There's a still life on my easel I've repainted the same fold of cloth on six times since February. Terracotta pot, two pears going brown, a white bowl with a chip in the rim. Nothing worth anything to anyone.

A woman came Thursday to see the big interior I've been struggling with. She looked at it for maybe ninety seconds, polite, and then turned around and pointed at the small study of the pot and asked if it was for sale.

I said yes before I'd decided anything. She paid what I asked without blinking, which told me I asked too little, and I don't care. She came back Saturday with her husband to collect it and told me she'd been looking for a painting of a kitchen for eleven years. Eleven years. The whole time I was teaching figure drawing to people who didn't want to learn it, painting almost nothing, this woman was walking around looking for my pot.

I didn't sleep well that night. Not from the money. From something else, harder to name. Ten years of telling myself the work was fine sitting in the studio, and then one stranger's hand hovering over the surface, not quite touching, and I understood I'd been lying to myself a little.

Anyway. She's hanging it in her kitchen where the pot will get afternoon light, which is where it belonged all along.