It grips us, this cold, and I try to seal myself off from it. I stay indoors to avoid breathing it, to avoid the headache and asthma that threaten at first breath. I close my curtains at night, a barrier that deters the cold and insulates me in warmth. Yet as I sit in relative comfort, I’ve noticed how many notable people have died in recent days. Every day a new report — sometimes as many as three — tells me of another passing.

Usually, I chalk it up to this hard winter’s cold and move on with my day. But today I felt its chill. Andrew Wyeth has died.

The art world will forever debate his merits as a artist, whether he qualifies as contemporary or parochial, but I remember him for one thing: The affect his noted Christina’s World had on my late mother. Perhaps my mother was drawn originally to Wyeth’s work because, like the rest of America, she was drawn to its realism in an age of abstraction and confusion. But when she saw Christina’s World, she felt someone had captured the essence of her experiences as a thirteen-year-old girl. No other painting ever resonated with her like Christina’s World and I will always remember her telling me, her ten-year-old daughter, about the work as one of the most revealing stories she ever divulged to me.

When she looked at it, she saw herself in that field, crippled by polio and shunned by the rest of the world. When she looked at the field, she saw not the rough, hilly lands of Maine, but the broad open expanse of the prairie of Illinois. She saw obstacle and ostracism. When she gazed at the dour, distant house, she saw the deep poverty of The Great Depression. She saw a place where rural Midwestern jobs were so scare, her father would not find work until the World War II forced the railroads back into business.

My mother saw the sorrow of her young life in that painting, but Wyeth gave her something in return. He gave her a sense of dignity, a sense of acknowledgment and validation. Yes, he seemed to say, your experience was real. Claim it and move on.

Typical hardened Yankee stoicism.

I suspect Wyeth had to be stoic about Christina’s World. The The Museum of Modern Art paid a measly $1,800 for it, and today it hangs not in a large exhibit room but in a small, obscure hallway of the museum along with a few other pieces MoMA had no idea what to do with.

I know. I came across it last summer when my daughter and I spent an afternoon there. She had gushed with excitement, finding herself surrounded by the very works she’d studied in college art history and media classes. I had basked in her enthusiasm, glad I lucked out in giving her such a meaningful experience. But when we turned that one corner and brief in that small, cramped hallway and spied Christina’s World, I almost started crying.

I did not expect to find myself before the very revelatory work that had once give me such insight into my mother’s heart. I did not expect to find myself passing on the tale of my mother and Christina’s World to my daughter then and there, right before the very symbol of my mother’s crucible.

Coincidentally, it’s 9 degrees Fahrenheit in Cushing, Maine where Wyeth painted Christina’s World and it’s also 9 degrees in Shelby County, Illinois where my mother experienced polio and poverty. Somehow, we’ve managed to reach a balmy 16 in here north central Connecticut. But I’m even warmer, thanks to an old memory made fresh.