​Here is one of my favorite paint brushes.  


Well, former favorite brushes, I should say.  


It’s actually been rather irritating lately.  But in the past years, we’ve been through a lot together.  Just about a year ago, in fact, this brush was doing amazing work on a rather large project.


I completely relied upon this brush, and it lived up to the task;  responsive, soft, flexible.  I could load on the thick oil paint, and this brush always smoothed things out just how I wanted it.


But not any more.  


Time has passed, and it’s grown crusty.


Stiff.  Uncompromising.  Unhelpful. 


This brush became so irksome that I wanted to cast it aside and forget about it.  Give up on it.


But the truth is, I still need it.  I love it.

So I decided to give it one last try.  After a quick soak in solvent, I turned on the warm water, and started in with the soap.  Just some hot water and a bar of regular soap.  


And an hour of my time.


Gently, patiently, I dabbed and pressed and painted on the bar of soap until the old crustiness began to melt right out of this beautiful brush.  I could not believe how much red oil paint was still stuck within the bristles!  No wonder it had been so ill-behaved!  Warm water, soap, dab, brush, rinse.  Warm water, soap, dab, brush, rinse.  Warm water, soap…


And persistent gentleness.


What if I treated other people with the same care and concern that I reserve for my paintbrushes?  What if every crusty, irritating person was gently soothed with warm water and soap?  What if I was willing to spend an hour with each grump, gently soothing away thier crustiness?  


What if?


You will be happy to know that my old brush is in perfect shape now.


No crustiness.  No stiffness, no wounds.  


It is pure and soft and gentle.  It's been restored.  

April 15.

Tax Day.

Groan...

For as much as I love paint and words and creating messy things,
I despise record keeping and ledgers and the monotony of orderliness.  
Calculating tax returns ranks right up there with the time I got a root canal.  

The root canal was particularly memorable because not only did it hurt like heck, but while the perky, young, blonde endodontist with red manicured nails heartily shoved medical machinery, including a running drill and what might have been a catalytic converter into my mouth, she asked 'getting to know you' questions.  

"Do you have kids?" her smile gleamed, sparkling with a million dollars of dental work.  I was flat on my back, white-knuckled, having infected tooth pulp sucked out with a vacuum hose.  I didn't feel much like small talk.

"Auhughmshix..."  I attempted to smile, and held up six fingers.
  
"Ohmygosh! Imagine, six kids!  How can you keep track!  Ohmygosh if anyone asks you how many kids you have, you can just say half a dozen!!!!!"   Her peals of laughter echoed loud enough for me to still hear today. 

Needless to say, I did not reveal to this woman that I was five months pregnant with number seven.  Better to let her imagine I swallowed a globe on my way in for the root canal.

Compared to Tax Day, which I have to endure every year, that root canal was nothing.  Just a fleeting irritation.   

But April 15 comes every year, with its infernal receipts and columns and calculations.  I am not fond of April 15.

Today my son came home from school, dumped his math homework on the table and said, "Mom, is tomorrow April 15th?"

"Yes."

"Awesome!  Will you make a cake to celebrate?"

"Are you nuts, Kid?  Who celebrates Tax Day?"  

"Mom!" he said, looking shocked with disbelief.  "April 15th is Leonardo Da Vinci's birthday!  How could you not know that?  It's important!"  

Well, who knew?  

April 15 is special!   I think I will go bake a gluten-free, sugar-free cake, after all.
​
Then we will really have something to smile about.  

Mona Lisa (public domain), Leonardo Da Vinci

This is a burnt charcoal vine.


Just ashes.


Good for nothing, you might think.  It’s the end, it’s done for.


Wrong.


I need this.  I actually went to a store and paid for it.  This small burnt vine is just what I need to begin an oil painting.


I use it to cover a page of tissue paper with blackness.  It’s a mess.  There is charcoal and ash on both my hands, on my cheek where I scratched an itch, on the floor, and all over the tissue paper.  Artists have worked the same way since the cave paintings of Lascaux.  In a mess.


