August 2026
One of my mother’s final paintings, before Alzheimer’s put away her palette and brushes for good, was this lightning-bright landscape. You might think, looking at this picture, that she lived in an old-growth forest. She did not. She lived in Madrona, an old Seattle neighborhood where stately Tudor and Queen Anne homes mix closely, sometimes just a few feet apart, with modest mid-century houses like hers. The best thing about her home was its stunning view: Mt. Rainier to the south, all of the middle Cascade Mountains to the east, and Lake Washington glittering in the foreground. This is one of the few landscapes she painted that stepped beyond reality, putting a forest in the place of rooftops and lighting up the eastern sky with a sunrise that appears to be bursting forth from the heart of a blazing forest fire. She probably painted this in the mid-1990s, before smoke and fire became regular summer visitors to the always-green—or so we thought—Pacific Northwest. Now, in 2026, this painting looks to me like August personified. No muted grays, no misty rain; it is a fiery sky reflected in a dark-edged lake fringed with a forest that is starting to burn. Oh August. You are the month that used to be the sparkling standout of the Pacific Northwest. Now, you’re like an aging beauty who is becoming ever more fragile. We don’t want you to go. We could easily have said goodbye to November or March. But August? We grieve. And not just for our own idyllic corner [...]
