By Susan Shanklin

I think it’s closer to spring than it really is. I was telling my 10-year-old granddaughter that I thrifted a bouquet of faux daisies for a wall vase on my outdoor shed, for springtime.

She said, “You know grandma, Spring is far away,” with her eyes rolling.

Spring is far away in the natural, but it is close in my mind. Sometimes, things look different than they really are.

I have a large rustic wood-framed print on my dining room wall entitled “My Prairie is My Garden” by Harvey Dunn.

It’s pretty famous around the upper Midwest, as the artist is from South Dakota and the original painting is hung in the South Dakota Art Museum at the State University.

It depicts a hearty farm mother standing in a meadow with a colorful bouquet of wildflowers looking rather sternly off into the distance. Alongside her are two children, each with a bouquet of flowers. Behind her is her humble, rather shabby outbuildings and house. There are cows, a running creek, and even a cat in the painting.

I have owned a smaller print of this famous painting before, and it probably got donated back again to the thrift store at one point. This 32×21-inch framed print also came from a local thrift store close to where I live. I was thrilled to gaze upon it again.

After my hip surgery, which was complicated by fractures of my femur during the procedure, I returned home unable to go upstairs. So, Tom purchased a twin metal bed frame and mattress and set the bed up in our dining room.

Our house is very small, and this was the only place to put the bed. The dining room table had to have some leaves removed, and some chairs needed to be set aside. The table was then shoved against the wall, and I was given an armed chair on the long side of the table, where I could sit with my walker next to me.

Straight in front of me on the wall was the framed print, “The Prairie is My Garden.”

I look at it daily just like it’s the first time I have ever seen it. I never saw the cat before.

I always thought the mother had a knife in her hand but really it is a pair of scissors! There’s a cow with a raised tail, and the buildings, I have noticed, could use some repairs.

It didn’t matter how many times I had looked at this painting, I wasn’t aware of what WAS really there.

As I was staring at the painting today, I was thinking about how things in the natural aren’t always how I perceive them. Maybe I’m wrong about what I perceive.

God forbid that I would be wrong!

“Maybe I’m wrong” is hard on the old flesh.  Maybe what they said didn’t mean what I thought it did.

Maybe what I saw didn’t really mean what I saw. Maybe, I’m wrong.

The knife I saw for years was really a pair of scissors!

In our daily interactions with people, that knife we saw in someone’s hand to stab us in the heart or back was really a figment of our imagination.

Maybe we were wrong.

Maybe we better go talk to them and ask if we were wrong.

Why live with a lie and let it cause a cancer that will eat away at our hearts?

The Bible tells us to go to our brother or sister if they have sinned against us. Maybe it would be best to speak in person rather than to send an email or text to avoid misunderstanding. 

Just go. You may be wrong just this once. Ha ha.

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