antiqued and painted wooden box, 4 inch diameter,
not available for purchase
An earlier work, painted in oil on a little shaker style box, for my Mother's 91st birthday in 1995--the house she and then we, her five children, grew up in, built by Grandpop in 1911. By the time I painted this, the house and surrounding acres of lawn, elm and maple trees, apple orchard, flower gardens, corn and vegetable plots, pig pens, outhouse used as a chicken roost and my sandbox were long gone -- succumbing in 1971 to the barbaric rape of rural land by developers' greed and the bulldozers' violent power. Now all is buried under the hard cold blacktop of a mall parking lot -- part of the down-at-the-heels outer ring of Youngstown's encroaching slums. Still, the memories of hide-and-seek, It, Statue and Mother May I swirl in my mind along with the Big Snow, building igloos and snow caves to hide in during our games of Fox and Geese re-run vividly in the nooks and crannies I am bold to call my brain. Talk about *Back in the Day.*—now back to trimming the tree!