My Drawing in a Stranger's Frame

I collect old frames; the pictures inside are usually landfill, but the woodwork can be lovely. At a flea market in a town I had never visited — three hundred kilometres from where I grew up — I paid next to nothing for a battered walnut frame holding a faded print of swans.

At home, dismantling it, I found the usual sandwich: print, glass, and a stiffening sheet of scrap paper behind, as framers have always used. The scrap was a child's drawing. Crayon. A house with smoke going the wrong way, a dog with too many legs, a sun wearing sunglasses — and in the corner, in the wobbling capitals of someone recently taught them, my name. First and last. Mine is not a common surname.

I stood at the kitchen table for a long time before I turned it over. On the back, in my mother's handwriting: my full name again, 'age 6', and the year. Her sevens with the little cross-stroke. Unmistakable, unfakeable, hers.