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[00:01] If you're in the mood for a fiction podcast, with a little heart and a little humor, I have one for you. Desert Skies is set in the afterlife at a lonely gas station, where new arrivals stop before moving on. The staff help guide them on their way, and what starts small grows into something much bigger. It's thoughtful, a little quirky, and really easy to get pulled into. You can find Desert Skies on any of your favorite podcast platforms. Welcome to Stories from the Village of Nothing Much, like Easy Listening, but for Fiction. I'm Kathryn Nicolai. I write and read all the stories you'll hear on the Village of Nothing Much. Audio engineering and sound design is by Bob Wittersheim. One of my favorite things about writing these stories is planting little seeds that I can harvest later. I'd mention some detail, a favorite flavor of tea, a memory of a bike ride, or in the case of our stories today, painting hanging in the hall. And then months or sometimes years later, I can pick up that thread and tie another story onto it. So years after I wrote the first story in this series, I found myself still wondering about who that lady in the painting was. And eventually I got to answer that. These stories also feature a character in the village known lovingly as the Cool Aunt. She has a lot more to share with us in the future. If you're new here and you don't know what I'm talking about, well, first of all, welcome. I'm so glad you found us. I write conflict-free, family-friendly stories that first appeared on my Bedtime Story podcast, Nothing Much Happens. Over the years, listeners begin to ask for another way to tune in without immediately falling asleep. So we bring you these, told in a less sleepy way with an immersive soundscape. They are a lovely companion to your chores, your commute, a walk, a bath. Any time you want to just enjoy something charming and interesting without drama. Now, before we step into the village, let's take a big breath in through your nose and sigh from your mouth. Again, breathe in and let it out. Good. Back to school. I'd been waiting, checking the mail each day for a few weeks, not knowing when it would come. When it finally showed up, folded around a few envelopes, a flyer for the neighborhood garage sale, and a postcard from a far away friend. I stood tucking the other items under one arm, and smoothed out the cover. It wasn't a thick catalog, just a couple dozen pages, but it held the promise of something new. I took everything inside and sat at the kitchen table with a fresh cup of coffee, and took my time to page through the possibilities. I'd finished college long ago, but often thought that if I could go back to those days, and bring with me the curiosity and focus that have bloomed in me in the years since, I'd enjoy it so much more. I'd have picked my classes with a lot more care for their subjects rather than their time slots, and studied the things that I'm so interested in now. A year ago, I'd taken my nephews for an afternoon of school shopping. They'd already gotten their new clothes and sneakers with their dads, and I'd been allowed to sweep in for the fun stuff. We'd contemplated all the book bags, notebooks, pencil cases, and boxes of markers. I'd remembered how important those choices had felt to me when I was their age, how each year's bag or trapper keeper had been an attempt to say something about who I thought I might be that year. Then add in the excitement of freshly sharpened pencils and clean blank notebooks, and although I'd been sad to see the end of the summer, I'd found myself looking forward to a new school year. One of the nephews was like me, making slow, deliberate choices, asking for advice. This one? Or this one? But his little brother, silly and carefree, had just tossed things into the cart randomly, while I pulled about half of it back out, and eventually followed him into the early Halloween section, where he stood with a spooky mask and a bag of candy in his hand. When I'd taken them home, we'd sat at their table for a while, eating the candy, sharpening their pencils, and setting them up for the first day of school. They'd already gotten their school books, and I'd remembered my dad sitting at the table with us, carefully covering our books in paper. He'd used brown paper grocery sacks, cutting off the bottoms and opening them at their seams to wrap the paper around the snubbed edges of the much used books. He'd stacked them in front of me as he went, and I'd opened my new case of markers and colored pencils and draw out the title and my name, adding in the necessary rainbows and rocket ships. That day with the boys had reminded me of how much I'd loved going back to school. So I started a new tradition. I decided to learn something new each year when the leaves started to turn. And so here I was with my small community ed catalog and my coffee and a pencil to make some notes in the margins. Last year, I'd done a semester of photography, and I'd learned the basics of composition and leading lines, and had even developed my own film in the studio darkroom. One year, I'd studied genealogy, and over the few months of the class had built an extensive family tree. I'd been fascinated by the documents, certificates of birth and death and marriage, and had noticed when looking at my great-grandmother's signature that we made our Rs in the same way. I'd spent one crisp autumn learning to identify various