While I will never forget our opening experience, a woman who fell in love with a snowy Centerport scene and walked away embracing it like some great treasure, my best customer was a woman named Linda, who came toward the end of the day. She told me she worked at The Artisan House up the road. She also told me she’d dealt with ovarian cancer since she was a young woman. 

I’m not sure how old she was at the time, but this had clearly been a decades-long experience for her. Linda shared that she was always “a good girl” and had done everything her doctor told her…and had also tried just about every alternative treatment folks have come up with. After describing more than one trip to death’s door and back, she told me the one thing that she felt saved her from both the disease and its cure was meditating on art. She expressed gratitude that my work was perfect for this and said she wanted to buy a few pieces. 

Enrapt in her story, I was I think startled by her punchline. Deeply humbled and honored, for sure, I just wanted to give them to her as a grateful gift. Linda refused. She insisted artists should be paid.

Then, she said, “You should be a Firefly.”

“What’s that?”

Linda explained that The Firefly was a neighbor business, then located down by the Firehouse on Main Street. She thought we would be a good match.