Story Frame 63 – The Film that Nearly Landed Us in Jail

A mother's mistake...

I stood in front of an intriguing, quirky and colorful dreamscape, lost for words.

Painted by North Carolina artist, Jane Filer, it hung on the wall of Haen Gallery in downtown Asheville. I’d come to the opening with friends and this painting stopped me in my tracks. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I wanted to live inside the colorful, whimsical world I saw before me.

Chris Foley, the owner of Haen Gallery, and I had followed the same escape route southwest from Alexandria to Asheville. Trained as a painter and sculptor, he had his own connections to Old Town’s collection of artists at the Torpedo Factory, where I’d had my ‘Introduction to the Third Dimension.’ But we hadn’t known one another during our years there.

Noticing the look of helpless infatuation in my eyes, and perhaps my mouth hanging open, Chris walked over to stand beside me and stare at the painting.

“Like this one?” he asked after a moment, a smile on his face.

“Like it?! I love it!” I responded, which is probably something you should never say to a gallery owner.

“It reminds me of Italy,” I said, transfixed. “And I love Italy.”

Bracing myself, I asked the price. Chris walked over to check the little sticker next to the painting, as if he didn’t already know.

“$2800,” he said, watching to see my reaction.

Like a hat pin to a balloon, that number popped the trance-like state I was in. $2800 was well beyond what I should responsibly spend on a piece of art, especially now both kids were in college and I was their sole financial sponsor.

Nevertheless, I wanted it. If I couldn’t live in that world, I at least wanted to hang it on my wall and escape into the magical landscape of its colors and buildings and trees and birds whenever I wanted to, whenever I needed to.

But being a responsible mom was woven into my body fabric, as much a part of my design and component parts as my freckles and toenails are. And although work was steady, the best it had ever been, I wondered how I could justify the expense.

Just then, a memory popped into my head and it took all of a New York minute to decide this painting would be a reward to myself for getting both kids safely through high school and onto university – despite what might be considered a recent lapse in judgement on my part.

Of course, a film was to blame for that lapse, but this time, not one I was working with.

Leif graduated from Asheville High School in the spring of 2008 and a few months later, headed off to SCAD, the Savannah College of Art and Design which was, ironically, where once upon a time Karen thought she might go for a master’s degree. SCAD was Leif’s first choice and well beyond what I could afford. But I decided, in the manner of Scarlet O’Hara, to figure that out another day.

That it almost didn’t happen, however, was because of a film.

Just as films wove in and throughout my life, they often wove in and around the narrative of my kids’ lives as well, usually passing through and doing no harm.

One evening the previous year, however, I’d thought it might be fun to watch Saving Grace – partly because it’s a well-made, well-acted and funny British film and perhaps also to show what a cool mum I was (at least in my own mind.)

Directed by Nigel Cole and starring Brenda Blethyn, Craig Ferguson, and Martin Clunes (soon to be of Doc Martin fame) and set in Cornwall, it’s the story of Grace Trevethyn, a small-town, middle-aged widow. The death of her irresponsible late husband leaves her with enormous debt and Grace soon realizes she will lose her home and all of her possessions unless she can come up with enough money to pay her husband’s outstanding bills.

Grace has a greenhouse on her property. Because she’s an expert in growing orchids, her young gardener Matthew offers to continue working without pay if she were to care for his own dying plants. Grace agrees to his offer, not realizing at first that Matthew is growing cannabis. Under Grace’s green thumb, the plants flourish astonishingly, and she and Matthew soon realize they could grow and produce lots of cannabis in a short time. After further drama and misadventures, Grace eventually becomes financially solvent with the success of her subsequent novel, The Joint Venture.

Saving Grace premiered at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award for World Cinema.

[Fun sidenote: I read that some of the plants used in the shooting were actually real marijuana plants. According to a note on the film site IMDB, the British government gave permission to the film crew to use 150 ‘real’ plants, under the supervision of authorities. It was actually somebody’s job to guard the marijuana plants on set and watch over their transportation to a nearby storage facility for their safekeeping each night.]

Pleased I had selected a film to watch that we all enjoyed, I thought nothing more of it.

Leif, it turned out, found the film inspirational.

Several weeks later, I returned home from shopping and let myself in through the garage, which was on the lower level of our house. Carrying my bags up the old wooden stairs to the kitchen on the upper level, I noticed glimmers of light coming from between the wooden steps.

I mulled this over while putting away my groceries. How odd, I thought – why had I never noticed that light before? Curious, I decided I’d better find out where it was coming from.

Retracing my steps back down the stairs, I determined the light must be coming from the old closet underneath the steps at the back of the garage. I knew the closet was there but had never used it as there were plenty of wooden shelves lining both sides of the garage itself that were much easier to access.

