Watercolor of a Family at the Beach on an Overcast Day

Stop in front of the framed picture in the bathroom when you go to wash your face this morning. Squint against the sharp ray of sunlight illuminating the image you breeze past a dozen times a day. 

Notice how the figures resemble your mother, father, brother, and you. How the soft brushstrokes capture an unmistakable essence despite the dreamlike haze of featureless faces, the languid drift of gulls. Wonder why your grandmother chose thyme-and-wheat hues instead of azure for sea, gold for sun, silver sand. Why that dark blur and fade to suggest a family? Sit with the unsettling sensations those colors and shapes stir.

Observe the wormwood of the frame, how it was whitewashed and distressed. Remember the secret your father once revealed on a long hike in the mountains, the smell of sagebrush, zizz of grasshopper wings, dull thud of your boots on the copper-rich soil. Imagine your grandfather’s bent-knuckled but competent hands sawing and nailing the frame with precision, the no-nonsense assurance of his movements. Try to imagine those same hands balling into fists, if you can.

Realize that only you and your estranged brother are still alive. Gone are your soft-focus mother and your father with his slightly downcast posture. Gone, your grandparents, both artist and craftsman. Remember her, whose brushes eased the bleed and wash of those subdued images onto the rippled paper. Him, whose hands crafted the angular frame. Those who sat for the picture—perhaps unwittingly—never imagining that you’d be standing here now, both subject and observer, powerless to change the past.

Stand before the basin, feel the sting of cold water on your cheeks as you scrub. And scrub. And scrub.

​

​