plants, to forage for stinging nettle, sorrel, and even wild amaranth. Now I turned the pages of the catalog and considered what should come next. I folded down the corner of the page on local history. That was tempting. It came with trips to the library and a few local houses and sites. I drew a star beside a course about the basics of space science. I could study white dwarfs, supernovae, neuron stars, and black holes. I was really considering the history of English when I saw one more option. Art restoration step by step. I carried my coffee into the hall and looked up at a painting that had been handed down over several generations. It showed a woman seated at a table, a book propped in her hand, and a window behind her looking out on a green landscape. It was full of details. Knots in the wood paneled walls at her back, the soft fold of the fabric in her skirt, a shelf of jars and vases above her head. But they were somewhat lost in the layers of dust that had settled on her in the last 150 years or so. We'd wondered so many times who she was, who had painted her, and if anything could be learned about where she'd come from. I imagine spending the next few months in the broad open art studio of the community center, her propped on my easel, me with various brushes and tools, pots of solvent and water, and a teacher to help me along the way. We'd clean her canvas and maybe reveal that dark smudge in one corner, which might possibly be a signature. We'd carefully open up the back of her frame and we might find a label, some scraps of yellowed paper, to point me to an archive or a ledger in a library. I strode back to the table, took up my pencil and circled, art restoration, step by step. I might, I thought, solve a mystery. If you've been listening to me for a while, you know how much I value rest. Sleep is really the foundation for everything else we do, our creativity, our relationships, our mood. And like you, I've had stretches where sleep just didn't come easily. And that's why I wanna share something that's made a difference for me. CBN night caps from Cured Nutrition. These capsules are formulated with 30 mg of CBD and 5 mg of CBN, two cannabinoids that work together to support deep, restorative rest. What I've noticed is that I fall asleep really quickly, and I stay asleep longer. And maybe most importantly, I wake up without feeling heavy or groggy. Instead, I just feel rested and clear. There's no psychoactive effect, just a gentle calm that helps my body and mind unwind. For me, taking one an hour before bed has become part of my wind down ritual, right alongside tea and a buck. It feels natural, not forced, and that's why it works. Cured Nutrition is offering my listeners an exclusive 20% discount, so you can try night caps for yourself. Just visit curednutrition.com/nothingmuch and use code nothingmuch at checkout. That's C-U-R-E-D nutrition.com/nothingmuch, coupon code nothingmuch. Transform your nights and your days with CBN night caps, because when you sleep well, you show up better in every area of your life. Restoration. It had started with the painting in the hall, one that had been handed down through the generations of our family. It had hung for most of my young life in the living room of a great uncle above his fireplace, in fact, which accounted for all the soot that clouded its surface. When it had come to me, I had carried it from one room to another, trying to find the right spot for it, where the light would show the details it had been painted into place generations before. Finally, I settled for a spot in the hallway that led from the kitchen to the stairs. Its hanging wire was still strong and sturdy, and there it had stayed for 10 years or so. Then at the end of summer, when kids were going back to school and the sunlight was just beginning to take on that golden autumn overlay, I found a class in the Community Education Brochure for Art Restoration step by step, and I thought of this painting. In it, a woman in simple clothes looks over her shoulder out of a window, behind her to a green landscape. She held a book in one hand, and the room she sat in was paneled in wood, with a shelf full of jars and bottles above her head. There was a dark smudge in one corner that we'd always thought might be a signature. I'd taken her down from her nail and signed up for the class. She and I had spent the next few months at the community center, where we'd gotten to know each other a lot better. It is a strange thing to spend so much time with your attention centered on one face. It felt like a kind of communion, not just with the subject, but with the painter, whoever they were. And finding out who they were had been the most intriguing part of the process. We started the half-dozen of us in the class plus the teacher by carefully freeing our paintings from the frames. It took patience and a bit of hard work to take out all of the tacks that had been in place for so long. But once it was done, we'd each laid our canvases or boards on clean workspaces and looked at their backs. One of my fellow students had a painting found at a garage sale. And though any work of art has value, his piece, A Simple Vase of Flowers, was being restored more for the experience of working on it than the art itself. The flowers had been painted on a piece of board, and on its back, we'd found a signature, an ink pen with a date. It had sent us all into a fever of curiosity. Who was the woman who'd painted the flowers, and what