The Thin Man

The Artist's Door (2004)

There is a particular gravity to this moment that the language of The Dark Tower names more accurately than any other vocabulary I know. King gives us ka not as fate in the abstract, but as the force that arranges meetings, convergences, and obligations that feel both inevitable and intimate. Standing before this door, my grandmother’s front door, now unmistakably no longer hers, I recognize that ka has done its quiet work. It has drawn us together again: my brother and me, my parents, my cousins. Not for celebration, not for crisis, but for something heavier and more enduring. It has drawn us for the shared labor of meaning.

This house has always been more than a structure. It has been a formative geography. My father and aunt's childhoods unfolded within these walls. My mother crossed into adulthood here, learning the rhythms of family life that would later shape my own. My brother and I absorbed its atmosphere long before we understood its significance, storing memories the way walls store heat. My cousins, too, were shaped by its gravity, even when they were absent from it for long stretches of time. The house did not require constant presence to exert its pull. It simply held.

My grandmother was the axis around which all of this turned. Like the Tower itself, she was less an object than a principle: steadiness, continuity, orientation. With her death, that stabilizing force has diminished, and the system has begun to loosen. This is not collapse, but drift. The work before us—sorting, inventorying, dividing—is the visible sign that gravity is changing. Ka has brought us here not to preserve the house intact, but to shepherd its meaning as it disperses.

In King’s cosmology, a ka-tet is never formed for comfort alone. It exists for a purpose, and that purpose often carries loss within it. What strikes me now is how closely this maps onto our present reality. We have been gathered not because we chose one another anew, but because history insists upon it. We are bound by blood, memory, and obligation, walking a shared stretch of road that none of us could avoid and none of us should walk alone. The house becomes our clearing, our threshold, our temporary camp before the path forks again.

There is an ache in knowing that all ka-tets eventually break. King never allows us the illusion of permanence. Companions fall away. Paths diverge. Stories end. And yet, there is dignity in the walking we do together. What matters is not the duration of the bond, but the fidelity with which it is honored while it holds. In this season, our task is not heroic. It is careful. We are to recognize which objects carry the imprint of shared life, which stories must be spoken aloud before they are scattered, and which silences deserve respect rather than explanation.

The door, then, functions exactly as Whelan renders it: not an invitation, but a demand. To open it is to accept responsibility for what lies beyond. Each room is a chapter. Each object is a sentence written by many hands. As executor, I occupy a role that is at once administrative and deeply moral. I am asked to translate a lived life into distributions and decisions without reducing it to mere property. This is where the language of ka steadies me. These tasks are not random burdens; they are the shape this moment must take.

Walking this path together does not erase our individual griefs. My loss is not identical to my brother’s, nor to my parents’, nor to my cousins’. But ka has aligned them long enough for us to recognize one another as companions again, shaped by the same house, the same grandparents, the same absences. For now, that is enough. For now, the ka-tet holds.

And when it breaks—as all ka-tets do—it will not be because we failed it, but because its work was complete. The house will empty. The objects will scatter. The door will close behind us for the last time. Yet what has been formed here will continue, carried forward in memory, habit, and the quiet knowledge that we walked this stretch of the road together, faithfully, until ka released us to whatever comes next.

Wake Up Dead Man

Sam's Club Hotdog Hack

Pizza Dog

Congratulations Brother, Master of Education

When you find the perfect hat.

Haven Coffee and Goods

Station 3 Coffee Shop

Flood Waters (1898)

I did not wake from the dream gradually. I surfaced from it the way one breaks the surface of water. Too quickly, lungs still burning, heart already ahead of thought. My brother was there one moment, solid and familiar, and then he was not. The river had taken him with a calm indifference that felt more unsettling than violence. I jumped in without hesitation, my body acting before deliberation could assert itself, and found myself fighting a current that did not respond to effort or intention. I was not saving him. I was simply being pulled alongside him. I was being pulled under with him. That was the moment I woke.

For several seconds I remained suspended between states, unsure which reality carried more authority. The fear lingered in my body even as my cognitive mind began its familiar work of correction: I am home. I am safe. He is not in danger. Yet the reassurance arrived too late to fully dislodge the sensation. Stress, I am learning, does not reside primarily in thought. It inhabits muscle, breath, and reflex. I turned toward Cricket, asleep beside me, and rested my hand on her back. She responded with a small, involuntary sound. It was not affection exactly, but acknowledgment. It was enough. My breathing slowed. The current loosened its grip. I slept again.

When I returned to the dream later, in writing, I noticed that it resisted interpretation in the traditional sense. It did not behave like a message encoded in symbols waiting to be decoded. Instead, it presented itself as a mode of consciousness, a particular way my mind had organized experience under pressure. Dreams, in this light, are not stories the psyche tells itself so much as states the psyche enters. They are consciousness stripped of its executive oversight, perception ungoverned by the rules of waking coherence. The dream did not explain my stress; it enacted it.

This is where Monet’s Flood Waters becomes more than an illustrative parallel. Like the dream, the painting does not narrate an event; it renders a condition. The flood has already happened. The viewer arrives after causality has given way to consequence. Trees stand where they always have, yet their relationship to the land has been fundamentally altered. Their reflections blur into their bodies, and the ground itself refuses to assert clear boundaries. Orientation becomes provisional. One must look slowly, attentively, without the expectation of resolution.

In cognitive terms, dreams may be understood as consciousness operating without its usual metacognitive scaffolding. During waking life, I monitor, evaluate, and contextualize my experience continuously. I know what matters, what can wait, what belongs to the past. In the dream, that hierarchy collapses. Emotional salience replaces logical priority. My brother matters. Water moves. Action follows immediately from affect. This is not irrationality so much as pre-rational coherence. It is the mind organized around survival, attachment, and urgency rather than explanation.

Several waking threads converge here. Conversations with a friend in the Northwest about the atmospheric river flooding his region. The anticipation of traveling with my brother to his graduation at Northwest Missouri State, an event weighted with pride, logistics, and the subtle pressure of showing up fully. And beneath all of it, the sustained stress of my grandmother’s death and the responsibilities that followed: grief braided tightly with duty, memory entangled with administration. None of these experiences are catastrophic in isolation. Together, they saturate consciousness.

The dream absorbs these impressions and renders them as water. Renders them as a force without malice, as movement without intention. That quality matters. The river is not an antagonist. It does not pursue or punish. It simply pulls. This distinguishes stress from fear. Fear has an object. Stress has a condition. The dream, like Monet’s painting, captures that distinction with precision.

