I immediately take the easel, sketchbook, a mug of water, and the paints out to the dock and set up. I’m frustrated at first because I’ve lost the knack of it, but after a few false starts, I start to feel it coming back…like Nathan and the guitar.

Before I know it, I’ve been painting for several hours. The completed painting is…not my best, but it’s recognizably the lake from my dock. I’m proud of it, maybe inordinately so. Winslow Homer, I’m not, but I feel good for having done it.

The expulsion of creativity is as much an antitoxin to the poison of misery and despair and sorrow as the peace of the lake has been, as sleeping in has been, as eating well has been. As much as that dinner on my porch with Nathan.

I gingerly tear the page from the book; Nathan is out on the lake, fishing. I heard him motor out early this morning, and he’s been on the far side of the lake ever since. I wedge the painting in his door, between door and doorpost.

I wouldn’t say I’m alive, yet. But…maybe, just maybe, I’m feeling the first glimmers of renewal. Like a seed germinating deep in the thick black wet soil.

I’m not okay. I’m very, very far from anything like okay. I think about Adrian just about once every other breath. I still wake up in the middle of the night and reach for him and tear up and clutch my pillow and scream into it when he’s not there.

But…I laughed, last night. I painted, today.

It’s improvement, if infinitesimal. But still, better is better.

One Little Thing At A Time

I haven’t seen Nadia for days. I wake up early, and she sleeps in. But we have a system—I make her coffee and put it in my old hunting thermos and leave it on her porch. She returns it sometime later in the morning. I made her an easel and got her some watercolor stuff, and now she’s out there most of the day, painting. On the dock, in the yard, under the trees, facing the cabins. She left me one, the first one she did, as a kind of thank-you. It’s good. Like me and guitar, I’d say don’t quit your day job, but it’s damn good.

It’s hard to read Adrian’s story. I put it off, sometimes for days at a time.

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