I’m taking what I’ve learned in my iconography classes and applying it to a painting of my mother. Her life has been hard, and now, as she shares more of her story, I have been full of sadness at the challenges she has faced. Yet, through all of that, I feel the beauty and wisdom of her aging. Here, she holds a little white dog that she still misses. I had thought the dog was a figment of her imagination, then I found a photo of her and the dog from 1992! I have merged that photo with a recent one taken as we went for a walk with her in her wheelchair. The flowers are plumenaria, representing the time she lived in Hawaii and was the full-time caregiver for her husband, who had Alzheimers.