Sidney artist’s book dips into the uncertainty of death, while living in full colour

The book began with a dream. Pierre at Deep Cove Chalet was serving her a giant bowl of soup — with pearls in it. Wendy Picken didn’t want to eat it, but he said “No, Wendy. It’s part of your double destiny, you have to eat it.”

She took that memory of pearl soup with her to a writing workshop and came to the epiphany that the soup was her grandmother’s.

Now Gramma’s Pearl Soup and Grampa’s Mango Smile is in print.

“It’s my baby at 49,” she said with a mango smile of her own.

Picken planned to write a book about her grandparents, but despite being an artist herself, didn’t figure on illustrating it herself. She contacted her local female artist friends and they were quickly on board, willing to create the characters, they just needed a storyboard of what Picken was looking for to create Gramma’s Pearl Soup and Grampa’s Mango Smile.

“I just sat down and did rough sketches,” Picken said. Then she showed them to her artist circle. “They said, ‘Wendy, you don’t need us, you can do this’.”

“I was really grieving and it just seemed natural to do the drawings,” she added.

She recalled the best things about her grandparents, the things that made her feel magical as a child.

Whenever her grandmother baked bread, Grampa would dance around the kitchen singing about “chicken in the bread pan, kickin’ out the dough.”

“Just the image of him doing that, I have never forgotten,” Picken said. The chicken, and all the other things that make grandparents special, appear in the book that tells the tale of an incredible visit.

“They’re happy to see us. They’re older but they seem younger. Their eyes are still shiny with fun and the colours in them remind me of the seasons,” Picken writes in the book.

Her earliest memories of Gramma was the older woman pulling out photo albums and telling family tales. She remembers vividly a picture of her grandmother as a child, the photo in the book, and that’s how she remembers Gramma.

She always feared losing her grandparents — right up until the moment she did.

“I think the story let me come full circle with the idea of losing them … and the idea that they’re still with me,” she said.

In Gramma’s Pearl Soup and Grampa’s Mango Smile, her grandparents assuage her fears of death and losing them.

“Remember how everything in Pearl Soup fits together? Well sometimes happy and sad things fit together too,” Gramma says in the book.

But though death is alluded to, there’s no dying among the pages, only leaflet upon leaflet of colourful life. And the book ends on a happy note, with the baking of a mango smile pie — and the recipe to boot.

Gramma’s Pearl Soup and Grampa’s Mango Smile is available at Tanners Books, Bubba Loo Children’s Boutique and Muffett and Louisa in Sidney, Deep Cove Market in North Saanich, the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria and Side Street Studio in Oak Bay.

Picken will be on hand for an official launch of the book at Deep Cove Market from 1 to 4 p.m. on Nov. 22 and 23.

reporter@peninsulanewsreview.com