I shake away the extra dust and flip the charcoal covered sheet upside down onto my new canvas.  Just a moment before, the canvas had been pure, white and clean.  But I’m not worried about smudges.  I place a traced outline of my initial sketch onto the tissue paper, and retrace my idea over the layers of tissue, and onto the canvas.  Smudges are easily cleaned up.  


What is left is a perfectly prepared canvas, with the image intact.  Iconographers for centuries called this the “cartoon”.  A simple charcoal line drawing, the beginning of  greatness.  With this humble beginning, they could paint windows to Heaven.


Some days my life feels just like a mess of charcoal and ash.  But I’ll take that.   I will embrace the ashes, let them cover me.  I’ll hold on to the faith that God has a plan.  He is the Artist, after all.  He can take care of the smudges.  And he can make something beautiful from a beginning of ashes.

"With Mary for your guide, you will never go astray; while invoking her, you will never lose heart; so long as she is in your mind, you will not be deceived; while she holds your hand, you will not fall; under her protection, you have nothing to fear; if she walks before you, you will not grow weary; if she shows you favor, you will reach the goal."

- St. Bernard of Clairvaux_, Doctor of the Church, 1090-1153

“What do you DO all day, Mom?”  my son asked me, a small tone of jealousy in his voice.  “I mean, we’re at school for seven hours.  What do you do?”  

Wow.  What can I say? That I sit at the kitchen table all day, eating ice cream?  Does he really think that I find all the hidden Snicker bars and scarf them down with no one to stop me?  They do go really well with ice cream…  Okay, I’ll be honest.  That could have happened.

But really, that is his fondest dream;  to be left alone with the refrigerator for seven hours, with no one to stop him.  

That’s not quite how it is.  Since you asked, Son, I will show you what happened at the kitchen table while you were gone.

These are a couple of statues that a very patient person has been waiting to be painted for a long time.  Today is the day...

The kitchen table turned into this:    It was gloriously quiet and deliciously fun.

The statues now look like this:

While I was painting the seeds in St. Francis's bowl, I thought about how much I love my brushes.  I have a lot of them...Some are fancy and luxurious and delicate, some are rotten-looking things that don't appear to be worth keeping.  They might look like garbage to someone who looked in my paintbrush box.  But all my brushes are needed, they all have a special purpose.  Here are two of my favorites:

The one on the right is a luxurious, expensive oil painting brush.  It is sleek and soft, the finest Red Sable Filbert. It is 100% reliable, and far more sophisticated than I am.  It blends colors beautifully.   It softens the lines that other brushes leave behind, smoothing all the imperfections.  

The one on the left is a 99 cent cheap thing from the hardware store.  It is ancient, hardened, crusted over and pretty much destroyed.  But that's why I like it so much.  That old brush can do things that no other brush can.  Like paint abstract, splotchy spots to make seeds in St. Francis' bowl, for example.   None of my other brushes can  do that.  It is precisely because that old brush is ruined that I like it so much, and use it so often.  I need it.  At times, I have taken a scissors and snipped some of the inside bristles, thinning it out even more.  There's not much left of it, really.  
That's why it's so valuable.  

As I painted today, I did a lot of pondering about brushes and people.  

People are just like my brushes... They are all unique, for their own special purpose.  
And we need them all.

So Son, that's what I did today.  But don't worry.  The kitchen table is now cleaned off, and ready for you to eat again.  

And I made cookies.

For you.  Because He loves you.

I had help today.  

Good thing, because it took six coats of paint (six!) to cover a brown wall in my kitchen.  
Please don’t ever paint walls brown.  You will live to regret it, six times over.  
Brown tree trunks are nice.  Brown dirt is nice.  Brown chocolate is the nicest of all.
But brown on a kitchen wall is not nice.
Dark and cozy, but not nice.
Buttercups and Daisies are cheery and nice.  Sunshine is the best cheery of all.  
But we don’t have any of those…everything outside here is dead and brown.  It’s that kind of winter. 

I’d like to paint every room in my house a cheerful yellow.  But the six coats of paint required to cover the brown frightens me off.  And also, the family is rebelling.  

