I believe the best gifts are those appreciated more with time. Sometimes that’s minutes. Sometimes that’s hours, days, years—a lifetime. We see better and more truly the thought and intention that went into, and seeing that, new perspectives and appreciation appear.
With our own years, experience—and seeing what others gifted to, and into, us—we see this: in the gifts we receive and, too, the ones we give.
For a week my children have been my accomplices. My wife was banished from the basement, and when absolutely necessary to enter, our children kept guard protecting a gift in progress.
I’m not the best at gifts. I don’t often think of material things. Often, I feel stressed—delaying shopping, not finding what stands out or speaks to me pre-made and on a shelf. This year, out of the blue—I had a thought; and as I usually do in words, this time I made with paint.
I haven’t painted in years. The last I believe was a couple’s paint class I made with Bridgette well before Owen was even born. Still, I tried.
One of our first and favorite dates was early when we began to date. Bridgette taught me to mix colors and from red, blue, yellow, and white—never black—she showed me how to make the colors in my mind.
I tried again. Twelve dollars of Walmart paint and a piece of plywood from the shed—I started.
First, I made the board into custom dimension: 15”x25”, dimension that made meaning to the rest; where the whole idea began.
For days I layered, messed up and refined; but the lessons are like life, layer on layer of continuing to try until attainment of something valued enough to share.
Blues and greens and browns and yellows that look gaudy up close—but real at a distance, much like memories that tend toward dream.
It was a view we shared for a week this summer: view from balcony and beach across an island sound from one volcano top onto another. I tried to paint the sky, the water and the land.
I wondered how she’d take it, what I would read within her eyes.
Gifted, I watched and read. Up close, it looked as spoken of before. Her first reaction—she touched it: textured layers of learning, mistakes, and efforts to keep trying.
In that way, maybe art resembles life—love—in way beyond an image. There are many moments, if paused or quit or stopped upon right then, where it isn’t always pretty; but it doesn’t have to end. It only ends and lasts that way if we choose to quit our effort. Keep going: the moment is but a base and texture of a history beneath decision to keep going; and it’s the layers that give beauty to the creation that becomes.
Later in the day, standing up and looking on from distance; it appeared a different way. She saw the depth of sky: lighter of horizon and richer blue in climb of high. Coarse brush strokes of waves blended from afar, and the sea appears to move. Each mix and blend and layer of color, slightly different and compounded on before, gave the ocean depth, appearance of windblown waves.
She saw it then as I had hoped and loved even more that our children had been part.
15×25: fifteen year anniversary, 2025. Dimensions of a milestone and moment all our family shared together.
The greatest gifts are rarely bought—they are made, and they take time. These are my favorite gifts. They are the ones I love to share however they inspire and arrive in me: to give away and allow for another to interpret and—if made right—for another to see and love them as I do.