What becomes especially important, then, is the act of reflection itself. Writing the dream is not merely a record; it is a shift in consciousness. In psychological terms, this is metacognition. It is the mind observing its own processes. By returning to the dream deliberately, I reintroduce the executive functions absent during sleep. I name, contextualize, and relate. I do not explain the dream away, but I situate it. In doing so, I regain a form of agency not by controlling the current, but by understanding how I am being carried by it.

This reflective act mirrors the viewer’s position before Flood Waters. Monet does not resolve the flood, but he frames it. He slows perception. He invites sustained attention. Likewise, journaling allows me to hold the dream at a distance sufficient for insight without demanding mastery. The dream becomes neither prophecy nor pathology, but data: subjective, affective, and meaningful precisely because it resists simplification.

What remains most grounding is still the waking moment: the tactile certainty of fur beneath my hand, the soft sound of a living body responding. That moment represents a return not just to wakefulness, but to regulated consciousness. If the dream is immersion, reflection is shoreline. Not a denial of depth, but a place to stand.

In this way, the dream does not require belief in any grand theory of dream symbolism to matter. Its value lies in how it reveals the shape of my current consciousness. In what surfaces when control relaxes and impressions reorganize themselves freely. Like Monet’s flooded landscape, it shows me not what has happened, but how I am inhabiting what has happened. Writing it down does not still the water or slow the current, but it allows me to see where I am standing within it and maybe where it might be pulling me. 

Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair

El Maguey Mexican Restaurant

Piłat (n.d.)

I keep returning to Piotr Naliwajko’s Piłat, drawn less to the suffering Christ than to the seated figure who refuses to look at him. Pilate sits with his back half-turned, the sharp weight of the beam looming behind him like a truth he cannot bear to face. The cigarette in his hand feels strangely contemporary, almost mundane, as if he seeks refuge in the ritual of smoke. In his posture I recognize a modern man caught in the undertow of an event too large for him, a moment where certainty collapses and interior fracture becomes visible.

These past weeks with my grandmother’s dying have placed me in a similar position. It placed me close to suffering, intimately aware that something irreversible is unfolding, yet unable to fully absorb its meaning. My brother and I held her hands as she took her final breath. I saw the moment she left the world. I was not absent or turned away. And yet, now that she is gone, I find myself unable to anchor that knowledge in my daily life. There exists a part of me that has stored the truth of her death, and another part that continues to move as though she is still here, waiting for the next call, the next errand, the next familiar request.

This split is not irrational. It is the shape grief takes. Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance describes the tension created by holding incompatible beliefs, but grief introduces a special kind of dissonance. It articulates one in which the mind and the body hold different versions of reality. My mind knows my grandmother is dead. My body still reaches for my phone expecting her name to appear. My hand turns the car automatically toward her street, following the grooves carved by years of care and routine. In these moments, I am startled by the stubbornness of my own habits, how they carry me forward even when my rational understanding has withdrawn its consent.

The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio writes about the “somatic markers” that guide our actions long before conscious thought intervenes. Merleau-Ponty would call it the habit-body, the part of us that moves through the world according to patterns learned over time. My habit-body remains loyal to the life I lived with my grandmother. It does not yet know how to inhabit this new terrain of absence. And so it carries me, on its own quiet autopilot—my own “auto-Pilate”—through gestures that once had meaning and now lead only to the hollow space where she used to be.

This automatic movement is not denial. It is devotion. It is the inertia of love.

When I look again at Pilate in Naliwajko’s painting, I see not cowardice but recognition. He is a man whose body turns away because he lacks the capacity to take in what stands before him. His refusal is an act of overwhelm, not malice. His cigarette, held loosely between his fingers, becomes a ritual of grounding, a fragile tether to ordinary life in the midst of the unbearable. I understand that gesture now. I live it.

But something else has begun to shift in me, something that moves beyond dissonance toward meaning-making. I discovered this the other evening as I sat on my own porch, pipe in hand, the air cooling as dusk settled across the yard. My wind chimes were moving in the gentle breeze, their melody drifting through the wind. I realized, with a kind of soft shock, that I had heard this sound before. I had heard it not here, but in the background of my grandmother’s phone calls. She often sat on her porch when she spoke to me, and the chimes would ring faintly behind her voice, a familiar accompaniment to our conversations.

Now, listening to my own chimes, I found myself inhabiting both the painting and my grandmother’s presence. I sat as Pilate sits. I sat turned slightly away from the unbearable weight behind me, pipe smoke curling upward like a private ritual, yet I also felt myself sitting in my grandmother’s place, listening to the chimes as she once did. In that moment, the boundaries between us grew thin. The painting, my grief, and my memories converged in a single sensory field. I was no longer only the witness to suffering or the one who turns away. I was also the inheritor of her quiet rituals, the one who sits on the porch and listens for the world to speak.

This is not resolution. It is not acceptance in any final sense. It is something more subtle: a willingness to remain in the liminal space, to allow grief to become embodied rather than resisted. It is the moment where the body, still confused by loss, begins to learn a new choreography. A choreography not of forgetting, not replacing, but reshaping the world around the absence. As the chimes sounded, I felt the first faint sense that I could carry her forward not only in memory, but in the rhythms of my own life.

In this way, I turn. I turn not away from suffering as Pilate does, and not fully toward acceptance either, but toward meaning. I turn toward a mode of presence that honors the habits that remain, the echoes that linger, and the love that continues to move through me like a quiet melody played one chime at a time. And in that turning, I discover that grief is not merely a fracture, a dissonant cord. It is also a bridge, carrying me from what was to what will be.

Good Time Charlie’s Got the Blues

Danny O’Keefe’s “Good Time Charlie’s Got the Blues” has been lingering in my mind for days, looping through the quiet spaces of my attention with a persistence that feels almost purposeful. Earworms are usually trivial, melodic remnants of passing moments, but this one has settled differently. It is not simply a tune I cannot shake; it is a mood, an atmosphere, a kind of tonal companion to my internal life. The song carries a weary gentleness, and something in me has been answering it.

What draws me most is the way the song turns on its bridge. The verses drift in circles, their melody tracing the same emotional contour again and again, as if O’Keefe is pacing the perimeter of his own resignation. The lyrics, the sense of people leaving, of life thinning out around the edges, of an identity worn soft by repeated disappointments, move with a kind of unhurried melancholy. They never rush toward catharsis. They simply acknowledge what is true.

