woe cakes for Thanksgiving

Before their careers veered off into academia, my grandparents met in art school. My grandmother painted with watercolors and oils on Guam as the kids grew up, and explored pottery and ceramic sculpture when the family moved to Bloomington, where my granddad earned his PhD. She was a medical librarian in Newfoundland when we lived with her, painting rocky Atlantic beaches. My granddad's art turned into woodworking, and these days he is a good-looking old man in the woods of upstate Washington, playing guitars he made himself and singing sad songs about his long-lost love.

Grandma died in 1993 due to a medical mistake. During a diagnostic scan, the technician hit her with 200x the radiation he was supposed to. She developed leukemia and died within a few years. My grandfather was desolate. They had moved to Vancouver for the relative warmth of the West Coast, hoping that would help her kick the cancer, and they left most of their belongings in storage while living in a small apartment. When my grandfather was too heartbroken to remember the bills, the storage unit was auctioned off, and all of my grandmother's artwork was lost.

Then a few years ago, a handful of well-loved old paintings that hadn't been in that storage unit were discovered, and the siblings divvied them up. My mother and aunt had two paintings each, hung prominently in their homes; a cresting wave, a rocky Canadian beach, an Arizona house with cats in the windows, and two of the sisters as naked toddlers on Guam. Then about a week ago, one of the paintings - the wave - fell off my aunt's wall, the frame broke, and she put it on the table to repair in the morning. When she woke up late, she was horrified to discover that her part-time housekeepers (this sounds fancy, but they were clients of a friend who works with the homeless/disabled and needed work as a favor) had thrown the painting down the high-rise garbage chute. My aunt jumped into every dumpster and searched, but the painting was gone. She said she felt as if her mother had died all over again.

It was gut-wrenching, we all had a hard cry over it. So we are convening around my aunt this Thanksgiving, and having the feast in her terrifying tower in the sky.

And now I have this memory, which I need to track down and verify - when I was 10, I went to summer camp in Maine. The owners were friends of my grandmother, and I remember sitting by the camp phone, waiting for a long-distance call from my mom and examining a statue on a side table. It was a dark brown (bronze? glazed ceramic?) figure of a little girl with Christopher Robin hair crouching down to cup a frog in her hand. One of the camp directors walked by and saw me looking at it. "Oh, your grandmother made that! It's your mother when she was a little girl." That camp is still there. The owners are still alive. If this is a real thing that happened, there may be one surviving piece of sculpture, and it may still be there in that room.

A QUEST! And then - A PILGRIMAGE!