Umbrellas will always bring back fun memories for me! My first six years of life began in San Pedro, California. We lived in Park Western off of Bret Place. It looks a lot different now but back in the day it had gullies and wasteland filled with junk (like cars, refrigerators, chairs, sofas, umbrellas, and so on) that people no longer needed or wanted. We would play in this wasteland and watch the occasional horse and rider pass by wishing we had a horse as a pet. We built things out of the junk we would find and it was pretty cool to us! I remember finding an umbrella and using it as shade for one of our forts we built on the side of a hill near our duplex. It always saddened me to see an umbrella go to waste on the roadside with the material torn or missing exposing the frame and then to be forgotten. It seemed to me that there could be some kind of use for it even if one could repair it with new material.
Do you remember the clear plastic umbrellas that swooped all the way down to a person's hip? Oh how I wished I could have had one of those umbrellas!
The painting I have posted was inspired by a stormy rainy day my sister and I experienced. We had school that day and we were actually excited to get out in that rain with the one and only black umbrella our family owned! I still get excited thinking of that day....it seems not so far back in time actually....that's how much joy the memory brings me. Well on that stormy rainy day my sister and I ventured outside equipped with that umbrella. It was blowing so hard that day and we both clutched our umbrella as if it was going to save us or carry us away. We began up the hill to where the bus picked us up when a huge gust of wind filled that poor umbrella and we were pulled back a ways. I swear it felt as if we flew a bit! Oh how we screamed with laughter!
There is probably only one sad memory I have of an umbrella....and that is of the one we did not have. For some odd reason this memory will be a mystery to me. The time when my sister and I were walking in the rain to Mama's (grandmother) house 2:00 in the morning without an umbrella.......but that painting and blog is for another time.
Other blogs:
http://cowboyshorsesrodeos.blogspot.com/
http://memoriesofavase.blogspot.com/
http://carminasstory.blogspot.com/
http://sylviafuller.blogspot.com/
