April 23, 2013
-
Morning Begins
It is 8:50 am. Riley is outside barking, the disciplinary barks of an aggrieved older brother. The sun is almost shining, giving us reason to hope, although the sky is besmirched by a fluffy cloud cover. Could rain, could clear, could just stay the way it is all day.
Now THIS is a hardy plant. They are supposed to grow on the forest floor; in our yard, they grow under the volunteer bamboo stand, which allows them to bloom and settle in in the spring before the bamboo shades them all summer. They are hellebore, or helleborus, which right up until I posted this I thought was ‘helioborus’, having something to do with the sun. I had to look up the spelling, which allowed me to learn the following” “Any of a number of poisonous plants in the buttercup family…” I can see the buttercup resemblance immediately: I did not know they were poisonous. As I just told Nancy, I had hoped the have fried hellebore for dinner tonight and now…
We have never eaten our hellebore. We marvel every year that they have returned (for where there once was one, there are now multiple plants) since everything we know about them tells us they are not well-suited to live on the side of our lawn. Nonetheless, they do.
This is Helene’s gourd, and very likely the end of my current obsession with waves. The colors are not quite right in the photograph, but you have the general idea. The green is called ‘peridot’. The yellow is ‘Aztec gold’ and the white is actually beige. This is another aspect of painting gourds that occasionally comes into play–the color of the gourd skin affects the color you paint on it. I personally hand-inserted each of the individual beads into each individual hole. And having done that, spent several hours looking for the 314 fly-away beads that said, “No! I’m not going in there!” This is apparently something that practice enhances because I was walking across the WalMart parking lot a few hours later and found a stray bead on the pavement.
My writing is being punctuated by high-pitched puppy squeaks which sound for all the world like Riley is beating the bejayzits out of Annie. We have watched these transactions before: sometimes, for instance, he actually has her by the lip and is refusing all requests for mercy. For the most part, however, he may not even be in contact with her when she yips. She is going to work with Nancy today, so Riley will be able to rest.
This is from our visit to the dog park Sunday. Riley is playing with Aggie (the semi-greyhound) and Crusher, an 8 month-old great Dane puppy.
This is my current project. It’s a cannonball gourd (I love cannonball gourds) which, with any luck, will look like a field of crocus when I’m done. One of the side-effects of working with gourds is that after a lot of cutting, cleaning, sanding, burning, more sanding, everything tastes like gourd. It’s a sharp, bitter and…to my mind…green taste. I love the smell of burning them (which, due to my Michigan-born sinus system, I can smell for hours and sometimes days after I’ve done it) but the after-taste I really could do without.
I’m not complaining. I am happy just to rummage through my paints, contemplating what I might apply them to…admiring just how far one small jar of acrylic paint will go… They fit in nicely with my colored pencil collection, my pastels collection and my watercolor collection. (My sister has a collection of colored markers. I remain envious.) I may not produce much with them, but I do really enjoy having them. My life has been a long, slow process of learning to let go of the ideal and allow myself to just play for the sheer pleasure of playing. My gourds are my effort to let go of having them and become more about the doing. I struggle in all aspects of my life with the concept of ‘enough’.
It does not appear the sun will be joining us any time soon. What little effort it made to assert its dominance has apparently extinguished the flame. On the other hand, it has to be 50 degrees outside already. The first of the leaves are breaking out. The grass is green instead of brown, there are buds on the six-inch forest.
It’s a good day.
