balloons

It's amazing what can happen when you just get out of the way.

I had a great idea last year -- buy a large, blank canvas for the kids to paint and display in my husband's bland, undecorated office. We had just come back from a trip to Paris and its many museums, and we were all feeling inspired.

Then, like so many other things in life, the project stalled. I take responsibility for that, being the one who let the summer slip by, the one who insisted on ideas being sketched out and painted on a smaller (and much less expensive) "test" canvas, and who always let other things be a higher priority than this. It was, in the scheme of things, a pretty optional project. But I still kicked myself every time I walked past the giant, still-blank canvas in the dining room. I toyed with the idea of just painting a brown dot in the middle and calling it Freckle, a modern self-portrait that would hang ominously above my husband's head. Or, a splatter painting, made by painting our dog and having him shake off on the canvas.

In the end, however, I knew that I needed to follow through with the original idea. My son was not as interested in participating, so this had become my daughter's project, and I couldn't take that away from her. She had given this a lot of thought and made some pencil sketches, but had not gone about this in the systematic logical way I thought she should. Yesterday, I finally let go and got out of the way. We needed to get that canvas out of the dining room; it had loomed long enough. I asked my daughter if she could do the painting then, and she replied with a bright-eyed smile: "Yes!"

A few hours later and one frantic run to Michael's before closing time, and the blank canvas had been transformed ... full of movement and color ... with nothing (and nobody) to stand in the way ... a handful of balloons pulling gently upward and away.