The Kindness Painting

This painting has hung by our front entry door from the day I received it as a gift from someone I never met. I learned of her while I was working for an environmental firm in Albuquerque doing water and soil testing and monitoring, and site remediation and restoration. I also managed their soil testing lab. One day while I was waiting for results on tests I had run earlier in the day, I decided to spend my “down” time by organizing and cleaning the lab, including desk drawers and cabinets. In one of the cabinet drawers I found a large stash of personal papers and water colors, including this one. “Liane” did not sign her last name on any of the paintings, so I checked with our HR department to see if she was a former employee. She wasn’t, and nobody knew who she might be. I went back to the stash of papers and wrote down each name I could find thinking she might be related to one of them. When I had a sizeable list I took it to my manager and asked if any of them looked familiar. One name stood out, and when I asked him if that person had a sister, he remembered that he did, and that he had agreed to let him store a few things in the lab while his sister was moving. Unfortunately, that employee left under not so great circumstances, and they no longer had a forwarding address. Armed with a last name for “Liane”, and hoping she hadn’t changed her name, I scoured the internet for who she might be and where I might find her. Lo and behold, I discovered she had just started a doctoral program on the west coast. I immediately fired an email off to her to confirm she was the person I sought, and after she identified a couple of the items I was holding for her, I offered to send everything to her. She was so happy to have back the meaningful possessions, irreplaceable pieces of her past, that she thought were lost forever, that she framed her favorite and sent it to me as a thank you. That’s why it hangs in a prominent place in our home. Its a reminder to be kind to everyone. Be kind not for what you might receive in return, but because someone might need it most right when you give it.