“Moments Among the Coleus
Leaves”
From the back seat, looking over Bobby’s shoulder through the windshield, the windshield wipers are moving rapidly back and forth, the rain hitting the windshield is heavy, and the night is inky dark. Instantly, the entire windshield is filled with the image of the side of a huge dump truck.
The image in my memory is frozen in stark black and white. The back of the cab is just to the right, the top of the rear wheels are just over Bobby’s shoulder, the bottom of the truck’s dump bed is all across the windshield. This is the image that lives in my mind like on a high definition TV screen. It is the image of what I saw, the instant before we crashed head-on into the side of that dump truck. Today, the image plays over again and again in my mind as I do this painting of some Coleus leaves. I don’t know why this moment from long ago is on my mind: it just is.
This event happened years ago when my friend Bobby Rogers and I were freshmen at Texas A & M. We were in Bobby’s new beautiful Ford Victoria. Why we were in Houston on that cold rainy night, I don’t remember. Why we were exiting off of the then new Gulf Freeway onto the feeder road, I don’t remember. I didn’t see the stop sign either. What happened after we crashed, except for the moment of the explosion, is a blank in my memory.
As I think about those memories and continue to paint the coleus leaves, I have the TV in my studio on the country and western music channel, and Roy Clark started singing “Yesterday, When We Were Young”. I couldn’t go on: I had to stop and listen to him sing that wonderful song. Sometimes, those things that happened long ago do seem like yesterday; but then, those memories are really just memories of a moment in time.
Not too long ago, I was searching on the Internet for the name of the person who wrote the beautiful and thoughtful poem, The Dash. I found her website and her name is Linda Ellis. Her other poems were also on her website and I opened and read the one titled Moments. How this beautiful young woman could know so much about my memories and put those memories in such a beautiful arrangement of words that affected me so much is just beyond my comprehension.
At any rate, her beautiful poetry has inspired me to make an extra effort to also try to do something beautiful. I hope you like this painting.
Cheers,
Acree
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