Art and memories.

My friend Kate has great taste and owns several pieces of art, many of which she inherited from her Dad. I remember and love all of the pieces that belonged to Kate's Dad, since she and I have known each other since we were five-years old and I often used to join her when she visited her Dad on weekends. She has had a lot of the prints and paintings re-matted and re-framed and it's so nice to see them being looked after and given a fresh start. 

I don't doubt that the olfactory sense is the sense most closely attached to memory. There have been many, many times that a certain scent has stopped me and taken me back to a specific moment in time. But when I haven't visited Kate in a long while and I walk into her house and see these pieces of art, they immediately take me back to our childhood and bring back smile-inducing memories of her Dad; his constant and blaring opera, his crazy-adventurous and more-than-slightly-scary cooking antics, his flamboyant and grandiose ideas. But they also remind me of Kate and me; the stages of our lives and the stages of our friendship throughout the years. 

I'm not the type of person who wishes that all my memories were good memories and in this one area of life, I certainly get what I wish for. But I'm happy for it because at some point, the tough moments become as important and memorable as the easy ones. I've known Kate almost my entire life and we've had good and bad times, but she will always be a sister to me. It's wild that we're both married and now we're both mothers. Being here and meeting her gorgeous Babe is incredible. 

But I find myself looking around at this fantastic art on the walls, immersed in memories of when we were kids, running around her Dad's house, giving him a hard time by telling him his music sucked and there was no way were were eating whatever was lurking in that pot. I'll never forget his feigned look of hurt incredulity, saying something like, "But why not? I've been stewing that tongue all day and it's going to be just beautiful!" 

Yesterday Kate admitted that she finds herself listening to opera and classical music on CBC and enjoying it; she even recognizes a lot of the music from her childhood. Well, of course. I would expect nothing less.