Snippets and Snatches

 This still life I drew of a handmade rag doll(given to me many years ago by my sister) was captured in an oil pastel drawing before one of our puppies chewed her up to pieces.  I don’t remember which pup would do such a thing, I just know this rag doll has not reappeared in attic boxes or potential yard sale treasures for many years and there’s no way I would have given her away, so she must have suffered an unthinkable fate in the jaws of an ornery puppy.  But I do remember doing this drawing at a time in my life when I was single and away from home in graduate school, living in Louisville, Kentucky.  She somehow is a symbol of home, the place I grew up in, Washington, Pa. and the sisters and brothers I shared my soul and space with for my entire childhood.  I’m sure I missed them terribly along with my parents, my gram, and our house on Magnolia Drive.  I’m glad I have the artwork as a reminder and record of my life, small and humble as it is, to lift my spirit and help me recall the love I was blessed to know as a child, imperfect love of course, as all love is I suppose.

I just returned from the place I call home, though I haven’t lived there since I moved away when I was a mere 18 years old.  Though the house I grew up in is long gone and the visits now entail seeing my mom in her apartment at the assisted living facility she has lived in since before my dad died three years ago, I still feel like I am going home because home is where my heart is and my heart is there with her.  It doesn’t matter that the walls that house my mom are so different from the walls that housed six children, several dogs, my parents and my grandma.  The memories are deeply ingrained in an eternal place of my mind and heart that just a glance of a picture from photo albumns can bring a flood of memories…things I don’t get triggered to remember until I’m there or even driving the long highway through the mountains of Virginia and West Virginia to visit her.

The tough part is knowing that life is changing, we are all growing older, and there is no way to keep the past preserved in the present or the future except through memories, photos, and stories of those long gone days.  Instead of clicking my ruby heels three times like Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, I only need to hug my mom, drive around my hometown, and look at an old piece of artwork that came from my homesick heart when I was very young to truly know without a doubt: There’s No Place Like Home!!!