Then the bridge arrives, and the whole song changes. Harmonically, it opens like a sudden clearing in a dense forest. The melody lifts, the chord progression broadens, and the emotional texture shifts from drifting to something quieter and more declarative. The song pauses. It pauses not by stopping, but by widening. It becomes a moment of stillness inside a life still in motion.

That is the moment that catches me every time. The moment I breathe out. The moment I exhale.

It is a subtle thing, the way art can coax an exhale from the body, but it is also a profound one. Psychologists note that exhalation signals a transition from tension to release, from vigilance to recognition. A breath-out is the body’s quiet admission that something true has been spoken. And in this bridge, this unexpected aperture inside an otherwise cyclical song, I feel that recognition. It is as though the music touches the same interior space I have been holding without words.

Grief has a way of tightening the breath. These past weeks sitting with my grandmother, witnessing her gradual turning away from the world, navigating the responsibilities and tendernesses that accompany that vigil have left my inner life often feeling constricted. Time compresses. Attention sharpens. The body holds its breath without asking permission. A song like O’Keefe’s arrives not as distraction but as accompaniment. It names the emotional weather I have been moving through: the quiet weariness, the steadying sadness, the sense of life shifting even as one stands still.

The bridge, then, becomes more than a musical device. It becomes a metaphor for the pauses that grief carves into a person. Moments when the world feels suddenly spacious, when the truth surfaces without struggle, when the body remembers how to release even a fraction of what it has been holding. O’Keefe does not offer resolution. He offers acknowledgment. And in that acknowledgment, I find room to breathe.

Art often meets us in these in-between spaces. It meets us between verses, between breaths, between the life we have been living and the one we are slowly entering. The bridge in “Good Time Charlie’s Got the Blues” is one such threshold. It reminds me that even inside a season defined by responsibility, loss, and the steady work of caring, there are brief intervals where something opens. Where the weight shifts. Where I can exhale. Where I can breath again. 

And in that exhale, I recognize myself more clearly.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Pygmalion (1939)

In these first days after my grandmother’s death, the world feels subtly but unmistakably altered. Nothing looks different, and yet everything sits at a strange angle, as though the horizon has been gently shifted while I wasn’t looking. The silence is the first thing I notice. For years, my grandmother’s call began each day before I had fully come into consciousness. Listening to a message she left, I could hear her voice offering assurance, routine, and presence. Now the phone stays still, and the absence feels physical, heavy, a pressure behind the ribs. Morning has not so much arrived as failed to arrive. In the words of Marcus Aurelius, “The whole life is but a point in time,” and mine has pivoted abruptly into its next, disorienting point.

It is into this altered landscape that I step into the role she left for me: executor of her estate. A role she named for me again and again over the years, shaping my understanding of it without my fully realizing what she was doing. Now I feel the tension of that responsibility pressed against the tender, unsteady ground of grief. I do not know what others expect of me. I do not know where conflict might surface. I only know that she trusted me and that trust brings both steadiness and fear. Seneca wrote that “We suffer more in imagination than in reality,” but imagination is powerful, and grief amplifies its reach. Even so, I remind myself that the inheritance that matters, the inheritance she already gave me, is not a list of objects or accounts. It is time. The afternoons spent together, the picture she knew I wanted to take on "Date Nights," the conversations where we shaped meaning from the ordinary. As Shakespeare wrote, “That which we have we prize not to the worth, whiles we enjoy it.” Only now do I understand the worth.

And then there is the house on Regan Ave. A place I have spent more of my life in than anywhere else. It is not simply my grandparents’ home; it is the primary architectural constant of my existence. My parents lived in the basement here when they were newly married. My father grew up in these rooms. My aunt lived her life in its orbit. And I began my own life here, before memory had even taken root. This house is not just a dwelling, it is a multigenerational mirror, a layered palimpsest of all the lives that passed through it. William James once wrote, “Every man is the sum of all his ancestors,” and nowhere is that truer than in this house. Its walls contain the echo of every voice that shaped me, and its floors hold the imprint of every step that led me to this moment.

As I move through its rooms now, I see ordinary objects transformed into intimate artifacts. The couch from my great-grandmother’s house. Thirty-year-old recliners in their unchanging positions. A mattress I carried home from a store that no longer exists. A kitchen table etched with decades of meals, arguments, celebrations, retreats. And an iron skillet, worn so thin I am still unsure how she used it, but she did. These objects feel less like things and more like repositories. They hold traces of the people who touched them, the rituals they supported, the gestures repeated until they formed the grain of daily life. William Blake’s line rings true here: “The visible world is but the curtain of the unseen.” Behind every object is a shadow of meaning I am responsible for honoring.

Yet the executor’s task demands that I turn this tapestry into distributable parts. A life once whole must be parsed into fragments. What was unified must be divided. It is an unraveling, and I am charged with doing it with fairness and care. “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also,” says Matthew’s Gospel, and as I sort through the belongings of my grandmother’s life, I understand that the treasure is not the objects themselves, but the stories and relationships woven around them.

In this emotional terrain, Delvaux’s Pygmalion becomes a mirror. The central woman touching the marble statue holds its face with a tenderness that is not naïve but resolute. She knows it will not answer. She touches it anyway. The gesture itself is the meaning. Saint-Exupéry wrote, “What is essential is invisible to the eye,” and that is precisely what Delvaux captures: the quiet devotion of tending to what is no longer living. This, too, is the executor’s work. I hold objects that cannot speak, listen for stories that can no longer be told, try to make decisions faithful to what I know of her desires. I am leaning toward what is silent, trusting that the gesture matters.

The surrounding figures deepen this metaphor. The foliage-crowned woman, carrying a bloom too large for her scale, represents renewal moving through unfamiliar territory. New life, but not in recognizable forms. The man in black who turns away embodies another truth of grief: the instinct to withdraw, to avoid what feels unbearable. Ecclesiastes reminds us, “To everything there is a season… a time to break down, and a time to build up.” These figures inhabit different seasons, different coping strategies. So does my family. So do I.

But there is yet another layer, one drawn from psychology rather than art history. The Pygmalion effect: the phenomenon in which the expectations of others shape who we become. My grandmother believed I could be the executor long before I did. She sculpted me with her trust. She walked me through her home, telling the stories behind each object, as if inscribing notes into its margins. She affirmed my steadiness, my fairness, my clarity, until I began to see these traits in myself. But the truth is, she was not the only sculptor. My grandfather, my parents, my brother: all of them shaped me. François Mauriac observed, “We are molded and remolded by those who have loved us; and though their love may pass, we remain its work.” I am the work of many hands. The executor I am becoming is the culmination of their collective shaping.

