That summer, I was taking an art class taught by a local artist who was semi-famous; meaning that anyone who was moneyed in town bought her paintings for their living rooms. She was strikingly beautiful (for a "mom", I remember thinking), with long-ish chestnut hair and a steady voice that never seemed to rise above the same soothing level. She had rented out this little cottage that sat between two homes near the courthouse - it had maybe been a tiny storefront or somebody's workshop many moons ago, but whatever it was, it was adorable. I can only remember creaky wood floors and late afternoon-sunlit wavy glass.
We were all supposed to be learning watercolors. I had a thick pad of fiberous white paper and the prescribed beautiful blue tin box of french paints; it was like a strip of Crayola colors gone cosmopolitan. Watercolors, real ones, are notoriously tempermental, and I spent most of my time in the little cottage trying to reign in each dripping color with that beautiful European paintbrush. I painted pink watery flowers, abstract slashes and shaded spheres. I ripped an ethereal, Venus de Milo-type picture out of a magazine and copied it - it was from a birth control ad, which one of the other teenage students, a frizzy-haired blonde, deigned to loudly point out to the class. But I was intensely proud of it, with all the blue-toned shading on the nude woman's skin, and the arbitrary flowers held over her mysterious lady parts (it was a birth control ad, after all), and it might still be hanging in my bathroom.
I rode my bike to these lessons, clutching my paintbox over one handlebar and holding the paper tucked under the opposite arm. And because it was 1995, I still had my Walkman headphones on, usually just set to the Wausau top-40 station. One night I was biking home, and the sky was flaming with pink and deep yellow and blue - like someone's rose gold jewelry had melted into the clouds. Some Sophie B. Hawkins song came through my headphones, and when I heard the line about "the whistle of a train on a summer evening", the same thing sounded out from the tracks down the hill, mournfully low but building in intensity as it snaked through town. I remember stopping and just standing there, thinking how someday I would be grown up and gone and not hearing train whistles while riding my bike anymore.
Now, feeding my son, watching him awestruck over the most rudimentary things in the room (the ceiling fan takes on legendary status), I have a deep hope that one day, he will have his own version of 1995 to miss.
Minus the bangs.
