I’m 70 years old, and just about every morning, I load up an old, second-hand cart with my wooden easel, a couple of blank canvases, and a set of oil paints I’ve been stretching thin for the last two months. Then I walk five blocks—slowly—to the same park I’ve been painting in since everything changed. I set up near the pond, by a crooked bench with flaking green paint, where the ducks gather and kids toss breadcrumbs while their parents stare at their phones.
That’s where I work now. That’s where I live, in a way.
I wasn’t always a painter. I was an electrician for 30 years.
I dealt with wires and breakers and everything else that came with the job, including difficult customers. Built a good life with my wife, Marlene, in a modest house with a vegetable garden out back and wind chimes she insisted on hanging from the porch. I used to laugh at them when they tangled in storms, but I miss that sound more than I care to admit.
She passed away six years ago—lung cancer, even though she never smoked a day in her life. Just one of those cruel twists. I thought that would be the hardest thing I’d ever face.
But three years ago, our daughter Emily, 33 at the time, was hit by a drunk driver.
She was walking back to her apartment from the grocery store. The man blew through a red light. Her body took the full hit.
Shattered spine, two broken legs, internal injuries. She survived. Somehow.
But she hasn’t walked since.
The insurance covered what it could, and we were lucky in that sense. But the kind of rehab that could actually give her a chance at recovery—specialized neurotherapy, robotic gait training, the whole package—is far beyond anything I could afford. I don’t have savings tucked away for miracles.
Most of what I had went to her surgeries. What was left, I used to move her in with me, and luckily I could put some away into a savings account. Not enough to live on, but enough for a rainy day.
She needed full-time care. And I needed something to keep me going.
I didn’t pick up a brush because I thought it would save us. I picked it up because I didn’t know what else to do.
One night, after she went to sleep, I sat at the kitchen table with a piece of printer paper and an old oil set we found in a box of Emily’s childhood things. I started sketching a barn I remembered from a trip we took to Iowa when she was seven. It wasn’t fantastic, but I’d painted as a teenager, and I just needed to shake off the rust.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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