February 27th - Gifts
Gifts
On the living room wall at my parent's house is an abstract picture of a landscape with the sun setting behind a mountain that my mother painted in high school. There’re only a few colors to it and it's washed in thin layers, producing an atmospheric haze that feels peaceful and sleepy, while still being bold against the white wall on which it hangs, trapped in its rectangle of canvas. It's always twilight in the painting, even as the room stays brightly lit through the evening with incandescent bulbs that shine right onto the long shadows of its study. It faces the windows and doors above the back of the couch. You turn your back to it during living room conversation. And when you eat at the dining room table or play cards or dominoes, you also face away from it, looking out the window at the world instead - where birds sing to the sunlight and visit my mother's suet cakes. The setting sun in the painting stays behind you unless you enjoy it purposefully.
When I was in high school and dabbled in painting, my mom took me out to the garage to search for some old canvases of hers that I could whitewash and create something new. We put a ladder up to the rafters and pulled down a dozen paintings my mother had made as a teenager. Most of them were incomplete subjects. Some were just splashes of color or abandoned ideas. That painting of the hazy twilight mountain landscape was up there too. I loved it right away, but my mom wasn't so sure, even though I insisted. Together we picked out a painting for me to whitewash and returned the rest to the rafters, including that landscape. Years later I came home from college, and it was where it is today.
On four separate occasions, I've given my mother painting supplies as gifts and she always loves it and gets excited and I get a big hug and a kiss. She's never opened the boxes of paint or had to wash one of the fine horsehair brushes I've bought her. I gave her the best gift when I told her I loved that painting, when I insisted on the value of her expression. The paint tubes are just a reminder.
My mother gave me every sunset I've ever seen.
Moms are great.