To rise to this role now is to inhabit the person they spent decades forming. Aristotle’s adage, “We are what we repeatedly do,” speaks to this: the executor is not a sudden identity but the continuation of habits learned across a lifetime. The habits of care, responsibility, fairness, and love.

This is why I now understand that the true work of grief is stewardship. Not simply mourning, but carrying forward what remains with tenderness and clarity. Stewardship requires both emotional presence and emotional distance. It requires stepping into conflict gently and stepping out of it with integrity. Martha Washington wrote, “Happiness depends on our dispositions, not our circumstances,” and in this surreal landscape of after, my disposition becomes the moral compass guiding each decision I make.

And so I keep touching what cannot answer back, trusting that this, too, is a form of love. “Love never faileth,” says Corinthians, and perhaps that is why the executor’s work, though painful, is bearable: it is love transposed into action. Love rendered as fairness. Love rendered as care for the unraveled threads of a life.

Now, as I walk through the house on Regan Ave, my house as much as theirs, I feel the weight and the gift of every belief placed in me. A Chinese proverb reminds me, “Be not afraid of going slowly; be afraid only of standing still.” I move slowly through this altered world, guided by the generational faith that shaped me. I do not stand still, but I do move with slowly and with intent. 

In the end, becoming the executor is less about legal authority and more about becoming the person they always believed I could be. Proverbs tells us, “Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace.” I follow those paths now, my grandma's paths, not because they are easy, but because they are hers. And because, in fulfilling the role she trusted me with, I honor every hand that sculpted the person I have become.

Flora (1906)

Grief announces itself in the smallest details. Before it becomes a word, before it takes the shape of tears or rituals, it first alters the texture of the world. Within grief light sharpens, sounds stretch, time loses its steady pulse. That is what I felt this morning as I stood at my grandmother’s bedside, watching her breath rise and fall in fragile, diminishing arcs. She had passed beyond responsiveness, though when I brushed her hair and spoke softly, she moved just enough to let me know she still recognized the cadence of my voice. That slight motion felt like a final act of acknowledgment, a last flicker of relational presence.

The room was already saturated with the premonitions of death. It was saturate with it's stillness, its irregular rhythms, the solemn choreography families practice without instruction. My parents, exhausted from the long night, sat close, their silence heavy with everything they could not say without breaking. In the background, my mother cycled through Grandma’s old Christmas CDs, searching for something that felt right, though death rarely accommodates such desires. And so, by sheer accident, Barry Manilow’s “Jingle Bells” rose into the air, bright and incongruously cheerful, underscoring her dying with a melody that should have belonged to holiday shopping aisles rather than to the threshold of mortality. That dissonance, joyful music at the edge of life, captured something essential: death occurs inside the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.

At 10:35, Grandma’s best friend arrived with a Christmas present she had lovingly selected, unaware of the gravity awaiting her. The present was a small, soft blanket bearing Matthew 28:10; after she said her goodbye and stepped out, we laid the blanket gently across Grandma. This simple act of leave-taking became the last gift Grandma received in this life. A prayer, a goodbye, a hand held in farewell, these became the last threads connecting her to us. And then, subtly, the shift began. Her face slackened into repose. Her hands and feet grew cold. Her breath grew erratic, shallow, sharp. As if keeping to her own internal logic of order and timing, she waited until the hospice nurse arrived just after 11:00, a final gesture of propriety. And at just past 11:00 AM, the very hour we had gathered every Sunday for more than forty years to share lunch, she passed. It was as though her life closed with the punctuation of routine, a ritual transformed into a moment of departure.

I am still in shock. My mind keeps replaying those minutes, searching for something to anchor myself to. But shock is not linear. Shock distorts and refracts. Psychologists call it a rupture in the “assumptive world,” the invisible scaffolding that allows us to believe that life tomorrow will resemble life today. When a primary loss tears that structure away, perception falters. Even the most ordinary tasks become labyrinths. Later, as I found myself at Walmart, the aisles seemed to stretch in unfamiliar ways. I went to grab a bag of chips for the Chiefs game, but somewhere between the entrance and the snack section, I became disoriented. I walked past displays I did not recognize. I forgot where I was. I found myself at the back of the store, looking at containers of lemonade. And without thinking, I wondered whether Grandma might want some, as I had wondered a hundred times these past years. The reflex was instantaneous, born of a life oriented around her needs. And then the realization broke over me: she would not need anything anymore.

The chips eventually appeared. But I was not the same person who had walked in. Something in the constant internal narrative of who I am had fractured. And with that fracture came a revelation I am still struggling to hold: with her death, I am no longer a grandson. Not in the living sense. That role, so fundamental and so defining, has evaporated in an instant. Who am I now? Who will I be tomorrow?

This is where my mind returned, almost instinctively, to Flora by Ramon Casas i Carbó. At first glance, Flora may seem too lush, too sensuous for a day of death. A reclining woman draped in a deep green gown rests against a cascade of loose, confident brushstrokes. Her body is warm, flushed, alive. She appears suspended between waking and dreaming, her eyes half-lidded, her expression both inviting and introspective. And yet what drew me today was not her vitality but the flowers. Those beautiful red blossoms arranged beside her. Their petals, delicate and luminous, seem freshly gathered, their stems still green. Held against the pale fabric, they form a small constellation of tenderness.

This afternoon, they reminded me of the rose my father placed near Grandma’s hands after she died. A single rose. A perfect rose. A gift to my grandma from my ex-wife who grandma loves so much. After three weeks of relentless decline, three weeks in which her body tightened, weakened, and fought, the rose felt like a quiet benediction, a final offering of beauty to someone who had given so much of it to us across a lifetime. The flowers in Casas’s painting, like the rose on Grandma’s bed, do not mourn. They do not interpret. They simply remain, luminous in their impermanence.

What resonates so deeply is the painting’s liminalit: the reclining figure suspended between tension and relaxation, presence and withdrawal. Casas paints threshold states, those moments when the body shifts subtly from active to still. And today, I saw my grandmother in that threshold. I saw her in the quiet transitions between breaths, in the gentle slack of her jaw, in the way the whole world gathered around her as though holding vigil at a boundary neither of us could cross.

