corner view~me

The me I was fourteen years ago.  A new mother with a five day old babe in my arms, me crying everytime Gary sang "Sky's Lullaby," a song he still hasn't recorded, although it is one of my favorites.  Me: a wife for one year.  I always dreamed of being married to someone who could sit at a piano and sing with me.

The years have passed and in the busy-ness of raising three kids I spent ten years not painting, something I used to spend hours doing every free Saturday I had when I was young and single and free. Until one day in 2003 I sat down by golly and painted something entirely new, something in reds and yellows, something I never would have created in my twenties.  I have moved many times since that photo was taken with Gary and baby Sky at the Steinway, and now we have a new piano, a Bosendorfer, I know how to grow food, there is the Internet and Youtube and Facebook and email, but I still have some of those paintbrushes from my younger days.  And I am going to pull them out when we get home.

Somehow I have come to be the me that I am today.  I am finally taking singing lessons.  "If not now, when?" I have to ask.

And a few days ago I took the kids to the Torpedo Factory in Old Town Alexandria, where I lived in my twenties -- a place I took for granted when I was a young thing.   We walked through the halls surrounded by working artists, we looked at large colorful abstract paintings, one of a kind handmade sweaters and belts, bottle cap pendants, shiny glazed pottery, and in that hour I found myself, and I remembered oh yeah, I am an artist.  I don't care if what I make pleases anyone.  I just need to make things again.

Me now.  More relaxed, happier, certainly wiser.  Sometimes I feel the inklings of what it will be to be an old lady.  But I am still a girl at heart.  And soon I will be an artist again.

p.s. This video is what my creative energy has gone into in the last month.  Song is "A Whisper Can Change the World."  We did have a team, but I gave input.