Purged

In 1864 Robert Browning wrote a poem in the voice of a character from a Shakespeare play and 115 years after that, I handed in this image for an assignment in my Victorian Poetry class. I kept this in storage until yesterday. Then I took a picture of it and threw it away.

It's a time honoured retirement tradition to surrender to landfill or the recycle bin the stuff you were too brain-damaged by work to get rid of before. 

Since I retired, I have purged the contents of the "office" on the second floor, the contents of the condo corporate files older than seven years and, most recently, the contents of the crawl space over our kitchen.

I have bent over files for hours, lifted heavy boxes, emptied binders of dusty corporate records, filled half a dozen garbage bags and hit my head on the low ceiling of the crawl space just enough times to make me really, really angry. 

In the crawl space, among the paint tins and Christmas decorations was a collapsed, dirty old artist's portfolio I've been dragging around since at least 1980. 

Normally, I am an inveterate thrower-outer. In 1983, I disposed of every essay I wrote in undergrad and grad school. In 1994, I sent everything from law school down the garbage chute. 

The portfolio was where I kept the few things I did not throw away, mainly pieces of artwork I had drawn for art classes. But I hadn't looked in the portfolio since I put it in the crawl space the day we moved in.

The years have not been kind to the contents. Acids in the paper and glue, and solvents in the pigments ruined many of the pieces. Unkinder than oxidization was my realization of how awful many of the pieces were. Already grumpy about my banged head and sore back, I had to confront that what I had once considered to be my best work was pretty bad. 

'Way back in 1979, I sat in my prof's office to discuss the grade she'd given me on my assignment (the one in the picture above). She was an English prof, not an art teacher, so she didn't note the many errors in the execution of the image. She did ask me about my interest in art, and I told her going to art school was my other choice for my post secondary education. She said, "you made the right decision." I believe she meant I was a very good English student, and not a crappy artist. 

But, she would have been right.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen  

Eight years ago I predicted
the fate of this tree. I was off 
by about seven years.