Opening the door, I was astonished when light flooded out and then further astonished to see every surface of the forgotten closet meticulously covered with aluminum foil. A large heat lamp, suspended in the middle by an intricate web of florescent green string, was shining down on three white Styrofoam cups, inside each of which was a small green plant.

Leif, it would appear, had taken an interest in horticulture. He was growing weed.

I closed the door, pondering what to do. I went back upstairs, got a piece of paper, a black pen, and some tape. Then I went back down the stairs again, still surprised by the light coming through the cracks, and taped the paper to the door of the closet. I’d written just three words:

See me – Mum

About an hour later, I heard the school bus come to a stop up on the road next to our mailbox. I heard its doors open, then listened to my son’s footsteps walking down the hillside on our long driveway. I listened as he opened the large garage doors, then followed the sound of his footsteps as they went over to the closet, where they stopped for a moment. I guessed he was reading my message. The closet door opened, then closed again. And then I heard his footsteps, slower now, dragging themselves up the wooden stairs to our kitchen where I sat at the table, nursing a cup of coffee.

He walked into the kitchen and glared at me.

“What!?” he said, in a not-unusual teenager’s surly way of starting a conversation.

What followed was a heated discussion between a now chagrined mother and her entrepreneurial offspring, a discussion that would grow into an ongoing debate off and on for another year, as Leif presented me with Harvard papers and medical research in support of his beliefs that weed was both medicinal and good for writers and critical thinkers. In short, anything he thought might win me over.

One afternoon, weary of the argument and unable to think of anything clever to say, I finally blurted out the words, “You don’t have my blessing!”

I still remember exactly where we were when I said that. I’d just picked him up from school and on the drive home, we’d had yet another go-around about the topic. I was following him along the stone pathway leading through my gardens to the front door when I finally said that. To my shock, my blessing seemed to matter.

“But why?!” he said, turning around to face me, dark eyes pleading with me from under his shaggy dark brown hair; frustration apparent in his thin, sagging shoulders.

It wasn’t that I was adamantly against weed. But my bottom line was always that it was still illegal, and I couldn’t risk anything that could result in having our house taken away from me. It was all I had, and I had worked so damn hard for the precious stability we were now enjoying.

“When you have your own place,” I said at the end of each argument, “you can do what you want. But for now, it’s my house and my rules.”

(Side note: I was impressed with his budding botany interest and skills and let him know that, while also making the point that if growing plants interested him so much, why wasn’t he helping me out in the gardens?)

Recalling this, as well as other far more stressful moments my teenagers had given me, including a different weed adventure that led to an actual dust-up with the Asheville police, I decided this painting would be my gift to myself for having pulled it all off; for having gotten all three of us to this point in our lives, often by the seat of my threadbare jeans.

And then I turned to the one person I could always count on to say ‘yes’ to art, imagining my sister’s voice encouraging me to support an artist. This was a useful trick I played on myself to justify buying a piece of art I really wanted, well aware there were more practical and mature things to do with my money. But hanging a savings account or monthly investment statement on the wall wouldn’t have had the same effect, lighting up my mind, triggering endorphins the way the colors in this painting did.

I don’t think I’ve ever experienced the same magnitude of accomplishment and relief as I did when both Zoë and Leif had graduated safely and successfully from high school and went on to university. That painting was – and still is – my daily reward.

As if foreshadowing Leif’s freshman (and only) year at SCAD, I was already working on a series for public television called Farmer’s Almanac TV, was also based – as sweet luck would have it – in Savannah.

FATV was a mouth-wateringly, beautiful farm-to-table agricultural and lifestyle series created by Buy the Farm: Green Media for a Green World. The whole crew, including Bill Chisholm, Renee Bishop and Mickey Younas, was a delight to work with and very supportive of my own efforts to get their shows on the air. As a thank you gift to PBS programmers for their support, we hosted an amazing bonfire party on the beach at Amelia Island, where they’d gathered for an annual public television conference.

The production team trucked in dozens of bales of hay, built a bonfire for toasting s’mores and brought in a charming band of young farmer musicians from New England. Special red flannel blankets with FATV embroidered on them were given to the PBS programmers as thank you’s – gifts they could take with them and be reminded of the series each time they curled up with one on their sofas at home.

Thanks to our collective efforts, Farmers’ Almanac TV went on to have more than sixty-two thousand airdates in all states, covering 92% of the US.

As an added bonus, it was nice to have another reason to justify trips to Savannah without appearing to be a hovering mama.

[For more information about the art, visit https://www.janefiler.com/]