Acrylic on canvas, stretched and ready to hang.

Signed on the front.

This Australian artwork full of native abstract wildflowers and foliage is sure to add a warming, magical and elegantly eclectic touch to your space.

Don’t Go Yet. As an only child (I only much later inherited a bunch of step siblings,) I remember thinking this often. Good times ended too soon. I’d stay up the night before play dates and birthday parties and horse riding lessons too excited to sleep. I knew the elation of what was to come and I also had a heavy, pervasive sense of how quickly the time would fly and how the joy would be over. My somnambulist self weary and worn with adrenaline the next day - almost too tired to enjoy the thing I had so whole-heartedly anticipated the night before. I was always so sad to say goodbye to friends, activities, outings…despite my delight and joy and gratitude for them in the first place.

I’ve not changed, as it turns out. Drinks and dinners with girlfriends always fly too fast and as I leave I wish we could stay and have sleepovers like teenagers and talk until the tiny quiet hours where drowsiness and drink bring our complicity closer. The same goes for tuck-you-in-time with my children when I realise another day has slipped quietly away and tomorrow they will need me a little less. Or time with family. I can never sleep when I know they are coming and when they leave and I hug them close my heart always screams so loudly I hope their heart hears it echoing like Morse code tapped against their chest, ‘don’t go yet!’

And I wonder. At what point did we decide, as adults, that there were appropriate time frames to catch up and why do we not just surrender to the joy of the now and embrace more time talking quietly instead of choosing responsibility and respectability and heading for home? I wonder if just a little more often we could say to those we love, ‘don’t go yet’ and smile and agree that the now, together, is a better idea. At least for a little longer.