Marylou DiPietro

Funny thing about my mother's painting is that I loved it before I knew it even existed. I loved the autumn-earth smell that filled the air whenever we opened my grammar school music book to the page the song, The Italian Street Girl, was on. I loved the song the whole class sang together, spinning out the story the picture told.

I loved discovering, years later, the same picture painted by my mother when she was twelve, stuffed in a drawer in the long, heavy desk we put on the porch when we moved to what my mother always said was the bad part of town. Then, sometime after I first saw my mother’s painting, which I thought was the most beautiful thing I ever saw, my father dug it out of the drawer and had it framed in the frame it is still in 60 years later.

Once I saw the original painting in a museum and took a picture of it to send to my mother. But whatever joy she got from the painting when she was 12 faded long ago. For me, the image of the barefooted girl drinking from an ancient fountain in Italy remains the icon of the thirst-quenching hope and peace it has been from the very beginning.