My grandmother, Clea, spent the last few years of her life in a nursing home in Lovell, Wyoming. She refused to leave the town in which she raised her children, but she could no longer take care of herself. She had a small room to herself with a rocking chair, a bed, a television, and photographs of her progeny.

When she died in February 2000, my father and his siblings set to the task of sifting through her belongings in her room and in storage. There were hand-made quilts to be distributed to grandchildren, kitchen utensils to be donated to thrift stores, and family photographs to be divvied up.

My father told me of a few paintings that my grandmother had done while in the nursing home. She participated in weekly classes where the seniors learned to paint. The canvases were store-bought and mounted to board, the paint was acrylic, and the subjects were imagined - invented landscapes and fictional floral still lifes. Since I was the only “artist” in the family, my father thought that I might like to have them. I asked him, “Didn’t grandma have pretty bad cataracts before she died?” He confirmed that she did. I said, “So do each of the paintings have a big blob in the middle of them?”