My mother loved this painting when I was a little boy. She loved it so much that my father bought it for her. It hung on the wall in our unhappy house. As a child I loved this painting. Sometimes I would pretend that the boy in the picture was me, other times I imagined that it was my mother and father.

When my parents divorced, she took the painting with her. She remarried and hung it on the wall of our new, much happier house.

Somehow something got trapped in this painting. I always thought it was a piece of my mother. Was it the love and innocence of her own youth? Some piece of what was snuffed out in her previous marriage?

Or was it a little piece of me?

In my life, I still see love as something distant, and so far away. A hillside which has been built up, and no longer exists. In my mind’s eyes I can remember when the drive between San Francisco and Santa Clara was nothing but train tracks and abandoned barns. Perhaps a fruit stand would mark the half-way point of the journey. I would lay on my back in the back of the volvo P1800 and stare up at the sky, thinking of the lovers walking through the distant grass of the rolling hills.

I had hoped that one day that would be me up there, holding the hand of the very woman I loved, blessed with connection, and grounded by these lush, rolling, golden grasses.

Today I was confronted by this painting again. I stared at it for a long time, and tried to remember the day it arrived on the wall of our living room, in our very unhappy house.

All I could do was remember the smell of pastures, and rain in the california spring time.