Promises to Keep includes a variety of carefully chosen elements. The background is from an antique magazine featuring the Bulwer-Lytton novel, The Last Days of Pompeii. I painted over it with a diluted solution of gesso and water, to make the text less prominent in this collage. The book cover at the top is from a 19th-century collection of Dickens' stories, old enough to have a section entitled "New Stories from Charles Dickens." (The book was falling apart when I bought it at a country flea market in New Hampshire.) The handwritten letter is also an original, not a photocopy. It's dated 1898 and it is a business letter. In it, the author is offering to work out a debt owed by a former business partner who abruptly left town. The tone of this letter reminded me of the Robert Frost line, "...promises to keep." The photo of the little girl is actually a photocopy of an image from a family album. The little girl was my husband's grandmother as a child in Brooklyn, New York. The photo was originally b&w, and faded to this interesting blue and white combination. I added a little extra age by brushing over most of it with gesso and water. The final element is the rusted metal. I have no idea what it is; I'd guess that it fell off a car. I found it in the Houston airport parking lot when I was leaving to teach in Seattle. I picked it up, thinking that it looked cool, and tucked it into my pocket. I completely forgot about it until I was going through the metal detectors at security, and had to explain why I had a rusty old piece of metal in my pocket. I suspect that my explanation was naive or odd enough that they didn't confiscate it: I said, "I found this cool old piece of metal outside, and I'm an artist, and I don't know what I'm going to do with it, but it was too cool to leave on the ground." I like this collage. While the letter is about business, after I completed the collage I realized that the title is more about our responsibilities to our children... hence the picture of the little girl.