My father passed away last week.
He was a Mainer through and through, a fact upon which most of his life hinged.

Sitting by his bedside during his final week, I listened as he fondly reminisced about many things that were so “him”, including: his love of being on the water (he marked periods of his life by sailboats, much the way many of us recount the years by the succession of dogs who have graced our families), the pride he had in crafting the delicate curve of a particularly challenging set of table legs for one of his many fine furniture projects, and memories of the island people whose salt-of-the-earth integrity had greatly influenced his own approach to life throughout his 98 years.

Early in the morning, before going down to be with him, I would sit on his apartment porch and take a few moments to quietly paint the nearby pine trees — tall and stately Eastern White Pines, which coincidentally are Maine’s state tree.

I realized as I worked to capture their distinctively irregular shapes that these sturdy conifers could be seen as an apt representation of the man who, along with our mother, had raised my brother and me: tall, upright, determined, resilient, unique, long-lived, and even, to make a terrible pun that he would have loved to hate, a bit sappy (classical music, especially Bach, could bring him to tears).

Much of making art is seeing the connections and metaphors that hover over our lives. Thanks to this unexpected sketching epiphany, I have a new way of seeing and remembering Dad — not only here in Vermont, but especially along his beloved coast of Maine.