The Old Creamery

My grandma passed away a few years ago. Before she died, I wrote a post about the impact she had on my life, and reflected on what that meant for my own journey. 

She was an artist. On a whim, I decided to Google her name to see if I could find any images of her work or life, but quickly realized it was as though she never existed. Google images had not one image of my grandma. 

I found her obituary and this sweet photo of her and my grandpa back in 2003, about 9 years before she died:

Like I said, my grandma was an artist. She did mostly watercolor, and after she passed away, all of us grandkids as well as my mom split up her artwork to hang in our own homes. This one of a cute little shop in the town I grew up in hangs in my family room:

After going through my decluttering book, I decided to finally get rid of the leftover paintings that I still loved, but just didn’t have a place for. After giving most of them away to family, I was left with one: The Old Creamery.

You see, I have a special connection with the old creamery. Pretty much every day for my 6 years of elementary school, the school bus would drop me off right across the street from it. I grew to see that house as an important piece of my day. Each day the bus pulled to it’s spot across the street, I would gaze at the house, wondering what it looked like on the inside, who lived there, and what mysteries its walls held.

What should I do with the painting? I wondered. I could donate it to Goodwill, but it just didn’t feel right to take something my grandma had painted in her last few years of lucidity before having full-blown dementia and just give it to a random stranger. I certainly wasn’t going to throw it away. And then it struck me: I should give it to whoever lives in the old creamery.

The creamery had been converted into a home decades before, but this is what it used to look like back in 1934:

This is what it looks like now:

I decided that a few days later, my kids and I would make the trek up to Jackson, CA (about an hour and a half drive) to knock on the door of whoever lived in that house. I would surprise them with this heartfelt painting from my grandma. 

The photo above is me (obviously!) standing in front of the old creamery, getting ready to surprise the resident with my grandma’s artwork.

We went to the front door and knocked:

And a woman named Joanne answered the door. Joanne had white hair, a beautiful face, and dangly earrings. Her hair was pulled back into a pony tail, with a few wisps of hair framing her delicate features. She wore a bright red sweater, and a big smile on her face.

I told her that my grandma had painted this painting in 2000, had passed away in 2012 ,and that I felt she would want Joanne to have it. 

Joanne’s eyes filled with tears. “Oh, dear. This is so wonderful! Honey, I would invite you in, but my husband is in the hospital right now. He has pneumonia and I’m not sure he’s going to come home.” She paused for a moment and glanced down at the painting. “Oh dear. What a beautiful painting! My husband would love this. I hope he can come home to see it.” She asked me about my grandma, how long she had been an artist, and where I was from. We stood there and chatted for a few minutes until I said it was best for us to go so she could go about her day. Joanne gave me a nice, long, firm hug and told me to stop by next time I was in town.

As I was driving away, I reflected on the life of that painting. It had hung for years in my grandparents’ home, then moved to my garage, where it sat in the dark for days upon end. It would now grace the walls of the old creamery for awhile, but then what? Joanne was no spring chicken. What would happen to it when she died? Would her family leave it on the wall for the next person lucky enough to live there? Would it get donated, or even worse, tossed into a junk pile and thrown away?

It was no longer my burden to bear. I knew it would end up where it needed to be.

For now, I could almost picture Joanne, sitting in a chair by the fireplace, cup of tea in hand, staring at the painting with a gentle smile on her face. I hoped it would bring her a small bit of encouragement during a time that none of us look forward to. And most of all, I prayed that her husband would be able to come home to see it.