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Sometimes, Fern Russell can’t remember her age or the name of her husband. But give her a paintbrush and a few instructions, and she just blossoms.

Check out “Fast Fern.” It doesn’t look like much. Just two green leaves and a brown dot. Yet, read her words posted beside her painting at the new exhibit inside the Central Library downtown.

Better yet, sit with her at the Adult Center for Enrichment,  where she spends her days. Her painting, she’ll tell you, is more than just two leaves and a brown dot.

It’s about her life as an opera singer; her Eddie, her husband of 54 years; and his wedding ring and watch fob that hang from a chain around her neck, hidden beneath her shirt.

“This (painting) makes me happy, it does, honey,” she told me, sitting beside her caregiver at the center’s headquarters downtown. “I love beautiful things, and I always want to be good. And I think I’m doing better, honey. I really do.

“Do you want me to sing, honey? Do you want me to sing?”

She doesn’t wait for an answer. She begins singing “I Love You Truly,” in her perfect-pitch soprano, right there in the office, with people looking in from the other side of the door.

“Honey,” she asks at the end, “did I do OK?”

You did, I tell her. Yes, you did.

I visited Russell this week after checking out “Elder Expressions,” on display at the library’s art gallery through the end of the month.

The exhibit coincides with Greensboro’s “One City, One Book” selection: Tommy Hays’ “The Pleasure Was Mine,” a touching novel about a husband dealing with his wife’s Alzheimer’s disease.

Library officials did the typical: loads of book discussions. But they also did the different: an exhibit of landscapes, collages and abstract paintings, a collaboration with the Center for Creative Aging — North Carolina.

The exhibit explains how art can heal. It also opens a window into the imagination and wisdom you’ll find among local folks in the fourth quarter of their lives — a segment of our county that grows with each passing decade.

Some of the exhibitors, like Russell, suffer from dementia. Others are simply dealing with the physical ravages that come from getting old. Yet, all of them have something to say about the book — and about life.

Take Miriam Sandler. She won’t tell you how old she is. But she will tell you what she thought of the book: “Delicious reading.” And she’ll explain her hardened, multicolored concoction on a collage.

It’s made of sugar and salt. Just like life.

“Not everything is mellow, honey,” says Sandler, a resident at Abbotswood, an assisted living center in Greensboro. “From the moment you’re born, you live to die. It’s what you do in between. That’s what counts.”

Sandler and a handful of other residents of Abbotswood read “The Pleasure Was Mine,” talked about it and created a collage, plucked from the pages of a magazine.

Check out their collage, sandwiched in the middle of the exhibit, and you’ll see words like “love” and “anger,” “acceptance” and the phrase, “conquering the hills of life.”

But check out the other wall, near Russell’s “Fast Fern,” and you’ll see Rose Taylor’s “Human Life.” Like Russell, she has trouble remembering things. But give her some paint and she can create something that’ll remind you of Henri Matisse.

Ask her about it, and as she sits beside her granddaughter, Cynethia Mock, she simply closes her eyes, looks up and begins.

“When I’m making all that art,” Taylor tells me, “I feel so happy.”

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com