My mother imbued me with many things. Her taste may not have been one of them. I’m pretty adept at picking my own clothes (no plaids with stripes), avoiding stringing tacky Christmas lights (less is more), and finding the vintage red amongst a bunch of Tuesday night, boxed beauties. But charged with the responsibility of choosing the ‘big art’ to hang over the couch in her newly purchased condo, I dropped the ball.

I may not have shared her preference for overdone roast beef — but I knew color trumped content. In short, if it matched, it could have be tastefully presented road kill. Armed with this knowledge, I emerged from our local art shop with what has, over the intervening three decades, come to be known as ‘the print’. A large (40 x 60), abstract, stylized ‘landscape’ in soft mauves, dusky roses, pinks, blues, and off-whites — all (tastefully) mirroring the palate in her love seat and chesterfield. I had a winner!

Wrong. Agnes, long known for her forbearance and mantra of ‘if you can’t say something nice. . . ‘, rarely expressed disapproval. I should have suspected the line had been crossed when the usual effusion of gratitude was elbowed aside by a troubled silence and pained smile. A few weeks of ‘getting used to it’ failed to soften and back to the gallery it went — those being the days when one could trial almost anything from mink to milk; and have it gratefully accepted back by the shop owner.

Imagine the surprise, and frankly Twilight Zone moment, when ‘the print’ appeared a few years later in the waiting room of the mental health centre on which I had cut my psychological teeth. Little Albert and his fur phobia had nothing on the tingle that ran through as I collected my first patient of that surreal day and beheld the framed embodiment of my mother’s principal disappointment in me — that I knew of. There it hung, disapprovingly for the next half dozen years or so. . . until Ministry funding allowed for a renovation on the already once reclaimed nurses’ residence. Off the wall to god knows where — my censure was complete.

Truth be told, the next incarnation had my own fingerprints all over it. Private practice looming and a need, once again, for big art — I’d caught sight of ‘the print’ peaking out between the cast off curtains, draped over dysfunctional file cabinets and frail, stained sled chairs in said mental health centre’s ‘storage’ room. Lazarus-like it rose again to adorn the entry hall at the newly christened office space — until a practitioner ballot (not even close!) voted it off the island — coincident with the Holstein lamp and the dead philodendron . Forwarding address: U-Stor-It, 123 Main St., Anywhere, ON. And there it remained, wedged between the cast off commode and bed-rail, all balanced, in the musty darkness of this rent-a-garage, atop the fold-out bed with its inquisitional ‘mattress’. Small comfort that it was reunited with old friends from those short-lived, halcyon days of condo living.

And so to 2014. Mother now a dozen years gone and a downsize of our own staring us in the face, the call for a holding tank was heard, yet again. Sorting the trash from the treasures, the recyclable from the rejects began in earnest. Well-travelled luggage would make perhaps its terminal trip — to Goodwill. Salvageable furniture, from Depression-era to Ikea, off to House of Blessing or a final fifteen minutes of fame on Kijiji. Horse blankets, hide-a-bed, terra cotta this and decoupaged that, boots, bottles, and headboards — all well past their BBD — were earmarked for a more ignominious fate. Landfill. And, sadly too, ‘the print’ failed to clear waivers. Into the pick-up’s already brimming box, Jeremy at the wheel — I think he lives for these cathartic scenes.

I missed the last rites moment. But Jeremy is an excellent historian. And I cannot doubt his account. The seagulls circled, disappointed with the absence of anything organic. The ‘dump stewards’ scrutinized to ensure metal was fully segregated from less durable materials. Time being money, there was little ceremony. No blessing of the raised toilet seat booster (new meaning to ‘booster chair’). No quiet prayer over the faux-silver drinks tray. No elegy for the mis-matched kitchen dishes. But as he scattered a few handfuls of dirt over ‘the print’, he was sure that he eyed a figure in the shadows — just possibly planning its next life. In the immortal (as it were) words of Harry Miller: ‘the print came back the very next day, the print came back — it couldn’t stay away’.