A Dear Friend

When I first graduated from college and moved to North Carolina, one of the people I met at Opportunity House, an art and craft center in Flat Rock outside of Hendersonville, was this elderly woman. She probably came around to paint in the small watercolor class for adults that I was invited to teach there. I was then 21 years old, and she probably was in her 80's, a typically elderly individual for that period of time in 1965. As I got to know her, we found we had much in common, especially the type of paintings we loved to create. One time she invited me for an afternoon at her home, which was the basement level of someone else's home where she and her dog lived in rented space. She made me lunch, which I seem to recall was Campbell's cheese soup. I learned, as we spoke, that she had been a physicians wife for so many years. Now he had died and she lived here, where she could pursue her art by herself. There was a freedom for her in this newfound existence where she shed the trappings of being a doctor's wife with society obligations.

Somehow there was a shared sensitivity to creating images and it felt to me that we were the same age intellectually. We became friends. This is a drawing I did of her at that time. I was very much into using brown ink and a fountain pen during that period, and wrote all my letters with it on cream colored paper, in script. So it's not surprising that it's what I did my sketch with, adding a little color here and there. So this evokes, for me, a memory of that experience, which led me to the knowledge that some souls, old or young, just connect in inexplicable ways that are to be held among our finest  treasures. It's nice to meet up with her here again, described by me here in her wisdom, for posterity, on a sheet of brown kraft packaging paper. I won't forget...