Shock often manifests as disorientation, but beneath it lies something more profound: the recognition that identity is relational. Who we are is shaped, reinforced, and reflected by those who know us intimately. For years, especially after the divorce, my life has been interwoven with Grandma’s: multiple calls a day, shared meals, errands, grocery runs, ice cream trips, the small improvisations of care that became the architecture of my days. This caregiving was not a burden so much we it was a rhythm I found myself in. It structured time. It oriented my choices. It grounded me in a sense of purpose. With her gone, that scaffolding has collapsed. A life organized around tending, checking in, and showing up suddenly has no place to go.

Death, then, is not just an absence, it is a reordering. It rearranges the internal calendar, disrupts the flow of expectation, and unsettles one’s sense of self. The world continues—cars in the Walmart parking lot, Christmas displays, game-day snacks—but the mourner walks through it as someone newly dislodged. Casas’s Flora embodies that feeling: a figure resting in stillness, surrounded by signs of life that she neither fully engages nor resists. It is an image of the in-between, where beauty persists but meaning remains unresolved.

Tonight, I cannot yet make meaning from this loss. Meaning is a long labor, one that grief demands but never rushes. For now, I can only record the contours of the day as faithfully as memory allows: my grandmother’s final breaths, the rose near  her hands, the blanket across her legs, the absurdity of Barry Manilow at the hour of death, the shock of wandering aisles without knowing why, the sudden realization that I am no longer who I was.

Flora rests in her painting, suspended between worlds of vitality and dream, presence and surrender. I feel myself suspended too, trying to understand the shape of the world without the person who helped form it these past years. There is a heaviness to this day, a before-and-after that will not reconcile easily. But in the red flowers beside Casas’s figure, and in the single rose by my grandmother’s hands, I see a quiet truth: beauty can accompany us, even at the end. And grief, for all its disorientation, is also a form of love. It is an echo of the ways we were shaped, tended, and held even when the throne drew blood. 

Gravedigger

Gravedigger 

By Dave Matthews 

Cyrus Jones, 1810 to 1913

He made his great-grandchildren believe

He could live to a hundred and three

A hundred and three is forever

When you're just a little kid

So Cyrus Jones lived forever

Gravedigger, when you dig my grave

Could you make it shallow

So that I can feel the rain?

Gravedigger

Muriel Stonewall, 1903 to 1954

She lost both of her babies in the second great war

Now you should never have to watch

As your only children lowered in the ground

I mean, never have to bury your own babies

Gravedigger, when you dig my grave

Could you make it shallow

So that I can feel the rain?

Gravedigger

Ring around the rosie

Pocket full of posies

Ashes to ashes

We all fall down

Gravedigger, when you dig my grave

Could you make it shallow

So that I can feel the rain?

Gravedigger

Little Mikey Carson, 67 to 75

He rode his bike like the devil

Until the day he died

When he grows up, he wants to be

Mister Vertigo on the flying trapeze

1940 to 1992

Gravedigger, when you dig my grave

Could you make it shallow

So that I can feel the rain?

Gravedigger, when you dig my grave

Could you make it shallow

So that I can feel the rain, I can feel the rain, I can feel the rain?

Gravedigger, when you dig my grave

Could you make it shallow

So that I can feel the rain?

Gravedigger

Gravedigger

IRL Friends

Maxine Eveline Armstrong, née Estes

Maxine Eveline Armstrong, née Estes

November 5, 1939 - December 7, 2025

Maxine Eveline Estes Armstrong was born on November 5, 1939, in Lawrence County, Missouri, to Wiley Ervin Estes and Sara “Sally” Long Estes. She was raised near Miller, Missouri where she attended Miller High School, as part of the Class of 1959. As a student, she played the drums in the school band and participated in track and field.

Maxine regularly traveled by bus from Miller to Carthage, Missouri to stay with her sister Francis to watch her children. While in Carthage, Maxine worked at Red’s Café. It was there that she met Ernest Armstrong. The two eloped and were married on September 29, 1958 in Miami, Oklahoma. After their marriage, Maxine and Ernie made their home in Carthage. Their daughter, Deborah, was born on December 26, 1959, followed by their son, Dale, on April 20, 1963. In 1965, the family settled into their home on Regan Avenue, where Maxine lived for the remainder of her life.

Maxine was a homemaker in the most traditional sense of the word: her many labors largely unseen but deeply felt. Her home was orderly and dependable, shaped by routine, preparation, and care. Family life centered around her table, which hosted weekly Sunday meals without fail, as well as countless Christmases, Easters, and holidays. Food was her primary love language, and through it she expressed welcome and belonging.

Her concern for others extended well beyond her own household. Maxine firmly believed that no one should go hungry. She volunteered for many years with Meals on Wheels and quietly cared for elderly members of the First Baptist Church of Carthage. She was widely known for her baking, regularly sending dozens of homemade cookies to students taught by her grandsons, both of whom are educators.

Faith was a consistent presence throughout her life. Raised in the Methodist Church, Maxine joined the Southern Baptist Church after her marriage and remained active in church life for many years. Alongside her close friend Nina, she taught Sunday School for more than four decades.

Outside the home, Maxine found satisfaction in caring for her yard and garden, with a particular love for roses. The same patience and attentiveness she brought to people defined her approach to tending all living things. Additionally, she had many houseplants whose origins stretched back into the last millennium. 

Maxine was preceded in death by her parents; her brothers and sisters; her husband, Ernest Armstrong, who died on July 23, 2002; and her daughter, Deborah (Daniel), who died on April 10, 2025. She is survived by her son, Dale Armstrong (Chalice); her grandchildren David Armstrong, Dawn Old (Grant), Andrew Armstrong, and Dixie Tsutsavea (Georgy); her great-grandchildren TJ, Clara, and Fedya; and her sister, Erma. 

In lieu of flowers, memorals made in her name may be directed to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

Cat Time

Rest (1905)

Every day that passes, Grandma grows quieter, as though the world around her has begun to dim while an inner world brightens in compensation. She speaks less, reaches out less, and her eyes, once so quick to orient toward a new presence in the room, now drift toward some interior horizon. She is still here—unmistakably, beautifully here—but turned slightly away, as if listening to something beyond my range of hearing. In these subtle withdrawals I see the same gesture Hammershøi captured in Rest: a back turned not in rejection but in transformation, the opening of a threshold that none of us can cross alongside her.

It is in witnessing this slow turning-away that my own belief structure has been tested, stretched, and, unexpectedly, strengthened. I have long lived without belief in an afterlife. I do not imagine heaven or hell waiting past the edge of consciousness. I do not think of angels or judgment or a continuation of self in any literal sense. Yet death, especially death that arrives slowly enough to watch it unfold, presses against these convictions. Not because they are fragile, but because they demand to be lived, not merely reasoned. It is one thing to assert that existence ends; it is another to hold the hand of someone you love as that ending approaches and feel the ache of wanting more for them. Wanting more comfort, more assurance, more continuation than a secular worldview can easily promise.

