AKlectic Designs

Adjusting painting number one to better relate to the atmospheric feel of number three. Before is shown for comparison.

It’s pretty much near completion

36 x 48 acrylic on canvas

🌊 Emberflow III — The Culmination

Where it becomes.

A river of living light winds through ancient cliffs and endless wilderness, carrying warmth, movement, and renewal through the heart of the landscape. Emberflow III reflects the moment where the journey resolves into something greater—where light no longer searches for its path, but fully inhabits it.

Shout out to my newest followers! Excited to have you onboard!

Added cliffs roughed in. Finally touching the painting again!!

Where she sits on the easel today

Where she sits as of now

Preface — Still Becoming

This is what fifty looks like.

In my hand, I hold pieces of who I was—May of 2001, a younger woman standing at the edge of a life she could not yet see.

Twenty-five years and one hundred pounds separate us.

(EDIT: I just realized I was about ten pounds off of the exact same weight!! It was later in life I was 100 pounds heavier!! Wow. So the body composition is different because I’ve worked harder over the years at exercising maybe?)

Time, choices, trauma, healing, love, loss—all of it lives in the space between those images.

And yet, when I look closely, I see her still. Not gone. Not replaced. Just… carried forward.

The photograph I hold was taken by Jake when he visited Wisconsin. Behind that moment is Lake Superior—vast, steady, unchanging in a way that humbles you. Just upriver, where the Brule River flows into it, is a place that holds part of my story in a way words struggle to capture.

It is where my grandfather and I spread my grandmother’s ashes in the spring of 1990—sometime between April 15 and May 2. I remember the cold, the quiet, the weight of the moment. I didn’t understand it fully then. But I do now.

That place holds grief. It holds love. It holds lineage.

And somehow, without realizing it at the time, it holds me too.

Not long after, my grandfather looked at me and said something that would stay with me for the rest of my life:

“Go now, or you’ll forever regret it if you don’t… like I did.”

He knew what regret felt like.

After World War II, when work was hard to find, he was given a choice—to reenlist and be stationed in Alaska, or to stay and keep looking for work.

He chose to reenlist.

But the very next day, a job offer came through. He was hired as a welder in the shipyards on Lake Superior.

So he stayed.

He worked there his entire life.

And when the company folded in the 1980s—just weeks before his retirement—he lost part of the pension he had built his life around.

He never made it to Alaska.

Two weeks after he spoke those words to me, I sold everything.

I packed up what remained of our lives, gathered my children, and with their paternal aunt beside me, I drove to Alaska.

I didn’t have all the answers.

I didn’t have certainty.

But I had movement. I had something in me that said go—and this time, I listened.

That decision would change everything.

Years later, after he was gone, I brought him here.

With my sisters, Lisa and Chelsea, I climbed to the top of Lazy Mountain above Palmer, Alaska, and spread his ashes there—so that he could finally come to the place he once chose, but never reached.

So he could watch over us from above.

So he could, in some way, finish the journey.

Today, I stand stronger. More confident. More at home in my own skin. More aware of the woman I’ve fought to become. I feel more aligned with my purpose, more grounded in my faith, more willing to stand in my truth without apology.

And still—if I’m honest—I carry the same quiet uncertainty about the future that I did back then.

Maybe that never fully leaves us.

My children are now grown—27 and 28—and we are walking through a different kind of journey together. One of healing. Of unraveling. Of understanding how our lives, our wounds, and our love have shaped one another. We are no longer just mother and children—we are individuals learning each other again, through the lens of truth and recovery.

And I am still learning too.

Still healing.

Still becoming.

I have not always walked a Christian path. But I have always been led. Even in the wilderness, even in the confusion, even in the places I now understand differently—there was always a hand guiding me. A voice, sometimes quiet, sometimes undeniable, that kept me moving forward when I had every reason to stop.

God was there.

Even when I didn’t call Him by that name.

And without that presence—without that grace—I would not be alive today. My children would not be here. The woman writing these words would not exist.

So this is not a story of perfection. It is not a story of having arrived.

This is a story of survival.

Of pain that shaped me, but did not define me.

Of lessons learned the hard way.

Of forgiveness—especially for those whose own brokenness intersected with mine. Because I have come to understand that what hurt me also taught me, stretched me, and helped form the very gifts I now carry.

I do not excuse the pain.

But I refuse to let it own me.

Instead, I choose to see it as part of a greater design—one I may not have understood then, but one I can honor now.

If there is a purpose to this life, it is this: to take what was given—both the beautiful and the brutal—and become a good steward of it. To grow. To heal. To walk forward with intention. To use what I’ve been through to bring light, understanding, and maybe even hope to someone else still finding their way.

So here I stand, stepping into the next half century of my life.

Not finished.

Not perfected.

But awake.

Grateful.

And willing.

I have lived a full life already. And still, I know—there is more.

More growth.

More healing.

More purpose.

More becoming.

This is where the story truly begins. Maybe I should write the book about my life that my daughters always mentioned.