“Claude Monet did that,” I tell my kids for the hundredth time, showing them internet photos of Monet’s happy yellow kitchen and cheery farmhouse. “You could grow up to be a famous impressionist painter if you ate your oatmeal in a cheerful yellow room.”

“Please no, Mom.”  they groan. 
I won’t tell you what else they said. 

But it wasn’t cheerful.

I did have help though, as I said.  Somehow, between coats 5 and 6, Dog took a leisurely stroll through the paint tray that I left on the floor.  He then ambled all through the living room.  Thank God it's not carpeted.

So, here we come to the point of my ramblings.  It took me all day to cover up my small brown wall with a clean, joyful color.  It’s a little wall.  An accent wall.  Maybe only 12 feet by 9 feet.  

ALL DAY.  And it was hard work.  I was so tired that while making spaghetti for the crowd, I burned myself three times, the pasta welded together like a brick, and I cried.
So much work and exhaustion.  During all this, in the dead, brown world of Minnesota winter, 

God made it snow.  

In ten minutes, the entire neighborhood, and most of Minnesota, was whitewashed a perfect, pure and glittering white.  Ten minutes.  What irony. 

I try and I try to do my bit…make my corner a little bit brighter and better.  To find the love, joy and peace that I know is hiding there, among the cobwebs and brown paint.  In my own way.  With old paintbrushes and leftover paint which I have to check for lumps because it is really old paint.  My way stinks.

I need to step back, let go of my own ideas, and just let God whitewash my world.   It appears to be outta my league.

Snow.  He covered the dead and brown world with crystal clean purity today… made it all a beautiful place.  

And he didn’t even need my help. 

I recently had a most enlightening conversation with Small One.  I was painting, she was painting.  She likes to do what I do.  

We were enjoying working side by side, watercoloring the cloudy sky and some cartoons.  

“Small One, please pass the Kosher salt.  Want to watch as I sprinkle it on my wet paint?”

“I know, Mom.  I do that too.  It makes snowflakes in the paint.  See?”  She proceeds to take a pinch of salt with her dainty little fingers, and gently drop the grains into her wet paint.  

That’s my girl.  Her ‘snowflakes’ are exquisite.

We continue painting.  I paint a cartoon character pregnant, looking like a globe.  She paints her character round like a piece of candy.

“Hey Mom, do you want a tootsie roll?”

“We don’t have any, Dear.”

She smiles a knowing, secret smile of delight, and puts down her paintbrush.  “Yes, we do!  Hiding way up in the cupboard.”

I stop working.  “Oh really?  How do you know that?”

“Oh, me and Sis found it.  Don’t tell!  It’s Halloween candy.  No one  else knows, so they can’t eat any.”

Ah.  A secret stash of candy, hidden away from many siblings... Do tell.  If you want to eat something in a house with many siblings, you have to learn to either A., eat really fast, or B., hide stuff.  

At this point, she climbs up a chair, onto the cupboard, and reaches up above the toaster.  She returns victorious, with a half-empty bag of Tootsie Rolls, leftover and forgotten from Halloween.  She is so happy to share this secret with me.    

“But please don’t write about it on your blog, Mom, because then everyone will find out and it will be gone tomorrow!” 

Good thinking, Small One.

Wandering through art museums is something I really love to do.

I recently spent a day at a gallery with a daughter.

She is like her dad, that one.  Intense and talented, she sees things that most people do not.  Her dad draws comic books for DC in New York.  She essentially grew up in an art studio, surrounded by Batman, Superman, and the DC Universe for companions.  Her world was filled with epic battles in art, and the good guys always won.

When she was young, I read Gardner’s Art Through the Ages to her more often than Go Dog Go.   She and her siblings made (and still make!) extreme messes at the kitchen table, in watercolor, acrylic, pastels, charcoal, graphite, clay, sticks, fabric, sculpture, even lights.  I love the moment of discovery, when a dinosaur emerges from the Play Doh, roaring in the hands of a toddler.  Our Family Nights include covering the kitchen table in rolled paper, and dumping the box of markers in the middle.  Everyone draws.  Art is as essential as breathing.  