And yet, it is precisely this tension that has deepened my connection to life. For without belief in an afterlife, I have had to locate meaning here, in these days, in these breaths, in the small gestures of care that shape the vigil. Without a supernatural horizon, the moral and emotional weight of presence intensifies. What I offer Grandma is not a bridge to the next world but companionship in this one. And that is enough. More than enough, it is profound.

In this sense, my beliefs are not diminished but clarified. I believe in rest. Rest not as a euphemism for continued existence but as a culminating state, a final easing of the body’s long labor. Rest is the body’s last truth. The final lyric of a life fully sung. I believe in grace, not as divine favor but as the human capacity to meet suffering with tenderness. And I believe in love, not because it outlives us, but because it saturates the time we are given.

In the days before Grandma retreated into this quiet inwardness, she spoke of visitors: her sister, the children. Someone asked me if I believed they were truly here, waiting to usher her into an afterlife. My first response was no, because I do not imagine such realms. But that answer was incomplete. For Grandma, these visitors are not metaphors. They are companions rising from the deep well of memory, the psyche, the emotional landscapes built over decades. They are the architecture of her inner world. They are artifacts of love, grief, and continuity. And in that sense, they are here to shepherd her not into heaven, but into peace. Into Rest. 

Reconciliation, then, is not about refashioning my worldview to fit someone else’s metaphysics. It is about realizing that subjective experience at the end of life is its own truth. If Grandma finds solace in the presence of her sister—real in memory, real in mind, real in heart—then that reality is sufficient. What matters is not ontological accuracy but emotional resonance. She is comforted. She is not alone. And that is a kind of grace I can believe in wholeheartedly.

My vigil has become a kind of prayer, though not in the theological sense. I understand prayer as a form of art: a human craft that transforms fear into form and grief into gesture. Sitting with her, I am shaping my own grief into presence. Into breath. Into waiting. Prayer is not spoken but enacted: a posture of attentiveness. And in this, I feel closer to life, not further from it. The vigil teaches me to see the flame of living not as something fragile, threatened by the dark, but as something self-limiting, something that naturally lowers when its work is done.

This brings me back to the Buddha’s image of the flame. In early Buddhist thought, nirvāṇa is often described as the extinguishing of a candle. A candle not snuffed out by force, but simply ceasing when the fuel is gone. The flame does not “go” anywhere; it stops because its conditions have been fulfilled. This image has settled into me with unexpected comfort. Grandma is not being taken or separated or judged. She is not vanishing into nothingness. She is completing a process. The flame is lowering, thinning, preparing to rest in its own stillness.

Confronting death from within my secular commitments has not weakened them. Instead, it has revealed their depth. Without the cushion of an afterlife, I am forced to confront the full weight of temporality. And yet, paradoxically, this has not made death more frightening. For me, it has made life more luminous. Every gesture of care becomes more consequential. Every memory more cherished. Every hour by Grandma’s bedside more sacred.

My connection to my family has deepened as well. We sit together in the shared labor of love, each of us holding a corner of the vigil. My father’s steadiness, my mother’s compassion, my brother’s presence, even my ex-wife's tender kisses on Grandma's forehead and hands all form a constellation of care around Grandma, a living testament to the world she shaped. In witnessing her life’s last chapter together, we discover not only the depth of our grief but also the depth of our bond.

What Hammershøi offers me through Rest is not an answer but a posture. The turned back is a reminder that some parts of the journey must be taken alone, even by those we love most. But it also reminds me that accompaniment does not require visibility. Sometimes love sits behind the chair, within the quiet, in the steady warmth of simply being present.

In learning to reconcile death with my own beliefs, I have not found heaven. I have found humanity. I have found the fierce beauty of finite life. I have found the grace of turning toward someone even as they turn away from the world and from me. And in that turning, I have found a deepened reverence for living. For its fragility, its mystery, its tenderness, and its final rest.

Coda

In learning to reconcile death within my own beliefs, I have not found heaven, but I have found something grounded and profoundly human: a reverence for life as it is lived and as it ends. Grandma’s quiet withdrawal has clarified what it means to love without needing metaphysics to complete the picture. Her turning-away has drawn me closer—to my family, to her, and to the fragile miracle of presence itself. And if this vigil is a kind of prayer, then let that prayer take its final shape in words as an offering not of faith in the supernatural, but of faith in love, memory, and rest.

As You Turn Away, A Prayer for Grandma

By Dave

May the world grow softer

as you turn away,

each sound thinning to a whisper,

each shadow settling into gentleness.

May the memories that visit you

arrive like familiar footsteps

in a room you have always known.

Your sister’s voice,

the children’s laughter,

all the quiet anchors

of the life you shaped.

May your body find its ease

in the slow unwinding of breath.

May every sorrow loosen

its hold on you,

guilt dissolving,

forgiveness rising

like a warm hand in yours.

May you feel us near,

our vigil steady,

our hearts unhardened,

as we keep the light low

and speak to you

in the language of presence.

And when your flame lowers

to its final glow,

may it do so without fear,

without struggle,

simply completing its work

in the quiet way

a life does

when it has given all it can.

Go gently, Grandma.

Turn toward your rest.

We are here.

We will hold you

as you drift into stillness.

You are loved

beyond measure.

Amen

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

Class 5 State Championship: Carthage Tigers vs Platte County Pirates

Hallway Cat

A Retrospect (1869)

My grandmother looked past me today, her gaze fixed on the far corner of the room. “Do you see the little boy?” she asked, her voice soft but assured. There was no little boy in the physical sense, yet the certainty with which she named him carried a kind of gravity I could not dismiss. Later she asked my brother about the little girl, and the night before she told my mother she had seen her older sister, the one who died in 2001, standing quietly at her bedside. These moments, though bewildering at first, began to feel less like confusion and more like glimpses into a space where memory and presence were becoming indistinguishable.

As I sat with her, I found myself thinking of Dickens’s Ghost of Christmas Past, that strange, luminous figure who appears to Scrooge “like a child: yet not so like a child as like an old man,” a presence both near and receding. The Spirit embodies the very quality I was witnessing: memory taking on form, time becoming fluid, old relationships and long-buried feelings emerging into the light. In Sol Eytinge’s engraving A Retrospect, the Ghost stands behind Scrooge, pointing into the darkness not with authority but with a gentle, illuminating insistence. It is memory as guide rather than judge. Sitting beside Grandma, I felt the same sense of soft revelation, as though the past itself had stepped forward with a lantern.

