and booked a trip around the world. My children called me selfish; two blocked my number.
Pelican Reach, my fourth stop, is where I met Arthur — seventy-one, widowed, gentle, funny, in love with the same old movies and jazz I was. He invited me for coffee, and when I stepped into his living room, I froze.Buy Maps
Above his fireplace hung a small oil painting of a willow over a pond — a painting I had made fifty years ago, before marriage and children swallowed the young woman I used to be. I tilted it off the wall, and there was my own maiden signature. “I’m the girl who painted it,” I told him. “You’ve been living with a piece of me for forty years.”
Chapter 2: The Girl I Used to Be
Let me tell you about the young woman who painted that willow tree, because I had spent fifty years
forgetting she existed, and standing in Arthur’s living room was the first time in half a century I remembered her.
Before I was anyone’s mother or wife, I was a painter. Not a famous one, not even a professional one, but a real one — a girl who saw light and had to put it on canvas, who spent weeks on a single pond because she couldn’t get the way the sun came through the willow leaves to be exactly right. Painting was the truest thing about me. It was how I understood the world. When I was nineteen, I sold a few small pieces at a little gallery, and I remember the feeling of someone wanting something I’d made, wanting a piece of how I saw things, more than I’ve remembered almost anything since.
And then I got married, and I had four children, and life closed over that girl
like water over a stone. It wasn’t dramatic. It was just the slow, total way a woman’s own self gets spent, one sacrifice at a time, on everyone else. There was no time to paint when there were diapers. No money for canvas when there were school shoes. No space in a day full of other people’s needs for the private, selfish, necessary act of making something just because it was beautiful. I put the brushes away “for now,” and “for now” became fifty years, and somewhere in there I stopped being a woman who painted and became only a woman who provided, and I forgot — I genuinely forgot — that I had ever been anything else.