Back to the gallery:  While in the museum, we saw this gorgeous painting by Whistler.  It stared,  large and looming on the wall ahead.  My heartbeat quickened.  So did our pace.  By the time we reached the painting, I was crying, and she had tears on her cheeks, too.  We stood in awe in front of the vast, white wildness, and the grandeur of Whistler’s oil brushstrokes overwhelmed me.  Seeing my daughter feel the same power of emotion from some paint and canvas multiplied my tears.  

She claimed the tears on her cheeks sprang from sheer embarrassment, because her mother kept blubbering in public.  

But I don’t think so.  

“Mom, why do you have grey hair?”

“It’s a gift from you, my dear.”  

“But why don’t you get rid of it?”

“Because I earned it.”

“But no on else’s mom has grey hair.”

How does one respond to this?  I’m an old mom…..  I could say  “That’s because I’ve had seven kids and I’m old enough to be your grandmother, my dear.”    But I don’t really want to go there.  Many of my old classmates are grandparents now.  They post adorable baby pics of their grandchildren on social media, and get to send them home at night with their mommies and daddies.  And my classmates don’t have grey hair.  

My mother doesn’t even have grey hair.  She had me when she was just 25.  She was young and cool and had fashionable clothes, painted fingernails, and frosted hair, sipping coffee with her lady friends.  I’d know date night was coming, because before Dad got home from work, she’d sit down at the kitchen table with the nail file and paint, and carefully smooth on a fresh coat of fire engine red.  When Dad got home, they would kiss each other in front of us kids, and go out to dinner, holding hands as they left.

I think I’m more like my grandma, who also had seven kids.  My dad was her youngest, and her home always seemed to have uncountable quantities of cousins swinging from trees and playing tricks on Uncle Joe and running off with fistfuls of Aunt Rita’s giant oatmeal cookies.  I have no idea what kind of hairstyle my grandmother had.  But she did have hair.  It was grey.

Another child chimed in “Mom, do you want to go to the spa today?”

Do they even know what a spa is?  Oh, wait.  Of course they do.  One walk down the toy aisle of any store will show you that dollies today come with spa chairs and cucumber slices for dolly eyes, hair dryers and makeup accessories.  When I was about four, I had a doll that only had a head.  Her head sat on a pedestal, and little girls were supposed to practice their preschool makeup and hairstyle skills on the head.  As a future and budding artist, I painted that head with glee.  Stripes on the eyes, patterns on the lips, facial tattoos…the doll was only in my possession for a short while before Dad thought better of it, and chucked it.  

But I digress.  “Mom, can I do a spa day for you today?”

That’s more like it.  I don’t have to go anywhere, or pay a lot of money to try to look like a chic, younger mom.  I can sit at my kitchen table, keep the coffee I.V. dripping, and pose as a doll head for my daughter.  I can do that. 

Out came the makeup case.  Out came old curling irons, hair straighteners, and long-closeted products cast off from teenagers who no longer live here. I sat at my kitchen table, and was slathered with multiple colors of base, sparkly eyeshadows from the nineties, and heaven knows what else.  I felt pampered and refreshed until the blobby old mascara wand hovered near my eyes.  I’d like to preserve my ailing sight more than I want mascara applied.  When the perpetual pony tail was removed and the hot curling iron came near, I just closed my eyes completely.  I spent an hour being re-created and made over into something new.  

“How is your forehead so pinched?”  one asked.

“OOOh, Mommy!  You look so beautiful!” said another.  

“You are like a hairless wonder” said the one who inherited thick locks from my husband’s side of the family.

“Oh, Mommy!” again.  “Will you look like this for church every week?”  

After all was said and done, I paraded around the house, blinking my sparkly eyes and tossing my grey head while we laughed.  Then I locked the bathroom door and chiseled it all off.  I'm pretty sure there was  play-doh in my eyebrows.  If it wasn't play-doh, I do not want to know what it was...  

And so, here it is, Monday already.  My pedicure is still purple with sparkles.  My pinched brow and grey hair are back.  And I am typing this with two kids and a 90 pound dog on my lap.  Sunday’s spa day was remarkable and hysterical, but I’m not sure I can recommend this spa to my friends.

I think that like grey hair, a trip to this kind of spa has to be earned.