Of Historical Significance

To no one other than me.

We have three painted stools in our kitchen. They were originally in my grandmother's kitchen. I don't remember when she painted them; they'd been there as long as I could remember. They are mine now.



The other day I was cleaning out the closet in my work room and ran across a shoe box filled with some wood blanks she had saved and her paint brushes. I hadn't really looked at them before and decided to take a break. Inside I found not only what I knew was there, but also a folded sheet of drafting paper. I carefully unfolded it and found the sketches she's done for the chair designs.



Something about that really touched me. She was a much better artist than I. The grapes look like actual grapes. The finished product has color and shading and depth. If I painted them, you'd have to paint the word "grapes" under my folksy design.

I don't even have any brushes worth saving. I buy the cheap ones because I'm really hard on my brushes: I don't clean them well enough, if something isn't painting a fine enough line, I snip some bristles off, those sorts of horrible bad habits. As I slowly looked through the bundle of her brushes though I had to laugh.

Some dried yellow paint, some blue, some snipped off ends even.