October 2006 - When Painting Came Back

Our family has spent a lot of time in the mountains of North Carolina on vacations.  In October 2006 we spent two weeks and my inner artist quite unexpectedly woke up and rolled over, and we met again for the first time in over two decades.  It felt like the lines in Donald Hall's "Kicking the Leaves,"

"This year the poems came back, when the leaves fell.

Kicking the leaves, I heard the leaves tell stories,

remembering, and therefore looking ahead, and building

the house of dying.  I looked up into the maples

and found them, the vowels of bright desire.

I thought they had gone forever..."

I have been gradually doing more art ever since.  That vacation, though, was like being brought back home after being away so long you forgot where you were from.  I rounded a corner and found that fields that had been barren for many years had mysteriously born fruit, like magic.