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it. She wrote in a letter to her sister Catherine that she was making a living, but it wasn’t worth the price. Somewhere along the line the legend sprang up that during this time Georgia designed the iconic little Dutch girl ¶ who famously occupied the bottom half of the Old Dutch Cleanser can, which more than anything reflects our need to rehabilitate this dull and nonproductive time in the life of the great O’Keeffe, to show that the long hours spent bent over that Chicago drawing table weren’t a complete waste of her life and talent, that it wasn’t a dead end, that something “good”—okay, it was just a cleanser label, but as far as product logos go, it’s a beloved classic—came out of these miserable years.
    Maybe there was nothing redemptive about this time in Chicago; maybe this was just an awful time to be gotten through. Maybe, to use an analogy from the long-lost Sun Prairie farm, the ground of O’Keeffe’s life needed to lie fallow. Maybe, this deadly year of cuff and collar drawing was just what she needed to realize what she didn’t want. It’s all well and good to know what we want to do; sometimes it’s just as handy to know what we don’t want to do.
    Thank your lucky infectious disease.
    For someone who lived to be almost one hundred, Georgia survived a number of serious ailments. She was saved from the slow-mo calamity of a career in commercial art by a case of the measles. After two years of grinding away in Chicago, one day she awoke and felt feverish and itchy. It will come as no surprise to you that the first measles vaccine came along around the same time as the Beatles. In Georgia’s case, not only did she suffer from a high fever, cough, and bright red rash, but her suffering was further complicated by corneal ulceration (inflammation of the cornea), which made it impossible to render tiny buttons and lacy textures. Once again, she went home.
    When she arrived in Williamsburg she discovered that only her father was there, unemployed and living alone. While Georgia had been away, her mother had been diagnosed with early-stage tuberculosis and had moved with her other daughters to Charlottesville, in the dry, cool, and presumably restorative foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
    Georgia was, among other things, private. She endured a lot of misfortune, and didn’t have much to say about having done so. The degree to which she was devastated by the news of her mother’s diagnosis is unknown. Frank, her once happy-go-lucky dad, he who loved to dance after having logged in a good twelve hours on the farm in Sun Prairie, was depressed. His life had turned into a walking O. Henry * story: He’d given up the land and life he’d loved to flee tuberculosis, only to meet it head on in a place he couldn’t abide, and that couldn’t abide him.
    In Williamsburg, Georgia spent several months recuperating. The great thing about recuperating is that no one expects you to do anything. You have nothing but time to sit and ponder. This is the case, then as now, although it’s infinitely more difficult to be granted the time to get back on your feet these days. People who beg to be allowed to get over a cold are viewed as slackers, and the sorts of diseases that allowed Georgia’s generation the luxury of lolling around on the divan for months on end have been wiped out or prevented by vaccines. Now, we need extreme measures to be allowed a little time to convalesce.
    Several years ago I needed surgery to remove a benign nodule on my thyroid. It was an easy day surgery, in at seven a.m., home on the couch recuperating by three. I’m a fairly irrational patient. The week before my yearly checkup—it doesn’t matter which one—I’m already practicing living under a death sentence. Even though it ignites an instant feeling of gratitude for my morning cup of coffee and the pink roses that struggle to