Flow

People and things flow in and out of our lives. When they’re “in” we enjoy them, celebrate with them, care for, train up, and in so many other ways we fully experience them for whatever the duration may be. When we lose them or they otherwise flow away from us we are left with the gift of a memory. This being a Sunday post the focus will remain on whatsoever things are pure, lovely, and good. . . It is we who are the ones who choose how to frame the memory, perhaps with a simple thin black one or an elaborately ornate gold-leafed frame, or perhaps otherwise.

This 7×12 “memory,” this amateur oil painting, was given to me fairly recently and now hangs on my living room gallery wall. Its not expertly done but you wouldn’t expect that of a budding artist in her tweens. This was painted in the late 1930’s by a young girl with a dream in her heart. It hangs from an original snippet of yarn, unframed, unsigned, but not unloved.

As my older sister and her family flowed out of my daily life here in California, headed for Texas for the rest of their days, she gave me this small piece of art. I’d never seen it before and I suppose she kept it in storage rather than inside their beautiful home. As they flowed far and away to another land this painting flowed in. Funny how that works sometimes. An object I had no previous knowledge of yet have strong ties to, strong emotions about is now in my possession. I didn’t know that young girl then—I hadn’t been born yet. But the budding artist grew and received her education and married and gave birth to three daughters and I am one.

So as a dear sister flowed away, a young girl’s artistic soul, having been captured on a scrap of canvas, flowed in. Not in place of. Memories never fully fill the void that “they” once filled. But as a unique and lovely memory with a story of its own.

Whatsoever things . . .