Sitting on the stool in my teachers art studio, the blank canvas on the easel loomed large in front of me.

Could I really paint something that would actually look like something when I was done? I wondered.

I was out of my element, but wanted to give it a try. The last time, the art lesson had been in a different location and instead with oils. I never did finish the painting and don’t much like working with oils. But this time I was trying acrylics.

And the teacher, someone who I’ve always admired for her myriad of creative talents, was eager to share her love of painting with me.

But first I was drawn to the photos that were carefully pinned on the bulletin board on the wall in front of me. I couldn’t pull myself away from getting lost in them.

Many of the photos of her late husband. He died at the age of 82 in November 2014, at a cabin up north that he loved.

His wife, my teacher, now moving into her second year of learning to live in a new way with good, and not so good days.

It was her second marriage and she was just easing into her fifth decade when she married him.

I stared at the photos of her with him. A chapter I couldn’t really recall being that I was so busy in my own life, married by then for almost ten years.

But now the pictures came to life in a way I’d never noticed before. Photos of my teacher at that time, around the same age as I am now.

What was her life like in her 50s? I wondered.  I thought about my own life now, trying to relate to how she may have felt and thought at that time, wondering how it is to what she now feels and thinks about in her early 70s.

I saw myself in her. In more ways than one. I saw it more now than ever before. This decade I’m in, she once was.

I too, will someday hopefully, be in the decade that she is now. But then where will she be? I wondered.

And my heart begged my mind to stop thinking ahead, urging it to instead linger as long as I could in these moments.

Live in the precious memory that is in the making right now, I heard a voice inside me say.

Drink it deeply into your heart, holding on as tightly as you can. It will be the memory you will need, along with all the others, when the teacher who has taught and gently guided you your entire life, will have moved to the other side of the veil.

You will need it then, to call upon, to be the comfort of an embrace of those loving arms that wrapped around you countless times over the years, providing a love like no other.

And as she began to squeeze the splashes of many different paint colors onto the glass palette, excitedly chattering away about making the blank canvas my own personal piece of art, my heart overflowed with love and joy.

My teacher…My friend…My mom…

and the work of art that now hangs on my wall and captures a day filled with sweet moments of laughter and love–and what I will no doubt turn to that inevitable someday as a gift that will flood my heart with this precious moment in time.

Thank you for subscribing to my journal posts.