New (inspired) series: Fifty-Two Objects: #1.

Hello there, dear reader! How was the first week of the new year? Mine was quite busy--along with the usual weekday madness, I had to eke out time for appointments with the mechanic--yes, the new year came with car trouble. I'm not complaining though, as long as things can be fixed (and stay fixed) it's all okay. The week was surprisingly productive (mostly mundane, but essential tasks) and with the satisfaction of having tackled that to-do list, I'm quite pleased with myself and ready to go!......Which brings me to the post on hand. Some of you may be familiar with the 52 Objects series on Emma's blog, The Marion House Book. I've always admired the series--I was hooked from the first day I stumbled across her blog, sometime in the summer of '11. It's a beautifully composed narrative strung out over the 52 weeks of a year-- in it, each week, Emma picks one object from her life and shares the story behind it. Over the course of the past year, she's (un)covered the secret lives of her favorite possessions, each rich with personal history, fragrant with memories. Thank you for the inspiration, Emma!

Starting this week, I plan on sharing some of my personal favorites with you--some breathtakingly beautiful, some crumpled beyond recognition, some pristine, some marked with scars.........each, a beloved object from my life. It's an ambitious project, one that will require a degree of dedication that I've struggled to bring to this blog in the past year. Hopefully this will remedy that! Wish me luck, my loves, and then join me on this journey as I do what I love to do--dig through my memories for stories to share.....

So here it is, the first of 52........

One down, fifty-one to go..........

xoxo,
Gagan

Update:

Dear all, thank you so much for your lovely words on this post. This painting is a favorite of mine, for obvious reasons, but I really need to do a post on my mother's art. She's quite old now, and hasn't picked up a paintbrush in many years, but I made sure that she got to read all the comments on this post. She thanks you all and wants everyone to know that this painting isn't an original, it was a copy of something she'd seen in an illustrated weekly. (That's my mom in a nutshell, always the perfectionist.) (Just FYI, there are plenty of originals scattered throughout my parent's home, and in homes of friends and family members around the globe.) I need to write that post, it's an emotional subject for me to write on, especially now that I better understand what she gave up to build her family. I'll get to it, maybe just not yet.
Thank you for all the love!

Gagan