Her sister’s appearance seemed to confirm this sense that something more than random neural fire was unfolding. Grandma was one of more than a dozen siblings raised in rural Missouri. It was a world of chores and crowded bedrooms, hand-me-down dresses, and unspoken loyalty. Amid this lively constellation of brothers and sisters, one relationship carried special meaning: the older sister she went to live with when she first left Miller to work in Carthage. I imagine her stepping off that bus—young, nervous, determined—and finding shelter in her sister’s care. Years later, when that same sister suffered a stroke and became disabled, Grandma visited her daily in the nursing home, tending to her needs with the kind of devotion that is more lived than spoken. In this sense, her sister’s presence now feels less like a hallucination and more like a final gesture of reciprocity. The one who sheltered her early in life returns to shelter her now, a quiet echo of Dickens’s Fan embracing Scrooge with “Dear, dear brother!” That greeting carries the same tender recognition I imagine Grandma is experiencing.

Yet even more revealing than her sister’s appearance are the children who populate the edges of her awareness. The little boy. The little girl. They come and go like figures stepping out of lamplight, patient and unthreatening. Their presence makes a kind of profound symbolic sense. My grandmother spent more than forty years teaching Sunday school, guiding generation after generation of children through stories, crafts, songs, and lessons that were as much about kindness as they were about Scripture. She cared for the children of friends, treating them with the same affection she showed her own family. And she cared for me and my brother with a tenderness that settled into the very marrow of our childhoods. Caregiving was not an activity for her, it was a way of being.

As I reflected on this, Dickens’s scene with Fezziwig came to mind, when the Ghost suggests that Fezziwig’s generosity is a small matter. Scrooge objects: “The happiness he gives is quite as great as if it cost a fortune.” My grandmother lived that same moral arithmetic. Her influence came not from grand gestures but from countless small ones: steady, gentle, and reliable. The children she sees now are not random remnants of brain chemistry; they are emissaries of her vocation, embodiments of the tender work that defined her life just as surely as the many cookies she baked and gave away. 

Thinking about these visions led me further into the phenomenology of dying itself. As the body weakens and metabolic processes shift, the mind often loosens its attachment to linear time. Memories are no longer sorted in chronological drawers but rise according to emotional significance. Loved ones who formed the early architecture of identity often appear first; the figures who shaped a person’s deepest expressions of love come next. Philosophers call this threshold consciousness: a state in which perception becomes symbolic, relational, and meaning-driven rather than literal. Dickens captures this beautifully through the Ghost’s glowing forehead: “a bright clear jet of light, by which all this was visible.” Not the light of reason, but the illumination of inner truth.

Returning to the bedside with this understanding, I began to recognize the coherence in my grandmother’s visions. Her sister comes from her beginnings, the children from her middle years, and the family gathered around her now from her final chapter. Rather than unraveling, she is gathering her life into a single field of meaning. The figures appearing to her are not fragments. They are the essential threads of her story rising to meet her. Dickens’s reminder that the scenes shown to Scrooge “are but shadows of the things that have been” feels apt here. These shadows, these memories made visible, do not diminish her. They reveal her.

This recognition brings me unexpected comfort. My grandmother is not being pulled into darkness; she is being accompanied by the very relationships that shaped her life. The sister who sheltered her when she was young returns in her moment of vulnerability. The children she taught for decades gather like small lanterns around her consciousness, embodying the love she poured into so many. And the family she raised and tended in her final years sits beside her, bearing witness.

Her past is not haunting her. It is guiding her.

It stands behind her like Eytinge’s Spirit, pointing gently toward the illuminated landscape of her own life.

She is walking toward a light she spent a lifetime creating, a light made from every act of care, every whispered prayer in a Sunday school room, every unseen and unknown kindness that rippled outward from her steady hands.

And as I sit with her, as she looks into corners where I see only air, I understand that she is not alone. She is accompanied by memory, by love, by the bright clear jet of light that belongs to those who have lived lives of quiet devotion. She is being led home by the very stories she helped shape.

And in the warmth of that light, we both find comfort. 

Rose #12

Witness My Act and Deed (1881)

There is a way in which Paton’s kitten speaks directly into the emotional weave of my life right now. The painting’s charm lies not merely in its humor but in the delicate truth it reveals about how love often carries mischief as its shadow. How closeness, especially after absence, sharpens both affection and play.

My own cats enact this truth with almost ritual precision. After days away, days that stretch long in their quiet, empty rooms, they greet me with an intensity that borders on ceremonial. They follow me from room to room, as though re-mapping the geography of their world with me as the compass point. Their purring becomes louder, their bodies press closer, their play becomes more exuberant, almost frantic. It is as though they are trying to compress every missed moment of companionship into a single evening. Love, for them, is never abstract; it is kinetic.

And then, of course, there is mischief.

The way a cat will identify an object on the counter and then look you in the eye, deliberately, challengingly, just before pushing it off. It is impossible not to see a kind of existential dare in this gesture. A test of the world, a test of you, a test of the relationship. Paton captures this liminal moment perfectly: the kitten’s paw, light but decisive; the inkpot teetering; the blot already spreading across the carefully ordered page. Mischief has already occurred, yet the cat’s body still thrums with the possibility of more.

This is not villainy. It is assertion. It is presence.

Psychologists who study companion animals observe that mischief is not simply random chaos but a behavioral expression of secure attachment. In this framework, the cat is not undermining the relationship but strengthening it. Mischief becomes a kind of emotional experiment: Are you still here? Will you respond? Are we still us? It is playful transgression, what Winnicott might call a “creative gesture," testing the reliability of the environment and the caregiver within it.

Lately, I have noticed my capacity for irritation shrinking to something nearly invisible. There was a time when a cat knocking over a cup might earn a startled shout or a sharp sigh. But these days, with grief and anticipation sitting heavily around the edges of my life, such small disruptions feel trivial, almost welcome. My emotional bandwidth has reorganized itself. I find that when confronted with mischief, the only reaction I can muster is warmth. A wry smile. A drawn-out exhale. And then, inevitably, what I like to call “punishment snuggles." It is the affectionate consequence that teaches them nothing but reassures us both.

