Time 

 . . . . slipping through my fingers, under my feet, and above my head.

 February is here, how can that be? What happened to January?

2022 arrived with the usual promise of a new year, and then it slid away, smoothly, quietly, like the sleds going down the hill and the snowflakes blanketing my garden. I hardly noticed its passing. 

The landscape is still white and sparkling, the surface of the snow sprinkled here and there with animal tracks; rabbits, squirrels, raccoons, and dogs. Winter is ever-present, but it's never long enough or slow enough for me.  When my garden rests, I rest, snug inside with my paints and my books. I pull out forgotten papers, search through boxes of embroidery floss, ribbon scraps, old photographs, and books waiting to be read.

I looked for changes to make in my inside decor, and I noticed the pictures hanging on my walls. I moved some around, took some down, and put new ones up. A particular pair that hangs in my sunroom gave me pause for some serious thought this month, two watercolor paintings that I created three years ago after returning from a trip. It was a trip to another country, you could even say to another realm of consciousness for me. On that trip, I stood in the midst of a small woodland on the very spot where my father died over seventy years ago. I took many photographs of the place, the trees, the sky, the ground. When I returned home I knew I wanted to capture that memory with paint and paper

 I had experienced time folding in on itself that bright autumn day. The unreality of the day my father's plane had soared above those very trees, and the reality of the present-day as I stood with my feet on the ground merged into one. I was standing on earth that still harbored fragments of his airplane.

After many failed attempts to re-create the scene in my usual way, I decided to try something different.  I stopped trying to illustrate the clouds, the leaves, and the branches exactly as they had looked. I began to put paint on paper to express my feelings and the mood of that day, seeing it not with my eyes but with my heart.  

The result was two abstract paintings, the first with the colors of a cold gray day in March, the second with the colors of a warm sunny day in October. I added delicate etchings of silver leaf over the colors of the sky in one painting, and over the colors of the earth in the other. The streaks of silver floated across both paintings like  ghosts of the silver airplanes.

I thought of the two paintings as then and now, and I hung them on my wall in that order. The image of the past above the image of the present. The planes in the sky above, and the planes on the ground below.

And here is the interesting part. Three years later, I looked at those two paintings and thought maybe they could be reversed. I saw something different in that scene I had tried so hard to honor, to put into form with art. The silver on the ground seemed to represent the day I stood in that place, physically connected to the hallowed evidence that was buried below me. The silver in the sky was now my solemn salute, spiritually connected to the memory of the man that will always soar above me.  

Maybe that's a touch of what "abstract" is, and maybe time is abstract. Some things can't be experienced, can't be captured unless we let our minds take us where we've never been before.

Read more of my story 

of loss and discovery in my memoir 

"Pieces of Us."

Available through me, the author, at stonewellgardens@gmail.com, 

and from stonewellgardensart.etsy.com