was her life like? Her restorer had eventually found her in a yearbook at the high school, and he'd brought it in for us all to look at. We'd crowded around his table and peered down at her picture, taken almost 50 years before. She'd had a big 70s collar and natural hair and a high puff. She'd been in the winter drama that year, and played volleyball and, at least according to the date on the back of the board, painted those flowers. I'd sighed with satisfaction when I'd seen her. It felt like reading the last chapter in a good book. I found I appreciated her painting even more. It meant more to me, knowing something about her, and it made me even more curious about my painting, the woman seated in that room, and whoever it was who'd painted her. When I'd first opened the back of the frame, I'd hoped there would be a label, a tag, something to send me in a clear direction, but all I'd found was a scrap of paper that had a few words on it, and most of them had been cut in half where the scrap was torn from a larger sheet. There was what I suspected was half of a name, a surname that might have been the painters. There was also a city and a partial date. I thought about those scraps of information while I worked on the surface of the painting. Restoring and conserving important works of art takes a level of skill and study that we knew we wouldn't be approaching in our semester at the community center. We kept it simple. We would clean the top layers of dust and soot from the art with very gentle cleansers and reframe our pieces, and learn the best way to care for them going forward. I liked taking a new thin dowel from the tray on my workbench, tearing off a piece of cotton and winding it around the tip till I had a long swab. Most often I cleaned just with water, working my way slowly over the surface of the painting. As I did, hidden details I'd never seen before emerged. In the green space through the window, I uncovered a tiny hill sitting in the distance, dotted with miniscule houses. Among the bottles and jars on the shelf was a small black key propped against a cup. What door did that open? The woman herself became much more human. There were lines around her mouth as if she'd spent many years smiling and laughing. Her hair, which had seemed a simple plain color, turned out to have thin streaks of darker and lighter shades mixed in. It seemed that every time I sat down to work on another square inch of the canvas, time would race past me and I'd be shocked to hear that my hours in the studio were up. I got so connected to what I was doing that I lost track of anything else. Many a cup of tea had gone cold beside me as I looked closer at the scene on my easel. When I got to that dark smudge in the corner, I held my breath. My teacher stood beside me and a few others crowded around. We were all invested in each of the pieces that we'd brought in, and hoped to find enough of a name under the dust and dirt to decipher the artist. I'd plucked my swab from the tray, wound it with a fresh bit of cotton, and dampened it just a bit in a saucer of clear water. Then bit by bit, rolled it over the surface, careful to lift off just the soot, not any chips of paint. A few letters began to emerge, like shapes coming clear from a retreating fog. My teacher reached out to stop my wrist and leaned in closer, adjusting the glasses on her nose. I know that name, she said. The painting itself had become clearer, richer, and now the story of the lady in it would too. Let's take a deep breath together. In through the nose. And out through the mouth. It feels good to breathe deeply. And the air we breathe, especially at night, matters more than we might think. While we sleep, our bodies are hard at work. Restoring, repairing, and recharging. But that work can be quietly disrupted by what's floating in the air. Things like dust, pollen, and other allergens. I didn't used to think much about indoor air quality. But once I did, I realized, if we care about what we eat and drink, why not care just as much about what we breathe? That's why I sleep with a Jasper air scrubber in my room. It has no annoying lights and doubles as a gentle white noise machine. That's become essential to my bedtime rhythm. But more than anything, it's turned my bedroom into a sleep sanctuary. A space where the air helps me sleep, deeply and peacefully. I can't recommend Jasper enough. You can learn more at jasper.co. And if you use the code sleep, you'll get $300 off. That's J-A-S-P-R dot C-O. Use code sleep for $300 off. The Lady in the Painting. She'd been watching over me for years, from her bench in the painting hung for a long time in my uncle's living room, and then for the last 10 years or so from the front hall of my own house. I'd see her lit with daylight as I took my keys from the bowl on the entryway table on my way out for the day, and then lit with the low light of the hallway lamp on my way up to bed at the end of the night. She sat with a book in her hands, looking over her shoulder through the window behind her. She had one finger stuck into the pages to hold her place. And I wondered what had called her attention away from what she'd been reading to look outside. Was a child calling or an animal eating from the plants in the garden? Or friends coming to have a cup of tea and chat, a neighbor needing to borrow a tool from the barn? Had she just fallen into a daydream and turned her face to the light? I knew that feeling of being pulled into the broad