The negotiated terms of my ouster included me rescuing my children’s artwork from the attic storage closet.  I wanted these paintings displayed and my children honored.  They had made oil, acrylic, and collage paintings on old plywood, cardboard, canvas board, and posterboard.  Many pieces were very good.  Determined, I took a framing class at the Tooele Army Depot morale, welfare, and recreation (MWR) facility.  I learned to measure and cut the mats and the glass, assemble the frames, and apply the backing.  I felt joyful and proud to hang these excellent art pieces on the walls of my apartment, which my father came to call my “art gallery.”  They included scenes of Lisbon streetcars, Rio de Janeiro’s Cristo Redentor, the romantic streets of Paris, African villages, Korean dancers, and New York City street corners, plus a Panda Bear and a Great Blue Heron.  The most venerable painting hanging on my apartment walls was an oil Dad painted in the 1950s of two children, a boy and a girl, walking hand-in-hand down a forest path.  To move them safely, I wrapped these jewels in plastic and stacked them carefully in the Mom’s and Dad’s basement.  After two weeks, I found myself ready to decorate my two rooms, too small to accommodate all the paintings I had framed.  And I suddenly found that my connection to them was touched with old despair.  For now, I will gently store them to await a time of greater healing and permanence, when I will take them out and again proudly display them.  Now is not the time or the season.  They are like so many priceless museum pieces wrapped in protecting plastic and stowed in crates, awaiting their grand retrospective.  In the meantime, I have hung in my rooms several of Mom’s beautiful needlepoints, prints I bought on various trips, and the old oil of two children walking through the woods, holding hands.