The Name They Stole

The year I turned fourteen, Grandma and I were crammed into a beat-up trailer on the edge of a desert town.

She couldn't afford paint, so she mixed colors from the cheapest red clay pigment at the general store. When a frame broke, she hammered it back together herself. When canvas tore, she patched the back with old cloth and sealed it with a paste she boiled from leftover church wax and cheap resin.

Grandma never went to school. She painted out of pure love, and she kept at it for thirty years.