Remember that time Kris spent the weekend with her family?
Remember when they drove up to Olympia to buy a boat?
Remember how she stared at the verdant hills of Washington and thought how very much the scenery looked like pictures she had drawn as a small child? Remember how she gazed out the car window and thought back to art-class lessons she had learned on perspective . . . how very large things appeared smaller because they were farther away and how very small things could appear enormous on the page because they were so close?
Remember how Kris envisioned those childhood drawings . . . rolling green hills with roads and rivers winding through and behind the hills, thinning as they headed over the landscape to the far reaches of the paper? Remember how Kris could see her childhood artwork in her mind’s eye, always with huge bright flowers and rocks in the foreground?
Huge images of tiny things because of the trick of perspective.
Remember how Kris stared out the window on this drive to Olympia and became suddenly convinced she had gotten the perspective of her life all wrong?
Remember how she wondered if she had been spending too much time on the brightly colored flowers and rocks in the foreground of her picture . . . her attention drawn by their immediacy?
Remember that?
Remember when Kris decided to stop tending the flowers and rearranging the rocks for just a little bit?
Remember how the flowers grew wild and the rocks were pushed into disarray and it didn’t matter?
Or at least it didn’t matter to Kris.
Not like she thought it would.
Remember when she asked her husband, “Why am I doing this thing at all?”
And her husband said, “Because you are good at it.”
Remember when she wondered if that was enough?
Remember when she thought maybe it was not?
Yeah.
