Another Painting...
her beloved grand-daughter was ill. she was cradling Jo Ann in her arms, the rocking chair keeping time with each heartbeat. creaking, clacking, cosseting. trying to keep the fever at bay with her love. the baby’s mother had been in the hospital for months due to depression after her daughter was born. then Jo Ann pointed at the old, time-worn painting on the wall above the sofa: at a mother with her young children in a rustic cottage from yesteryear, perhaps from the country of their forbearers. there was a swaddling babe in a cradle on the floor. together, the two of them looked at the painting that hung there in pride of place. two generations separated them, these two females – one near the end of her life, the other at the start of hers - but viewing the painting as one.
Not Just...
after her husband passed way, the grandmother went into a rapid yet long decline. what had been thought to be grief and loss that addled her mind, eventually ended up being diagnosed as dementia. her house and furnishings were sold. she was placed in an old people’s home, behind locked doors. when one of the woman’s daughters took down the old oil painting from its permanent place above the sofa, on the back she found an inscription. “This is Jo Ann’s picture. from Grandma.”
Not Just Another Painting...
tick, tock, click, clock. decades passed by in the blink of an eye. flowing, fluttering,
flickering. that child grew up, married and became a mother with a baby girl. the river of life churned on. a few months after her 65th birthday the woman who had been that baby
girl passed away suddenly, her heart giving up the ghost of its host. she fell only a short
distance from that painting that hung in its pride of place above her sofa.
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