The Mansion Assisted Care Facility got a very special gift today from a local artist named Marilyn Brooks. She was commissioned last week by a blog reader named Eileen Peterson to paint a landscape portrait of the grounds behind the Mansion where the residents sit and walk, a view many can see outside of their windows of a path  over a stream bounded by some old stone walls.

Petersen found and contacted Marilyn, who works at the Battenkill Bookstore(the store is owned by her daughter, Connie Brooks) and hired her to paint the landscape, which arrived today and was immediately hung over the fireplace in the Great Room where birthdays and holidays are celebrated and parties are held.

I was shocked by the gift – Marilyn called me and asked me about it – but not nearly as amazed as Activity Director Julie Smith and the Mansion residents, who filed into the Great Room to look at it and wonder at their great fortune at having a complete stranger give them so beautiful and personal a gift.

Eileen insisted on paying Marilyn for the painting.

Thanks Eileen, I am familiar with your name but have never met you. That was an extraordinarily warm thing to do, and it meant a lot.

(Julie Smith, the activities director at the Mansion, says she is in need of two books, Easy Trivia books and Finish The Phrase books. I was able to find two copies of the later, but could not find the Easy Trivia books anywhere. If you have copies of either and are so inclined, the Mansion could use them in their daily reading program: 11 S. Union Avenue, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816. And thanks for the DVD’s nearly 200 of them arrived this week. Julie says she keeps pinching herself.)

Eileen has left me a bit speechless. It took a lot of work and thought to get that landscape into the Mansion. A remarkable group of people.