The hands look like hands this time! I can put away the gloves and mittens I was going to make everyone wear.
I've come to think of this thing as "paint for your life". If a person had only two years to paint, what record would they want to leave behind? Prioritize. Two years can become five. And ten. And thirty. Best to start at a run, though, just in case.
Queue:
The family. A portrait of each child. Of the man. My mother. Myself. The cats. Maybe the chicken, if she stops biting me. My aunt, the two cousins.
When that is finished, there are the places where I would want to hide a horcrux.
On Black Mesa, there is a little cliff you can sit on and watch the horses in the valley, and a hidden cave down the hill to climb into and pretend you're surviving a harsh winter.
At Lake George, there is a long dark rock to swim out to at night and watch the stars for UFOs while you sit shivering next to someone you love so much you'll vibrate into little pieces.
Near St. John's, there is a beach with grains of sand the size of Le Cars where my grandmother stood and painted the shoreline before she died, and blueberry fields with steaming flat patches of grass where moose have been napping.
In Bloomington, there is a well house with a hot metal drinking fountain in the middle, and at sunset the bats fill the sky. There are statues in the woods, if you can find them.
On Molokai, there is a deer path that leads down through the trees to a waterfall with a pool at the bottom, where you can jump and swim and then lay on the warm rocks while a friend confesses that their dad died that morning.
And in between, there is a life's worth of well-loved objects; worn leather gloves, old silver necklaces, tokens hidden in boxes, sheafs of old paper and notebooks and scribbles that tell stories that will never get typed up.
There is still time to make the things we want to make, and visit the places we want to see - GO GO GO.
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