Love Luggage BY GREG EUBANKS These days, my office is flooded with unique expressions of love. They’re not directed at me, mind you. Rather, they are intended for children placed in or entering foster care. There are sixty-seven of these unique creations lining the halls, walls, floors, shelves, and any available free space. What a picture! We are literally overflowing with love for children. These expressions of which I speak are the creations of local art students under the direction of their school art teachers and the Longview Museum of Fine Art. I am surrounded by luggage. Old, cast-off pieces of hard-shell luggage which have been reinvented as one-of-a-kind works of art, now known as Love Luggage. These teenagers have given their time and abilities to create something new and wonderful from something used and discarded. It could be seen as a picture of what miracles happen in foster homes around our community. The lives of these children, once beaten and emotionally shattered, are being reinvented as children who understand what it means to give and receive love. New creations. In my mind, I see two distinct images, like film reels running side by side. In the first, an artistic teenager’s thoughts wander until imagination takes over and a child is packing their belongings to move from foster care to an adoptive home, a forever family. Only, that child isn’t packing their belongings into a plastic trash bag. No, their belongings – they themselves – are so much more than they once thought. This child now can begin to understand that they are worthy of love, that they have worth beyond measure, that they are one-of-a-kind. With each brush stroke, this young artist paints a future for an unnamed child. In the other film, a foster mother sits on the floor next to her foster daughter, in the middle of their bedtime routine. Perhaps she’s singing to this child who once wouldn’t sit still long enough to have her hair brushed. She screamed, in fact, because her brain had become so familiar with abuse that acts of comfort were confusing and interpreted through the misfires of her brain cells as hurtful. Now, though, she is being ‘re-wired’ to understand the difference between comforting touch and abuse. And with each brush stroke, this patient foster mother creates a path out of the darkness of despair. Just recently, two of these pieces of Love Luggage left our office – the same day they arrived – on their way to the arms of young children, unaware of the tangible offering of love they were about to receive. After loading the luggage in the caseworker’s car, I wandered back through the office thinking about the children who would receive paintings of superheroes, cartoon characters, footballs, flamingos, and flowers with messages of compassion tied to the handles. I hurt for the pain they have endured, but I couldn’t wait for them to enter a new world where love was waiting. One artist wrote such poignant words on one piece, painting, "The place I keep my treasures, … things dreams and wishes are made of." My heart soars with the thoughts of what new dreams and wishes will be discovered by the child receiving this suitcase: finding hope, and experiencing love from a mom and dad, perhaps for the first time.