The anger I used to access more easily feels distant now. My life’s landscape has changed its scale: the ink spilled across the desk is not a catastrophe but a reminder that life continues even in the midst of uncertainty. My cats, unaware of the weight I carry, continue to knock things down. They continue inviting me, in their own way, to rejoin the tangible present. To hold something that is alive and near. To laugh at the small things because the big things loom so large.

Paton’s painting, and my experience of my own cats, suggests a kind of domestic theology. Mischief interrupts the illusion of control. It disrupts the tidy narrative of human order. Yet the disruption is not destructive; it is enlivening. The ink spill is both a mess and a reminder that the world is not static. That something other than us has agency. That life presses in where we least expect it.

There is, in this, a quiet resistance to despair. The kitten refuses to behave according to the script. It reintroduces spontaneity into a world that appears tightly managed. And perhaps this is why I find myself drawn to this scene in this particular season of my life. Death, grief, and caregiving have their own rigid structures: timelines, medical routines, the careful navigation of emotional thresholds. They invite a seriousness that can become suffocating if allowed to dominate unchecked.

But the cats, my real ones and Paton’s painted one, refuse to let the world stay too orderly. Their mischief reanimates the mundane. They insist that life is still happening in small, ridiculous ways. They spill the ink so I can remember that not all messes are tragedies.

In the painting, the ink spreads across a formal document, obscuring its legal precision. The cat’s pawprint becomes a mark of unintentional authorship. This makes me wonder: how many times in my own life have I left such markw, accidental or unintended, but ultimately revealing something true about myself?

Mischief, even when unplanned, leaves traces. These traces become part of the narrative. The ink that mars the page becomes inseparable from the document’s story.

And perhaps this is part of why the painting resonates now: I am living in a moment where the ink is spreading across the page of my days, where the forms and expectations I thought were fixed are being smudged and rewritten by circumstances outside my control. My emotional reactions are different. My priorities have shifted. I am softened in places I did not expect.

In Paton’s scene, the human is absent but implied. Someone will return to this desk and discover the chaos. Someone will wipe up the ink, right the bottle, pick up the glasses, and perhaps even laugh.

In my own home, when I walk through the door after days away, my cats greet me with the full range of their presence: affection, need, curiosity, and mischief. Their disruptions pull me back into the living world. They remind me that even now, joy and play insist on returning. Life demands to be touched, to be knocked slightly off balance.

And in that delicate imbalance, I find something that feels very much like the grace I need to give myself in this moment. 

Cracking the Queen's Code

Chaudron et prunes (1905)

Still-life paintings often become quiet portals. Appearing as small, staged arrangements that open into the deeper architecture of memory. Returning to Alfred-Arthur Brunel de Neuville’s Chaudron et prunes, I recognize that familiar sensation: the way a single object can call forth entire seasons of one’s life. What draws me in is not merely the painter’s skill with copper or light, but the vessel itself. The copper appears warm, luminous, and evocative stirring memories of a time defined by sweetness, ritual, and early marriage.

My wife and I had been married only a short while when we rented an apartment above a small candy shop. During most of the year the owners ran a brunch café, and I often baked for them. Things like pies, cakes, and other small pastries that felt like offerings of domestic goodwill. But at Christmastime, the café transformed. The air filled with peppermint, sugar, and anticipation. Their candy canes were locally famous, and the day I was invited downstairs to help make them felt like initiation into a seasonal mystery. The thrill was almost childlike. It felt as though I had been welcomed behind the curtain of a winter ritual.

The copper pot in the painting recall those heavy vessels we used to boil the sugar. The massive kettles that radiated heat and shimmered with the same reddish glow de Neuville captures so faithfully. The alchemy of candy-making unfolded in stages: the boil, the pour onto marble slabs chilled to an almost arctic cold, the labor of pulling and folding the molten mass until it turned glossy and firm. The sensory details return as vividly as scent: the sweetness in the air, the snap of cooling sugar, the rhythm of hands working in practiced coordination.

Psychologically, such memories inhabit a space Bachelard described as “intimate immensity,” where small domestic experiences expand into emotional landscapes. That year above the candy store carries this expansive quality. It was a time when so much felt malleable: early marriage, creative work, the forming of our shared rhythms. Like the sugar we pulled on cold marble, life could be shaped, stretched, twisted into something enduring.

As I return to those memories, I am struck by the vivid symbolism embedded in the candy canes themselves. The red and white stripes are more than festive coloration; they are visual metaphors. Red, with its warmth and vibrancy, suggests vitality and celebration. White, crisp and cool, evokes clarity and stillness. Psychologically their pairing creates a chromatic dialogue. They create an energy braided with purity, exuberance intertwined with restraint. The colors announce the season long before taste or smell can, and they echo, in a quiet way, the emotional dualities of Christmas: joy laced with remembrance, festivity bound up with nostalgia.

And then there is the iconic crook. Forming that bend by hand was always the final gesture, the moment when the straight rod became something recognizable, even emblematic. The curve has accumulated meanings over time, the shepherd’s crook, the initial “J," but for me it signifies something more personal: the truth that sweetness rarely travels in straight lines. The most enduring joys of life, whether the hope of marriage, rituals, or community, bend and arc and accommodate. The hook at the end of a candy cane is a reminder that delight often emerges where the line changes direction.

Returning to de Neuville’s painting, the copper cauldron becomes more than still-life subject. It becomes a metaphor for resilience and receptivity. They become the psychological vessel that carries warmth without being consumed by it. The plums scattered across the worn tabletop evoke the quiet ripening of life’s seasons. Their presence reminds me how sweetness, even in emotion, develops slowly, sometimes haphazardly, and how memory preserves the fragrance of such ripeness long after the season has passed.

We lived in that apartment only a year before buying our house, but for many Christmases afterward I returned to help make candy canes. Each December the ritual revived itself: the heavy copper pots steaming, the sting of peppermint rising in clouds, the laughter and warmth shared in the back kitchen. These memories have acquired a patina not unlike the copper itself glowing, worn, and deeply human. 

So when I look at Chaudron et prunes, I see more than a vessel and fruit arranged in a painterly triangle. I see a return to that early chapter of life: the sweetness of forming traditions, the delight of learning a craft, the small domestic joys that become anchors for memory. The still life becomes a threshold through which past and present meet as a visual echo of copper heat and peppermint air.

And I am grateful. Grateful for the labor that once felt like play, for the warmth stored in memory, and for the way art can draw those recollections to the surface with the gentle clarity of a cooling sugar rope. In the muted glow of de Neuville’s copper cauldron, I feel the season again: bright, crooked, sweet, and shaped by hand.