One summer afternoon, circa 1973, my childhood friend Alice came over to visit. Nobody else was around, and we got bored. We rummaged around in some desk drawers and closets, looking for something interesting to do. We eventually came across some boxes of acrylic paint and brushes. So far so good. However, we didn’t have any suitable art paper or canvases for our work, so we set about finding another medium. In the kitchen we noticed that there were two sizeable blank spaces on the walls that looked just right. I chose the area by the back porch, and Alice got to work above the closet door.

I can see both of those paintings clearly to this day. I painted a lovely pond surrounded by trees and hills, with a deer stopping for a drink. Alice painted a forest with large trees, and one very tiny fox pausing in the middle. We had just about finished our magnum opi (opuses? opera? Those three years of Latin are stuck in my head) when we heard my Dad’s truck pull up in the side yard. We came abruptly back to earth, and stared at each other in alarm. We hadn’t asked if we could paint the walls! We stood frozen, clutching our painting materials, while Daddy walked in the back door.

“Why, hello, girls,” he said. “What are you up to?” We gestured wordlessly to our respective projects. “Well,” said my Dad. “That looks very nice.” And he walked on through.

As much as I cherish the notion of serving as my mother’s muse, all I can say with any certainty is that sometime after my Diego Rivera act was when she started on her own murals. Her first effort was rows and rows of small sea creatures, shells, and other objects on the bathroom walls. There was even a tiny octopus winding up to throw a baseball, with the caption “Plaaaay baaaaallllll.” Over the next several years she put a clipper ship above the bathtub, a bear in the coat closet, an elephant in the pantry, a panorama of the Himalayas in the stairwell, and a school of fish on the floor of the back porch. The last one I remember was a gentle-eyed sea monster under the bathroom sink.

Eventually, after many years of patching the pictures back together as the paint peeled, everybody accepted the fact that they couldn’t be preserved any longer. My cousin Tim did a photo shoot, and one by one the members of the menagerie came down.

Except the sea monster. She was painted on a separate wooden panel, so when my father changed houses, she went with him. She kept him company for many years, and even now, after all this time, she has hardly aged a day.