"I See Blank Canvases"

In your home, do you ever sit and stare at a white wall as though it was a huge, blank artist's canvas?

It is, you know. Each blank wall is an empty canvas crying for a creative brush to stroke it into a colorful life.

That's what I did yesterday with this small-ish canvas just outside my Dream Room door. It had been plain vanilla--plain white--for 70 years. I could tell because there were no tiny dabs of color at the baseboard's edge like I've seen in my other rooms. Mrs. Murphy from the 1930's - 1980's must never have carried her paint brush upstairs in all those years. My Dream Room had lived a vanilla life and the other room across the hall was a dusty, dark, creepy-but-nice attic until we finished it years ago.

So I grabbed my green-dipped paintbrush from the freezer (I keep them all there, wrapped in plastic, so they're ready on a painting whim.) After I brushed green onto the wall, I set-up a card table in my Dream Room and painted a shelf, then a chair while I watched episodes of The Andy Griffith Show.

That's how you take a trip back in time. One way, anyway. You watch an old tv show while you paint something on a spring day with the daylight and day-scent meandering through your window screens.

And hours later, I felt tired and looked frazzled--but in a good way. There are different kinds of tired, you know. The kind where I spent the day minding everyone else's business and worked madly after Grace told me to quit for the day then whined about everything that was going wrong--

--or the type I felt yesterday which comes from concentrating and working a long time, but letting Grace lift and guide my brush while she gives me pleasant thoughts to munch upon. 

The kind of tired which gives me sweet dreams upon my pillow.



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"The ordinary arts we practice every day at home are of more importance to the soul than their simplicity might suggest." ... Thomas Moore