Phantom Trees, by Maureen Sauvain O’Connor

Artist and provenance unknown.

Phantom Trees

for Frank
 
There is a framed painting, by an unknown artist, hanging in the hallway that leads from our front door to the kitchen. I picked it up at a thrift store several years ago. I loved it, then and now, although I essentially forgot about it until Frank went ape over it.
 
The 24- inch square  painting is housed in a two- inch hand painted gold frame which Frank adores and says will be perfect on a south-facing bedroom wall to complement his antique gilded mirror.
 
The six birch trees in the painting are leafless, their ashen limbs stretching up, intertwined, into a shadowy pale cerulean blue sky. At their feet, on the horizon, phantom like shadows hover in a yellowish haze. The trees' roots at first appear to be a thin line of bloody red but then dip into a pond of metallic gold where they become just slightly visible. It is this golden pond that has caught Frank's attention and obsession. And mine.
 
Frank has done work for us before and he has become a friend, although we mostly see him when we have a job for him to do. This time he is painting our living room and seniorizing our home with bars and railings. He is a perfectionist in the best sense.
 
I want that painting, he says, with such enthusiasm and brashness that it takes me off guard. I love it, he says. I say we do, too. He persists for a few days asking what he can pay me for the painting. I laugh but ask him to please not ask me again, for now.
 
I am thinking about times when I could have relinquished something to someone I knew needed it more than me, but I didn't— whether my time, my feelings or thoughts, or an object we both loved. I decide not to live with that regret again.
 
Maureen Sauvain O’Connor
 
Maureen Sauvain O’Connor is a poet, flash fiction writer and psychotherapist. Her clients have brought meaning and depth to her life and the work has helped to create a space for her own  self-exploration and writing. She is grateful, too, for the inspiration provided by the magical gardens, outside her writing window, tended by her husband and daughter.