Legacy

It’s only a few minutes past 4 pm and the sun is already setting. My brother pulls his A-class Mercedes into the driveway of an impressive yellow house. It’s not really a mansion, not by today’s standards. But it would have been considered one at the time when it was built, and a few hundred years thereafter. Still, 6 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, a fully renovated basement, a sunroom, and a double-lot within jogging distance of Harvard is nothing to scoff at.

My brother turns off the car and smiles.

“Here it is!” His face beams with pride, radiant, even in the fading light.

“Nice.” I nod, taking it all in in strides after a 30-hour flight from the other side of the globe. Honestly, I’m not sure how to react to seeing his house for the first time. How much of a reaction is enough? How much of a reaction is not enough?

We exit the car and proceed inside, his wife is there to greet us at the door. We exchange hugs and normal amounts of small talk about my flight as if it could really bridge the gap of not seeing each other for a span of about 3 years.

“Coffee? Water? Seltzer water?” She asks as we get settled in the sunroom, even though it’s a little cold and a little late for any sunshine.

“Water, thank you.” My head is starting to swim, the drunk-feeling of a 13-hour time shift.

“We have one of your paintings!” She says with a nod to the shelf as she hands me a cup of tap water and sits in a squishy armchair across from me. “An Alice Thomson original. But it’s not signed. You need to sign it for us!” She says it with all the pep and conviction you would give a little kid when hanging their bad art on the fridge.

And that’s exactly what it is, bad art.

“Wow, yeah, I didn’t realize that one survived.” I glance up at the painting, a family of barn owls stares down at me. Acrylic on canvas with a contrasting pop-art purple background. It was never meant to be good. It was meant to be digestible and easy to sell. The owls are leftover from a series of quick paintings I made as a weak attempt to save myself from becoming a literally starving artist in my college years. Budget-art I’d produced with very little thought or care so I could turn around and sell them for around $30 a pop. And that was over ten years ago. I have made very little art since.

There was something so unnerving about seeing it there. Something almost morbid. My lack-luster painting on a shelf in a grand house full of real ones. Hudson River Schools, Battle of Lexington originals from the 1700s, a hand-painted vase older than the United States itself, and my shitty owl painting. It felt like it was placed there amongst all the other great works by artists long since dead in remembrance of me. As if I too had died. But I wasn’t dead, just missing most of the time. However, that version of me was dead and had been for a long time, I just didn’t have the heart to tell my brother and his wife that. As awkward as it felt, it was a sweet gesture.

Coming back to a place you haven’t been to in a long time can be a very jarring experience, especially when you’ve grown and changed but other people’s memories of you haven’t. But I try to make the best of it and avoid making eye contact with the haunting reminder of how long it's been since I spent any real time with my family.

“I still have our original Nintendo and all our games in the basement!” My brother adds, “We should do some Mario-Karting later.”

I agree with the suggestion. Even though we’re well past video game playing age, it still sounds like a good idea. No one is too old for old fun.

A few days later, we drive up North to visit the rest of my family. The first stop is my father’s apartment. He helps me haul my oversized luggage up the icy steps to his third-floor apartment fondly dubbed “The Eagle’s Nest.” He’s over 70 and still stronger than I am. I briefly wonder when I will actually begin to feel like a real “adult,” despite being in my early 30s.

Once inside, he gives me a quick tour, even though I’ve been there before, it’s only my second time and it’s been so long, he figures I could use a refresher. I get comfortable in the spare bedroom and unpack a few of my things. My father keeps encouraging me to put my clothes in the drawers, even though I won’t be staying long, we both pretend that isn’t the case.

“Did you see the shrine? Pretty creepy right?” My sister asks when she calls the next morning.

“Yeah, it’s something.” I try to brush it off, but she’s right. The “shrine” as she calls it is almost an entire wall of my father’s apartment dedicated to my old paintings. An homage to my past achievements. I used to think it was sweet, the idea that my art had been saved and not tossed out like a lot of the old junk my parents used to keep from my childhood. Now, my once award-winning paintings seem to stand as a constant reminder that I never became a successful artist. A shrine to my failed potential.

I act flattered as my father retells how he saved each piece while we sip hot chocolate and listen to retro holiday music. I force myself to dig through a box of old photos and memorabilia from my childhood as he reminisces about the time we used to spend together. As much as I don’t really want to see pictures of myself sitting on the lap of my horrible high school boyfriend, I remind myself to enjoy it, at least we are spending time together now.

The next day he places a box of old mail on my bed. It’s mail that’s been forwarded to his apartment while I’ve been away. I get to work sorting and my heart starts to break. Old bills, unpaid student loans, collection letters from the exorbitant hospital fees I racked up last time I got sick in the States. Is this what they think of me? Is this what they see? Unpaid bills and bad art from my childhood?

My legacy.

Across the world, things are different. I have a budding business, a warm, well-kept, and lively house full of happy, healthy rescue cats, a loving husband, and a whole other family that I see on a regular basis. My hair is a lot different now than it was when I last visited, my clothes and body too.

As I walk around the apartment, I’m bombarded by ghosts of my former self. I hardly know the girl I see in the old photos. The girl with unpaid bills, the girl who didn’t grow up to be a famous painter. But she’s still there, for everyone else. She’s there in the paintings, she’s there in the photos, she’s there in their memories because we haven’t gotten to make any new ones.

For the rest of the trip I make an extra effort to snap more selfies with my family, pose for more pictures, and make some new memories in the hopes that the next time I visit, some of the photos in the frames will be updated to ones that better reflect who I have become, rather than who I was.

A few weeks later, I’m back at my brother’s house staring at the family of owls in the sunroom. I pick it up and flip it over. I stare at the blank edge where I used to sign my name and debate how I should write it. But something doesn’t feel right. How can I sign for the girl I used to be? I quickly put the painting back in its place and sit back on the squishy armchair. No, I won’t sign it. Instead, I’ll paint a new one.

Before I leave I make a promise to myself to return soon and replace it. If I had known all those years ago which pieces of my life I would leave behind, I might have tried harder to make sure I would be proud of them when I returned. But none of that matters now. What matters is that I am not the girl who left behind this legacy, I am a woman building a better one.