sea of what if and forgetting where you were or what you'd planned. I found myself floating through it a lot as I worked to restore her painting. In the studio classroom of the community center, I'd spent weeks carefully freeing her from her frame, cleaning the surface of the canvas, and securing any loose paint so that not a chip was lost. We'd found a small tear in the surface near the bottom of the painting. The fibers of the canvas were split and in danger of fraying. My teacher had helped me to apply a patch to the back of the piece, a sort of bandage that would hold the fibers in place. And then we had worked to match the colors and dab them on gently. Just color matching could be a life long work, it seemed. And the small repair had taken me a solid week. But now you could barely make out where the fix had been done. Something I was very proud of. Some might think that a whole week spent on a small spot the size of a silver dollar would be tedious, but I'd found it thrilling. It was like a puzzle that I knew could be solved if only I stayed at my bench. And I found myself thinking of it when I woke up each morning about what the next step would be and what tools I'd use in the process. In the studio we had a collection of brushes and swabs, bottles of purified water and mild olive oil based soaps. There were small hammers to put tacks into place, cans of varnish and strips of gentle adhesive, paints and magnifiers. Something like a jeweler's loop that could be worn right on your head and focused in front of your eyes. I liked those a lot and marveled at the small things I'd spot in the painting when I had them on that I'd never have otherwise known about. It was a bit like finding a message in a bottle, something written years ago, and waiting for the right person to open up and know again. Once the painting was clean and restored, I'd covered the surface in a smooth layer of varnish, which sealed and protected it, but also gave it a satisfying and uniform shine. As it sat to cure in the corner of the shop, my teacher and I hunted for information on the artist who'd painted this piece. We had a scrap of paper we'd found stuck to the back of the canvas when we'd taken it from the frame. It had a few letters that might be a part of a last name, also a city, and what I took to be a date. If I was right, my painting had been made in September, 142 years before. While I'd been in the process of cleaning all those years of soot and dust from the piece, we'd found a small and barely decipherable signature in the bottom right corner. Thankfully, my teacher had recognized it. Otherwise, I'm sure it would still be a mystery. The painter wasn't famous, just a favorite of hers, who had painted for 30 years or more, mostly portraits of people who were themselves also not famous. She showed me a small collection of them in a book, and I attentively looked at each one. There was a man sitting with a bowl of soup in front of him, tearing a piece of bread from a loaf, and it seemed talking to someone, not pictured. There was a family walking in a field, someone in a thick winter coat reaching out to buy a newspaper at a stand, a woman planting a bulb in a flower garden. Like the lady in my painting, none of these people were looking at the painter. They'd been captured in something more like a casual photograph, just living and being observed while they did it. Mine wasn't in the book, and neither was much about the painter themselves. They were known only by a first initial and a surname that might have been invented. Maybe they wanted to be, to a certain extent, anonymous, just like the people in the paintings. I considered whether knowing more about them would feel like a more satisfying ending to the story, but a name was just a name after all, and the real clue to who the painter and subjects were seemed to lay in the work itself. This was a person who admired simple aspects of living. A meal, a day in the sun, a connection to the world, a hope for a colorful spring. I could relate to that, and it was enough. So who was this woman? I guess I'd never know her exact details, but I felt a kinship with her. She read books, and so did I. She had a cluttered kitchen, and so did I. She looked off into the distance and wondered or called out to visiting friends or watched her children play, and I understood all of that. People are not so different, no matter what century they live in. When the painting was dry and ready to be rehung, I'd set it back in its original frame. I'd even kept the tacks and hammered them into place. The canvas itself had become a little stretched out with gravity and time, and one step in my process had been to mist some hot water onto the back of the painting and set it out in the sunlight. As it dries, the fibers shrank back into their original shape and the surface was taut again. I had learned so much over the semester, not just about the process of restoration and conservation, but also what it might be like to capture a moment and save it for another generation. I was proud as I looped the hanging wire over the hook in my wall. To have saved this moment, which I would pass down again when the time was right. I stood back a few paces and looked at the scene I knew so well. A woman, a book, a window. Ordinary magic. Thank you for spending some time with us here in the Village of Nothing Much. Here's to a week of new discoveries and talents. We'll be back soon with more stories of the glimmers of every day.