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.

I called her, obviously. The reconstruction took the whole evening and two more calls to my aunt. In the year in question, my school had sold children's drawings at a charity fair — my mother had labelled mine for it, she remembered the labelling clearly and losing the drawing completely. Somebody bought it for coins. That somebody, or their heir, or their house clearance, eventually reached a framer, who one day needed stiff paper cut to a swan-print's size, and reached into the scrap pile.

Then the frame travelled, as objects do, estate to dealer to market stall, until the person whose six-year-old hand made its backing paper walked past and liked the walnut.

The swans went to landfill. The drawing is framed now — in that frame, professionally, with the dog's surplus legs on full display. The framer who did it refused to be paid, saying frames apparently know where they're going, and he didn't want to interfere with logistics like that.