Bittersweet.
I hate that it happened, but I’m happy that I wrote about it.
Way back in 2002, my then-husband took some of my daughters’ precious artwork off the wall and put it in a pile on the floor to deal with later. Our cat peed on it.
This piece was originally published in the Our Town section of the Tracy Press on January 2, 2002. I’ve inserted Oxford commas where they belong - because I don’t adhere to AP Style in this Substack - and then before husband because he’s not now, but everything else is the same.
At times like this, I’m really happy that I held onto so many of my old columns. Reading through this piece brought my girls’ artwork right back into my mind’s eye, fresh and clean and bright as the day before the cat critiqued them.
The lesson for me is that taking the time to pay attention to what is truly precious is worth every moment. I’m so grateful that I didn’t take that tiger, that elephant, and those birdhouses for granted, that I stopped and looked at them so many times that I have almost perfect recall, more than 20 years after they were ruined.
Bad, Bad, Cat.
Right in the middle of the holiday season, when our minds and efforts were bent on welcoming friends and family to our home and our happiness, tragedy struck. My heart suffered a heavy blow. My spirit was broken.
Something so precious I couldn't fathom its value till it was gone … well, things happened and now it's gone.
My then-husband, being helpful in the face of holiday visitors, took some artwork down from my daughters' hallway and placed it on the floor in our room. His intentions were good; he wanted them somewhere I would remember to store them properly. The bright but primitive designs had been decorating that hallway for almost three years and were looking a little worse for wear.
But I loved them, with my heart and soul. More than I knew. Every morning as I journeyed to my daughters' rooms to help them greet the day, and every evening as I made the last silent trek down that hallway to kiss them silent goodnights, I passed by those cheerful, precocious creations and grinned. I've traced them with my finger in the quiet moments of an afternoon and sighed over their smudges on hectic evenings.
I should feel silly, because they were just pictures from school, just chalk and markers, just happy jungle animals playing in the grass, but I just can't bring myself to shrug it off and deny that their absence depresses me. You haven't been cheered up properly until you've wandered down a hall where a grinning, spirited tiger and a trumpeting, roly-poly elephant greet you with unconditional and never-ending, boundless, bouncy joy.
When we first moved there in 1999, my daughters were 6 and 5. They may have moved to a new town, a new house, and a new school, but they brought with them an old, insatiable appetite for the creation of all things "art" (show me a kid who doesn't have this and I'll show you a sad, sad, thing that really needs a crayon). One of the first truly enjoyable experiences they had in their new school was the time they got to spend with a local artist by the name of Pam Wilhelm.
She presented some of the same projects to both of my daughters' classes, and I was suddenly smiled on by fortune. I got to see first-hand how each of my girls approached the same process. I could sit and pore over the details, catch a glimpse into their creative minds. I could glean clues to one girl's eye for detail and the other girls' use of sweeping strokes. The same birdhouse in the snow for example, built with the same tools, according to the same plan, revealed so much about the individual who had painted it when placed next to her sister's.
The moment I noticed the disappearance of the tiger, the elephant and the twin birdhouses, my stomach tightened into a knot.
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