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Although Kathie was an art major in college when we met, she didn’t pick up oil painting until fifteen years ago, because I gave her a plein air workshop for her 50th birthday. Back then she told me how she would like to try her hand at oils and get away from mats and glass cutting and all that came during her picture-framing days. So off to John C Campbell Folk school we went.

Much of her story has been documented in various forms since then, but what is not known is what I am about to tell you. About eight years ago, let’s call it 2015, as she was securing event invitations, gallery representations and teaching opportunities, we were driving off the grid to our favorite place on earth… about an hour’s drive from our house and into the Great Smoky Mountains Nat’l Park. Elkmont.

As we drove she looked deadpan at me and said with a curiosity I had never heard before, “When we get set up in our campsite, it’s my turn to have a question for you”. She definitely had an agenda which was soon to be revealed.

With the pop-up camper all popped up and a small fire laid, Kathie said, are you ready? (There was no way to respond but in the affirmative). “What were you thinking by marrying an artist?”, she asked.

In the long quiet I reflected back on our college days and, in my mind’s eye, I saw her toting an oversized portfolio to drawing class, I met her muddied-self after throwing a pot in ceramics and witnessed her ever-so-lively spirit when she used foreign words like batik and raku. But what did I think?

The only hint of me seeing her as an artist showed up two years after we married when the local Dogwood Arts Festival held its annual open show. I can only now imagine the pre-children, pre-late-in-life art career, 24-year-old excitement as she received the notice in the mailbox. Her very first post-college show, first award and first red dot. She must have flown high as a kite that evening!

But then finally, with the sound of the creek as our only backdrop, I admitted, “I never thought of you as an artist. I only was thinking of me.”

In hindsight, it seems to me, that her question and my unaware confession opened a floodgate of seeing Kathie anew there in the mountains. Since that moment I began to notice her as always being an artist because… isn’t that a mother? Isn’t that a sister? Isn’t that a daughter? Isn’t that a wife?

Isn’t that a woman?

Now, go spend your days together asking good questions.

BuddyO