✦ Child and Fish — Mural by S. Louis ✦

I found myself meandering through the quiet streets of Peachland one evening, with an odd, restless energy buzzing just beneath my skin. The town seemed to hum with its own secret life, the air tinged with a kind of anticipation I couldn’t quite place. My thoughts drifted aimlessly as I wandered, until I suddenly stumbled upon S. Louis’s mural, Child and Fish, painted across the side of an old brick building. It caught me completely off guard, pulling me out of my reverie and rooting me to the spot.

There’s an uncanny quality to the mural that’s hard to pin down—a young child holding a fish, both of them suspended in a moment that feels like it belongs half to a dream and half to a memory you can’t quite recall. It’s as if the whole scene exists on the edge of reality, teetering between what was and what might have been. The colors are muted, as though they’ve absorbed years of Okanagan sunsets, their brightness leached out and replaced by gentle pastels that seem to ripple and shift in the changing light. If you close your eyes, you can almost feel the cool breath of lake fog on your skin, taste the mineral tang in the air. The mural doesn’t just depict a scene—it seems to hold the very essence of the place within its brushstrokes.

The longer I stood there, the more the mural seemed to draw me in. I couldn’t quite decide whether it made me feel safe or left me with a faint sense of unease. Maybe it was both—a nostalgic comfort tinged with something a little haunting. The child’s expression is ambiguous, hovering between innocence and something more knowing, while the fish glimmers with a subtle iridescence that makes it seem almost alive. Every brushstroke looks purposeful yet hesitant, as if the artist was trying to capture a feeling that kept slipping away. There’s a sense of longing embedded in the details, a quiet invitation to pause and look closer, to really let the scene seep into you.

It struck me that the mural is layered with meaning, like it’s hiding a secret just beneath its surface—a story that refuses to be told outright, but lingers in the shadows and soft edges. The longer you gaze, the more you sense there’s something waiting to be discovered: a lost memory, a question with no answer, an emotion you can’t quite name. For a moment, I forgot everything else—the restlessness that had sent me wandering, the plans I’d half-formed for the evening, even the passage of time. I just stood there, letting the world slow down around me, until all that was left was the sound of my own breath syncing with the quiet heartbeat of the town, and the faint echo of a melody I couldn’t quite recall playing somewhere in the back of my mind.

It was as if the mural had the power to temporarily suspend reality, to draw you into a space where you could linger between thoughts and memories, between comfort and uncertainty. In that brief pause, I felt connected to something deeper—a sense of place, of longing, of wonder—that stayed with me long after I eventually walked away.