Aging is an extraordinary process where you become the person you always should have been. – David Bowie

When COVID came, a few members of the last writing group to meet in person decided to send occasional prompts and write email responses.  Yesterday, Jan sent this quotation by David Bowie. Here's my response.

Linda, 1950

This little girl is a former version of me, with her saddle shoes and clean white socks, her hair pulled back in a barrette, wearing a light colored cotton dress.  Her mother made the dress.  I know this because she made every dress from baby to bride.  

The sofa behind her (looks like a day bed with pillows) was also upholstered by her mother, a greenish fabric, possibly a remnant she could have afforded on a clearance table?  A satin-shade lamp (Green Stamps?) and a framed picture of Linda Gayle sit the end table along with a figurine of an animal

The background: white Venetian blinds and a temporarily abandoned doll.  

Her mother has spread newspaper to protect the carpet, but the little girl seems engrossed in painting her right hand with a paint brush in her left hand. To her right, she has painted two blobs, possibly circles? 

I love this picture because it portrays me as the person I have become in my seventies. I’m oblivious to everything else, I’m melding with the brush, the paint, the quiet moment. I love the silence of my solitude except for the photographer who's made it possible.  

I didn't study art in college because it never occurred to me. I'm not a professional in these endeavors.  In college I was married to a "serious" artist--and art was his domain in our house. 

My only art lesson in first grade was discouraging.  When I painted the mimeographed courthouse with a purple crayon in dark thick happy strokes, the teacher held it up to show the class what NOT to do:  My color was wrong (the courthouse was red), my pressure wasn’t “ladylike,”  (way too much pressure for a girl) and I hadn’t stayed inside the lines of her courthouse lines.  "The lines are there for a reason, Linda." 

To hell with art! I decided. It was too hard to get all that right in one picture. 

I turned my attention to words—which I  love for their color, tones, and textures. But after teaching writing for  decades, I am now painting on my hands again. As I type this, I have glue on my fingers and a dab of red paint on my right hand. 

The pretty doll I loved is out of reach, not the focal point at the moment-- like other aspects of past selves that aren't calling for my attention as they once did. 

In this stage in my life, few things absorb my interest like playing with papers and colors.  The seeds of This Me are evident in That Me.