sketchbook stories: the art supply closet

i never promised you a rose garden

Found: the fossilized palette of an artist’s life. Dried-up paint tubes. Portfolios of illustrations. The faint odor of turpentine. A Milk-Bone box crammed with every card I’d ever given her—bygone birthdays and Mother’s Days; a half century of Valentine sentiments. Lace and paper hearts reduced to decaying mucilage.

Evidence of talent. Proof of love.

Found: the portrait of a traditional family, my mother’s drawing published in a now-defunct newspaper a year after my birth. In my own life, though, art did not imitate life. An odd little family—the eccentric artist, the intellectual oceanographer and their only child.

Still: life.