There’s an art to properly remembering my mother

Although she was a married woman and mother of three, her face shone like a small child bringing home a piece of artwork from school.

I had encouraged my mother to take a painting class because I loved the little houses she drew for me, and I had noticed that even her doodles had grace and form. What she lacked was confidence.

But when she walked in the door after her last class, carrying her painting, covered with butcher paper, she was smiling.

“Oh Mom, it’s finished,” I said, excitement mounting.

“Not exactly,” my mother said with the air of an artist who declares their work is never finished. “Let me see,” I exclaimed, reaching for the prized package. She looked a little embarrassed as she set it on the dining room table, carefully peeling back the light brown paper to reveal her still life with fruit.

Although she brushed off my compliments, my mother’s face told a different story. Pride shadowed her features and enthusiasm lilted her voice even as she pointed out the problems with her work. She would live another 60-some years, but the still life was her first and last painting. Unfulfilled potential always makes me sad.

I wanted her to hang it over the fireplace where it would be the centerpiece of the room, but Mom shook her head.

“It’s not good enough for the living room,” she declared. The painting would bounce around from room to room, sometimes perched on a desk and covered by a pile of bills. But it never actually hung on a wall.

On one of my trips home, after I moved to New York, I took it home to live with me. It looked content in my Greenwich Village apartment, where it brought life to the dining room that consisted of a card table, covered with a red and white checkered table cloth, and two folding chairs. The fruit still life hung over a small bookcase so it could be seen from either chair, dessert to my paltry meal offerings.

After I moved to California I would sometimes pop the painting on a desk in the office-slash-guest room when Mom came to visit.

“Do you still have that old thing?” she would laugh.

When we had some remodeling done in the house, it wound up stored in the garage, boxes piled high in front of it. As the garage got more crowded, the fruit painting seemed to decay into the walls. I feared it may have been accidentally trashed.

About a year after George died, I started the great garage clean-out, one painstaking box at a time. It took many months, but eventually I could see the back of the garage where Mom’s fruited painting was pushed against the wall, wrapped in plastic, one of George’s neatly implemented preservation tactics.

As my mother’s 105th birthday approaches, I found myself rescuing the painting and searching for a place to display it in the house. It didn’t take long. I headed straight for the fireplace and placed it on the mantel.

Happy birthday, Mom. Your painting is finally at home where it belongs, splashed with sunlight in the day, soberly pensive in the softly lit evening.

And Mom, if there’s a painting class wherever you are, please take it.