A lady who lived down the street from us when I was growing up was a famous artist.
Well, she was famous in our Pinehill subdivision and pretty well known in other parts of town.
She mass produced pictures that I think were watercolors of robins, redbirds, roses, sweetgum trees, dogs, deer, storm clouds and assorted other things across our landscape.
Her neighbors and church friends bought the pictures, put them in dime store frames and had them on the walls of their little homes in the paper mill village.
They must not have been very expensive, because my mother had one hanging in her living room.
It was a picture of a blue hydrangea with a plain white background. I wondered why my mother chose that painting. She could look out the window and see blue and pink hydrangeas that she had planted all around the house.
This was the only original painting we had. Other pictures on the walls were black and white photos of grandparents, aunts, and uncles and of me and my brother in the snow.
My main recollection of this neighborhood artist was that she was extremely prolific. Her paintings were hanging in homes, stores, churches, and just about everywhere else we went.
She brought a pile of them to our house one Saturday to sell at a Tupperware party, and it took several of us kids to haul them all in from her car.
One day when some ladies were having coffee on our screened-in front porch and we were within earshot outside, somebody asked her the hardest thing about turning out all those paintings.
She said deciding what to paint was the hard part and that once she had a picture in her mind, the rest was easy.
It took a while to get to it, but that is the point of this narrative. In talking with other folks who have done writing like this for a long time, most agree that settling on a subject is half the battle.
When I stare at a blank computer screen trying to get started on another column, I often wish I could call Mrs. Branch, my high school English teacher.
The first day we walked into her class, the blackboards were filled with a wide-ranging list of topics for what she called themes or compositions.
We had to pick 25 of the subjects and turn in 500-word themes on them in a lined composition book by some specified date.
There were things on the list like “There but for the Grace of God Go I,” which made us realize how well off we were compared to many other folks and “My Favorite Teacher.” Most of us had the good sense to write that one about Mrs. Branch.
It seemed easy then to produce compositions about the kind of simple things Mrs. Branch put on the blackboard about special memories, best friends, biggest regrets, most interesting relatives, plans for the future, a most admired celebrity and such.
You could think about those things while you were listening to Elvis, bream fishing, having a soda fountain milkshake or getting a crewcut.
Then the themes would just about write themselves when you sat down with a ballpoint pen and the composition book.
But some days, she walked into the classroom, told us to write a 300-word theme that hour and didn’t give us a subject. We usually stared stymied at blank paper trying to think of something to say.
That happens now sometimes. If there is a column in my mind about grandkids, old friends, good dogs, my mother’s cooking or country music, I think about it walking or riding a bike, and it is written before I get to a computer.
Other days, I need a list of suggestions from Mrs. Branch to get me stated.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES