The Red Chair

About the work

Watercolor sketchbook, 7 in x 14 in Thoughts upon leaving the house in Cape Cod: Many years ago, to escape her life, my mother bought a little house on Cape Cod. Over the years she cultivated a garden that blooms continuously from spring through fall. Like my dreamer mother, the garden has always been, in its most embarrassing aspects, totally out of control and unrestrained —Solomon’s Seal, irises, daylilies, peonies, dogwood, hibiscus, rhododendrons, and more. Casually speaking, the house and garden were “always there”. Repositories of memory. Playing scrabble on the floor, discovering new swimming holes along the Cape Cod Shore, cooking live lobsters (the last time I would ever do that). I’m selling it now, my mother was long gone. So goodbye sweet lilac scents, magical birds, languid summer afternoon shadows, the bicycle path. It’s time to move on, a hackneyed cliche I know. But not before one last summer afternoon, lying on the green chaise lounge that we bought 25 years ago. Under the big red Japanese Maple tree