The Storytelling Beauty of Found Things

How the discovery of a portrait of my mother sparked my writing

This is my mother. A portrait painted by my father sometime, I believe, in the mid-1960s. My mother would have been in her 30s at the time. My father was an amateur artist, charcoal drawing dogs, pheasants, trout on a fly line, and occasionally portraits—there was one of Jackie Gleason and another of the Pittsburgh boxer, Billy…