When I was packing up my parents’ house after my father died, I was stunned at all the art of mine that my mother had saved for over 60 years.

Hundreds and hundreds of my childhood drawings, paintings, and handmade cards revealed themselves. Sheaves of paper and Grumbacher sketch pads filled with youthful illustrations rendered in crayons, cray-pas and Venus colored pencils.  Playful doodles were as precious to Mom as earnest watercolors and oil paintings.

They were entombed for decades in oversized Lord & Taylor dress boxes, and bulging A&S shopping bags. Stacks of large Welcome Wagon envelopes, remnants of a short-lived career of my suburban mother, now contained my childhood cartoons.

Artwork was discovered in her dresser drawers, tucked underneath Merino wool sweaters, and in the hall closet, resting on top of a metal box of Kodachrome slides. The ping pong table in the basement had long morphed from a place of suburban sport to a dumping ground of disordered boxes. Digging through the clutter like an archeological dig I unearthed my 1960 kindergarten projects packed next to the original pencil drawings from my book “This Year’s Girl.”

The more I packed up, the more I unearthed.

I come from a family of savers, and I have inherited that gene as much as I did my mother Betty’s blue eyes.  Discarding items of sentimental value goes against my sensibility

Naturally, all these saved items came home with me, to be cherished as my mother once did.

A Flood Of Memories

I’ve thought of these carefully saved childhood drawings the last few days as I’ve had to cope with a recent devastating loss.

A great deal of my adult artwork was destroyed in a flood.

As the temperatures plunged in the Northeast this past Friday, multiple pipes burst in the basement of my Victorian home. The copper pipes were directly over-head the area where I store all my oversize hand-cut paper collages too large to store in a metal flat file cabinet. If this had been a bombing mission this space would have been ground zero for maximum damage.

When I returned home late afternoon from my monthly 4-hour infusion for my compromised immune system, I noticed a strange vibrating sound in my kitchen wall. Fearful there could be a pipe problem, I went racing down the basement steps.

Ground Zero

What I saw nearly stopped my heart.

The deluge of water from broken pipes was swift and intense and was cascading over my work. I could have been in a rain forest on the balmy island of Belize except it was my basement on Long Island, and it was bone-chilling cold.

I had been so vigilant about flooding. After a storm a few years ago, I raised my warren of bookshelves housing my ephemera to stand well above the water line.

I never anticipated flooding from above.

Water is Kryptonite to paper, and as a collage artist, that is the unforgiving medium I work in.

The work was all boxed and double bubble wrapped, but the flood of water rushing over it could have been going on for hours. As though I was a doctor on The Pitt dealing with a disaster, I jumped into emergency mode,e triaging what was salvageable. My husband and I carried the work we could upstairs, where it was dry. The living room became an ER, tagging pieces that could be saved, others to put in hospice, and all too many were dead on arrival.

To witness decades of work damaged and destroyed is indescribable. Watching carefully cut pieces of paper from my collages now floating in puddles of water was horrifying. The loss feels unbearable.

My first thought as I surveyed the mess was that I would never have work to show in an exhibit again.

Was that part of my career over?

Unlike the work my mother saved, many of these now marred pieces have been shown in galleries and hung in museums. I longed to call my mother and cry to grieve this loss, but of course, she is no longer here. But even if she were here, I would want to spare her. For my mother, who was so diligent about preserving my work, this casualty would be too heartbreaking.

The next morning, rifling through papers in search of printed pieces of the work now destroyed,  I stumbled upon those familiar childhood drawings my mother had saved that now rest safely in the drawers of my flat file in my home office.

It felt good to see them preserved, showing no signs of age or wear. They were intact just as I made them years ago. They stood in stark contrast to the waterlogged, blemished collages lingering in my make-shift hospital ward. Looking through a childhood of drawings served as a reminder of who I am and who I will always be.

I am an artist.

Though the remains of my complex collages are difficult to look at, as though viewing a mangled child in an autopsy, I know from that, something new will rise.

These childhood drawings were a tangible reminder from my mother, who always embraced and encouraged my creativity as an artist.

She preserved these pieces of art, this record of my creativity, to preserve the fact that I am an artist and that cannot be destroyed.