Years ago, I had an idea for a series of paintings. It was a good idea, too. I spent years gathering material for my project. Then life went sideways on me. I continued to gather material, but the likelihood of completing my project grew farther away. The main reason for the delay has been time, but I’ve begun to rethink my problem with time.

I’ve felt for some time that I have a lot of catching up to do. While painting and writing have always been important to me, for a time, life took me in another direction. Even though I was an English major in college (with a concentration in writing) and I took some art courses, I didn’t start painting full time until I was 45 old (actually that sounds young now). Part of that journey involved taking numerous workshops, but that doesn’t make up for all the years I didn’t paint at all.

I have a box full of journals filled with poetry I’ve written over the years. A scant amount of which was published over the years. But I published my first book in 2024. I’m well into another book now, but again, I’m not exactly fresh out of college.

As the adage goes, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice.” So I concerned myself with thoughts about starting to paint seriously too late as well as having only recently published my memoir. I figured I needed more time for practice than I have–—but wait, Great Aunt Rose lived to be 106!

I am going to operate on the assumption that I have the Aunt Rose gene and act accordingly. Without giving away too much information, I still have nearly forty years to work on my writing and painting. That should be long enough to get pretty good at both.