I Forgot That Andrew Wyeth's Maine Is Me

I forgot that Andrew Wyeth’s Maine

Is Me

            This morning I sent two trucks back to the estate to clean out the garden shed and the last of the wood shed.  The rest of the estate was cleaned out and empty; house, barn, sheds, tool shed, tractor barn.  The estate was all cleaned out and stored in the warehouses.  The estate’s family comes back tomorrow to “put the place on the market”.  This was my last day of access …and the clean out was done.

            I started at the sort bench in our barn with two boxes of removing from her bedroom.  She was dead.  Before that, she was very old and lived, happily, alone.  She’d moved her bedroom from the upstairs chamber to the colder front room of the cape.  The room was sparse.  It was furnished with a bed, a table, a lamp, a blanket chest and a dresser.  The first box was full of her bedside things found on the bedside table.

            Two books were on top:  “Recent bedtime reading?” I wondered.  Andrew Wyeth drawings was first.  Then Maine art.  The Maine book I find at least one copy in nearly every Maine estate.  A Wyeth book is very common in Maine estates too.  The Wyeth book had old  newspaper clipping from the mid 1960’s and an 1989 exhibition program slipped into it.  I opened and looked at these on the bench.  The watercolor on the program stopped me.

            I forgotten about Wyeth and how he painted what I do.  But there I was on the cover of the program back by the old woman’s kitchen wood stove in her ell.  The window showed my silhouette as I boxed up the contents of her kitchen on her old sawbuck table by the window.  Wyeth caught me at work… perfectly.

            I’d forgotten that Wyeth liked rain filled wash tubs in barn corners, hanging hand saws above a tool bench, saved bundles of wire and clothes line and old chairs scattered along the milk room passage way.  I forgotten the gray and brown colors highlighting dents and scrape marks that he painted and I… brush by as I “clean out”.  But there I was… right in the thick of an old Maine farm clean out and having probably been at it for at least eight hours already.