The evenings were not longer.

There was simply nobody in them who needed to be managed.

I bought new paints on a Tuesday in March with fifty-one dollars I did not really have, and felt guilty about it for a week.

I painted after the kids went down.

Badly at first — genuinely badly, the way anything is when you’ve not done it for a decade, and I had to sit through about six weeks of being worse than I had been at twenty-two, which is an experience I would recommend to any adult and which almost nobody is willing to endure.

I started posting them.