Bringing Home Memories

Dad and Lou will be moving into a new house this Fall for a variety of reasons, not the least of which, I'm sure, is my mother's presence in their current house. She had a huge, demonstrative spirit when she was alive and I'm sure it's still very much in that house. Lou was a friend of Mom's, but I'm sure that doesn't make this any easier for Dad and Lou.

So when we visited a few weeks ago, Dad gave me a few things to take home with me. One was the ceramic pot with Mom's ashes in it (which I have since removed and put elsewhere since we're using the pot on our livingroom table, and that "creeps the kids out").

I also got to bring home the tray that Elisabeth, Kat and I made for Mom's 76th birthday. We copied meaningful photos in black and white, made a collage with them, and covered the whole thing in a thick acrylic layer.

And I brought home two paintings by Dad of the house we lived in from the time I was 11 until I went to college. The house no longer exists. It was in a quaint California Bay Area town called Atherton where properties are an acre or more and no businesses are allowed. When we moved there, it was more like a refuge from the hustle-bustle of the emerging Silicon Valley, but since then it has become an elite town with gazillion dollar homes -- which cracks me up because I remember my parents skimping and saving to afford the $65,000 it would cost us to buy this small Mediterranean house! The people who bought the house purchased it only for the beautiful acre with 12 huge oak trees and promptly razed the house (which broke my heart) and built the mansion that's now there -- which makes these these paintings by my dad that much more special!