Welcome to Bedtime Stories for Everyone, in which nothing much happens.
You feel good, and then you fall asleep.
I'm Katherine Nicolai.
I write and read all the stories you'll hear on Nothing Much Happens.
Audio Engineering is by Bob Wittersheim We give to a different charity each week, and this week we are giving to GLAD, GLBTQ, advocates and defenders, working to create a just society, free of discrimination based on gender identity and expression.
You can learn more about them in our show notes.
We also have links in our notes to our ad -free and bonus subscriptions, our super cozy merch, including our new coloring set and weighted pillow.
Your support makes this possible.
Now Bob and I are taking this week off, so we're bringing you a special episode.
it's a two -parter that has never appeared in front of the paywall we've put it all together into one so that you get an extra long bedtime story tonight enjoy now you know how this works i've prepared a place for you to tuck into and rest all you need to do is let your attention rest on the shape of the story
and the sound of my voice.
Of course, I'll read the story twice, going a little slower the second time through.
Just shifting your attention from the background static of your thoughts to the gentle structure of my tale will transfer brain activity into the task positive mode.
And that is when you will fall asleep.
Our stories tonight are called Restoration and The Lady in the Painting.
And they are stories about an inherited treasure and the tale it has to tell.
it's also about the precious gift of a common moment preserved in paint the feeling of knowing someone you've never met clues on a scrap of paper and the feeling of being so connected to what you're doing that time passes without notice now lights out get comfy notice how the sheets feel against your
skin how heavy and tired your limbs are you are about to fall asleep and you will sleep deeply all night take a slow breath in through your nose and out through your mouth do it again, breathe in and out good restoration It had started with the painting in the hall, one that had been handed down through
the generations of our family.
It had hung for most of my young life in the living room of a great uncle, above his fireplace in fact which accounted for all the soot that clouded its surface when it had come to me I'd carried it from one room to another trying to find the right spot for it where the light would show the details
that had been painted into place a hundred -plus years before.
Finally, I settled for a spot in the hallway that led from the kitchen to the stairs.
Its hanging wire was still strong and sturdy, and there it had stayed for ten years or so.
then at the end of a summer when kids were going back to school and the sunlight was just beginning to take on that golden autumn overlay I'd found a class in the community education brochure for art restoration step by step and thought of the painting.
In it, a woman in simple clothes looked over her shoulder, out a window, behind her to a green landscape.
She held a book in one hand and the room she sat in was paneled in wood, with a shelf full of jars and bottles above her head.
There was a dark smudge in one corner that we'd always thought might be a signature.
I'd taken her down from her nail and signed up for class.
She and I had spent the next few months at the community center where we'd gotten to know each other a lot better.
It is a strange thing to spend so much time with your attention centered on one face.
It felt like a kind of communion not just with the subject but with the painter, whoever they were.
And finding out had been the most intriguing part of the process.
We'd started, the half dozen of us in the class, plus the teacher, by carefully freeing our paintings from their frames.
It had taken patience and a bit of hard work to take out the tax that had been in place so long But once it was done we'd each laid our canvases or boards on clean workspaces and looked at their backs One of my fellow students had a painting found at a garage sale and though any work of art has value
his piece, a simple vase of flowers was being restored more for the experience of working on it than the piece itself the flowers had been painted on a piece of board and on its back we found a signature, an ink pen with a date it had sent us all into a fever of curiosity who was the woman who had painted
the flowers and what was her life like?
Her restorer had eventually found her in a yearbook at the high school and he'd brought it in for us to have a look at.
We'd crowded around his table and peered down at her picture taken almost 50 years before.
She had a big 70s collar and natural hair in a high puff.
She'd been in the winter drama that year and played volleyball and, at least according to the date on the back of the board, painted those flowers.
I'd sighed with satisfaction when I'd seen her.
it felt like reading the last chapter in a good book i found i appreciated her painting even more it meant more to me knowing something about her and it made me even more curious about my painting the woman seated in that room and whoever it was who painted her.
When I'd first opened the back of the frame, I'd hoped there would be a label, a tag, something to send me in a clear direction.
But all I'd found was a scrap of paper that had a few words on it.
and most of them had been cut in half when the scrap was torn from a larger sheet.
There was what I suspected was half of a name a surname that might have been the painter's.
there was also a city and a bit of a date I thought about those scraps of information while I worked on the surface of the painting restoring and conserving important works of art takes a level of skill and study that we knew we wouldn't be approaching in our semester at the community center.
We kept it simple. We would clean the top layers of dust and soot from the art with very gentle cleansers and reframe our pieces and learn the best way to care for them going forward.
I liked taking a new, thin dowel from the tray on my workbench, tearing off a piece of cotton and winding it around the tip till I had a long swab.
Most often, I cleaned just with water, working my way slowly over the surface of the painting.
As I did, hidden details I'd never seen before emerged.
In the green space through the window I uncovered a tiny hill sitting in the distance.
dotted with minuscule houses.
Among the bottles and jars on the shelf was a small black key propped against a cup.
What door did that open?
The woman herself became much more human there were lines around her mouth as if she'd spent many years smiling and laughing and her hair which had seemed a simple plain color turned out to have thin streaks of darker and lighter shades mixed in it seemed that every time I sat down to work on another
square inch of the canvas time would race past me and I'd be shocked to hear that my hours in the studio were up I got so connected to what I was doing that I lost track of anything else many a cup of tea had gone cold beside me as I looked closer at the scene on my easel when I got to that dark smudge
in the corner I held my breath my teacher stood beside me and a few others crowded around we were all invested in each of the pieces that we'd brought in and hoped to find enough of a name under the dust and dirt to decipher the artist.
I plucked my swab from the tray, wound it with a fresh bit of cotton, and dampened it just a bit in a saucer of clear water.
Then, bit by bit, rolled it over the surface, careful to lift off just the soot and not any chips of paint.
A few letters began to emerge like shapes
