Watercolor Paintings

 

                Back in 2016, in the fall, just a few months after we sold our Marion house, my dear Julie Crandall handed me a gift. There wasn’t an occasion at hand, so I was surprised to be a gift recipient, but I do love a good gift, so I was excited! Inside? A watercolor painting of our first home. She had pulled the photos from the listing, shared them with a friend of hers, and commissioned this painting of our Marion home.

                I wrote here about all the (beautiful!) emotions that stirred in me. Ryan and I loved the painting so much that we asked for the contact information of the artist and commissioned a painting of our Kokomo house to hang alongside it.

                Then you know what happened, right? We moved to WillowBridge…and Bluffton…and then to the lake. And before we knew it, we were really behind on watercolors for our wall of homes.

                Two years ago, in the fall, after we had moved to the lake, I reached out to my friend Amber, who I’ve talked about many times on this blog. She’s a phenomenal artist, and I wanted to support her endeavors, so I asked if she would paint the remainder of our homes. She has a full time job and busy life aside from her art, so I told her we weren’t in a hurry. For the waiting season, as I wrote about here, I purchased an inexpensive app and created “watercolors” from photos of our other homes so the frames wouldn’t be empty on the wall. But the app pictures are not the same as a handcrafted painting.

                A couple of weeks ago, when we were in Kokomo for Ryan’s grandpa’s funeral, Amber came to the visitation. On her way out, she pulled me aside and said, “I have your paintings…do you want them?” We hurried out to the parking lot and transferred them from her car to ours, and I wanted to cry on the spot over the beauty of her work!

                She hasn’t done the lake house yet, per our request, because we were waiting for it to look more like our transformed vision before she painted it. But she did WillowBridge and our Bluffton house.

                Here is WillowBridge.

                The funny thing about this painting is that only one of the windows you see shows the apartment where we lived. The window on the first floor behind the white railing was our guest room. The rest of our windows were on the back side of the building, and you can’t see them here. But it doesn’t matter, because I can see and hear so many memories when I look at this picture.

                I can hear the gray door on the left slamming when people hurried out the side of the building. (We were the only ones who closed it carefully.) I can see our upstairs neighbor leaning out his window to talk to us when we went to our car in the parking lot on our days off. (He wasn’t supposed to do that, but he always did.) I can smell the nauseating rotten food from the refrigerator in the upstairs front apartment after a tenant got angry with us and unplugged her refrigerator before she moved out. When I opened the door and found all that spoiled food…WHOA. I think of all the meals and meetings we shared with tenants and coworkers – right there in the community room. The front doors remind me of the message board that hung in the entry. I’d go out every morning to write a verse or note on that board. And then over there hidden behind the tree were two more apartments where I spent hours talking through life’s problems with the tenants who lived in there.

                And then there’s the new and improved WillowBridge sign, replaced after a tenant learning to drive got the brake and gas pedal confused and plowed over the old sign. And the blue siding that was added while we lived there…starting at 6 a.m. on our day off!

                You might notice the bear beneath the sign. It was never really there, of course. It was Amber’s nod to our ongoing relationship with our godson, because we met him in this place.

                I found the quote on Pinterest and asked her to add it: Much of who we are is where we have been. It’s true of us with this home. We are forever changed and marked because of this season of our lives – for better and worse.

                Amber also painted our Bluffton house, which was the shortest house experience we ever had. And I will tell you right now that the yard looks 1000 times better in this picture than it ever looked in real life. Oh that summer of trying to grow grass in a drought! It was abysmal.

                We do miss our three car garage. We miss having an attached garage! But we don’t miss fighting with the yard or the view into the dining room of the house behind us. The lake has been a gift in that respect.

                In this picture I see the window to my office, where I spent hours writing and working – many times with the blinds down because we had some overzealous visitors sometimes.

                And then there’s sweet Lexi Grae’s room, where she slept every night while we watched her on a Lexi-cam.

                Our time here was brief, and the quote feels appropriate. It was unexpected that we landed her, and it wasn’t quite home – but we found home while we lived in this place.

                Our gallery wall looks stunning with these two additions. We’re currently wrestling through whether we should have Amber paint the lake house from the street side or the lake side. (We learned at one of the HOA meetings that when you live on a like, your lakeside door is technically your front door. Is this true?)

                We never dreamed we’d live in five homes within the first (almost) decade of our marriage. We hope this gallery wall is complete at this time. But we sure do love the memories we see/hear/feel when we look at this wall! Thanks, Amber, for your masterful paintings!