Years ago, Steve and I were at a Meijer and, for some reason that escapes me now, we were looking at art prints. I think we just didn’t have much money and wanted something to hang on the wall.

I saw a print and fell in love with it, but it wasn’t what I was looking for. It wasn’t bright and it wasn’t modern and it wasn’t surreal or strange or anything of the sort.

It was just a house. And there was a man walking away from the painter, and a horse looking at the painter. That was it.

Two days later, we were back in Meijer as I looked frantically for that print. I wanted it. Desperately. It was gone.

Two years later, I found it. We were in a mall. We walked past a poster/print store and I saw someone flipping through a collection of prints and somehow spied that picture in the fraction of a second it took for the customer to flip past, uninterested.

I bought it. We were still broke, so I couldn’t afford to frame it and didn’t want to mar it, so it stayed rolled in kraft paper and I unrolled it all the time and just stared at it.

Two years later, my mother had it framed for me.

Today, we were at a different mall entirely and I saw a print and hopped up and down and pointed and hollered “It’s my painter! It’s my painter!” This print was framed and with a little plaque that showed the painter’s name.

So now I know his name. Peter Sculthorpe. My painting? “Buckskin.”

Isn’t it amazing and strange how a piece of art, whether a painting or a poem, can sit in our hearts for so long, so silently?