Her discovery as a painter is the stuff of legends and Hollywood movies — like Grandma Moses or like one of the main characters in the film “The Trouble with Harry.” Anne Gray, owner of the Eric Schindler Gallery in Richmond, was delivering a cabinet Marion had purchased when Anne saw a painting hanging in the hallway and inquired about the artist. Marion was surprised that Anne would be interested in her work. In 1983, Anne carried several of Marion’s works in the gallery. Then in 1984 at the age of sixty-five, Marion had her first solo exhibition. During the last fifteen years of her life, she created approximately 300 works. Throughout the years, Anne remained a friend and mentor. Particularly charming and significant about Marion’s work is her devotion to storytelling, color harmony, an unyielding inventiveness in depicting subject matter and an innate sense of a balanced composition. Uncle Millard and the Pear Tree or the Letter of the Law (Forbidden Fruit) 1991 epitomizes these attributes. The story that inspired this painting is one of Line family legend. Uncle Millard Line as a teenager had an unyielding appetite for pears, often stripping an entire tree of ripe fruit before anyone else had a chance to partake. One day his exasperated father exclaimed, “If I see you pull another pear off that tree, I’ll wear you out.” The next day Millard spied a particularly ripe pear on the tree. So instead of disobeying his father, he put a ladder up close to the pear and devoured it without removing it from the branch. Later his father saw the core still hanging on the branch. Realizing that Millard had not truly disobeyed him he just had to laugh.^[6] Marion’s painting illustrated the moment perfectly. That she did not successfully use linear perspective is perhaps a positive attribute rather than a shortcoming. Her lack of linear perspective, one reviewer called “delightfully cockeyed,”^[7] supports the notion that these images are from the mind’s eye. Indeed this seems to be a conscious choice for Marion. She once explained to writer Judith Snyderman, ” I sketch right on the canvas with a light wash of turpentine and yellow ochre. I go by shapes-I don’t have to worry about depth.” Another writer noted, “Line’s ability to extract details from different eras and weave them into single frames results in a slighting distorted reality.”^[8] Sadi, the Lines’ black poodle appears in nearly every work regardless of the time period depicted. Perhaps for Marion, Sadi is at once a talisman and comic relief. Other family pets appear without regard to the chronology of their life span, such as Trumpy, the horse from Marion’s girlhood, Simon the cat and another dog, Plato. One reason why her works are so endearing may be because they seem so familiar and emotionally restorative. They show us things that are true for every person. We all hold images of family heritage and homestead dearly. They are placed securely in one’s mind by significant childhood experiences and from stories told by mothers, fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers. They are imbedded in our hearts and souls as memories. Memories keep our spirits uplifted in times of pain and sorrow. Memories remind us that time passes and they provide hope. Memories provide examples of courage, truth and beauty. Memories are fertile visions that keep the past alive while providing inspiration for today and tomorrow.