I think about color. I think about color often.

I am sitting up in bed as I write, and before me is an abstract expressionist painting by a friend of my aunt Marcie (Marcia Smith Aron). Marked 1959 and “Floral Growth” on the back, it is tied to memories from my aunt’s house in Berkeley when I was a young child, and later to her San Francisco house. Bright with egg yolk yellows and intense pastels. Mom said the painting had been held by her sister for safe keeping. After my aunt died and the painting came to me, I traced the artist. By then, she lived just a few blocks away from where Gary and I first lived in Big Pink in the U District of Seattle. She had turned to calligraphy, become famous for it. Midori Kono Thiel was sorry to hear my aunt had died, delighted her painting was still alive, but no, she didn’t want it back. So that colorful oil, flush with memory, hangs across from our bed in Portland.

How art travels when we are having fun.

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