows spotting tall green hills—that compression of memory and breath and talk and seeing that filled my time in California. And I was filled with delight as I heard how he expressed what I could not in picture or word, while I looked at his brilliantly colored and beautifully linear paintings, and heard the soft voice of my sister, reading with such love of it all.