The Horse Fair

Our neighbor across the street moved to a retirement home after her husband died a few months ago. I visited her, her son, and a daughter who had come back to finish the house clean-up. It was sold to another neighbor, who now owns three houses across the street.

As you can surmise, we live in a neighborhood in transition. Nora, across the street seems to stay, as we do. Her grown children, three in town, others quite a distance away plead her not to sell the beautiful home that they grew up in. We stay because we love our stuff, like good Americans, and cannot bear to ease our lives by leaving.

Yesterday I went to visit the 86 year old friend that I used to walk with, who invited me into a County Extension Club, who was a confidant for years. She is keen, logical, compassionate, and I have missed watching for her drapes to open in the morning.

As the son was carrying things up from the basement and into the dumpster in the driveway, he showed me some pictures and asked me if I would like them. Of course I did. I say people who love books, paintings, and plants can never have too many. One of the framed lithographs is "The Horse Fair" by Rosa Bonheur. It had come out of the immigrant school house from the 1800's. It is sepia of course, and a little tattered at the top for they had used the frame and glass to hold graduation pictures of the 1960's. Underneath them was this marvelous lithograph.

Rosa Bonheur was radical in her personal life, artistically conservative in the 1860's.