Hollace the Mopsy

In a Word

2012-01-06T18:19:00.001-08:00

I have been noticing a trend among my acquaintances to choose a word for the New Year that describes the way they want to grow. It’s the 2012 version of making resolutions; resolutions have been found unsatisfactory in that we fail to keep them as thoroughly as we’d like and then we feel bad, guilty, like a Loser. If we have a word that we are occasionally thinking about, it can move us in that positive direction and yet not be quantifiable, hence we can’t truly fail and with fortitude we will move towards that goal. Win/win.

Here are the words my friends have chosen, in no particular order. Their names (or links) are not given to protect the innocently hopeful from recriminations next December, should you check up on them.

step

Shine

flourish

anticipate

glow

grow

lucky

truth

purposefully

focus

brakes

positively

prepare

butterfly

receptive

imagination

surrender

In late December when I was thinking about the possibility of making a resolution I didn’t have to think very hard. Mine is Sweeten Up, not nearly as charming as those other words but mine was born out of conviction one crabby day and not dreamed up for the spirit of New Year’s. I am not going to tell you about how bad I can be or the dour thoughts I might have just because I am a perfectionist in recovery and have a critical analytic tendency at times when I should be warmer and fuzzier. Such as now, perhaps. The great mystery is that many people don’t seem to realize this: I am often called sweet (unlikely), kind (humphh), and patient (now, that’s true, usually). But inside myself I have some very crabby tendencies which I remember being pointed out to me as a child. Ask my brothers. My self-perception seems to be different than my public persona and I would like to be closer to the misconceptions that people have, up until it gets insipid. I still want to be Interesting.

Now, Dorothy Parker was Interesting, and as a teenager she was sort of a hero of mine until I learned enough about her to know that she wasn’t a good role model. Dorothy Parker is famous for going to dinner parties with important and fascinating people and making witty, insightful comments that made everyone laugh and often made it into the newspapers. Everyone was amused except the victim who was flayed. Why did people keep inviting her to their dinner parties? She would be fun to eavesdrop on but not to be seated by at dinner. Not safe.

I read a biography of Dorothy Parker and decided her wit came at too high a price, that of friendship and trust. Who wants to be close to someone who might ridicule you or mock you publicly? Even privately? Only another porcupine.

Therefore, my note to self is “Sweeten Up”. Not anything poetic or artful, just a favor to myself and the world around me. And I don’t want it to be a word that is just talk, but as Eliza Doolittle said,

Words, words, words! I’m so sick of words! Never do I ever want to hear another word. There isn’t one I haven’t heard. Eliza Doolittle, My Fair Lady

Well, here goes. I hope that thinking it and wanting it and saying it will make it happen. And if I flourish and grow and shine and grow in the process, so much the better.

Anniversary

2012-01-03T17:34:00.001-08:00

Today marks the 3rd anniversary of my starting to blog. I was looking for a way to express myself and to let interested family members and friends know what we were up to in Portland. I wasn’t thinking about getting acquainted with new people or learning new computer skills.

Soon after I started my blog I “happened” on to another woman’s blog and found she had spent her weekend in the same way I had, only she was in the Netherlands! By going to some of the blogs she followed and then by checking to see who they followed, I began to gather quite a group of writing friends through our many common interests. It is perhaps hard to understand how one can feel close to someone they haven’t met, and yet I feel I could drop in on any number of people I’ve met and have a delightful time. I have new friends in England and Scotland, Texas, Georgia, Arizona, California and British Columbia and Alberta, and Massachusetts. To name a few. We share our lives, our hobbies, our craftsmanship, our gardening, our trips, our family get-togethers and grandchildren, what books we are reading, what we are striving for, what bargains we found at Goodwill or the antique mall and how we are repurposing them. Many of these women amaze me with their cleverness and DIY instincts. Some have book lists of current reading which challenge me. Some share their spiritual lives, their ups and downs, goals and satisfactions, in a transparent and moving way. I am enthralled.

I think I am still trying to find my voice. My interests and subjects are all over the place, and I’m okay with that, I guess. I am not specialized enough to have a travel journal or a art blog or a ‘thought for the day’ column. I am learning how to incorporate photos into my stories and to tweak them as needed. I have a LOT to learn about how to make the computer do what I want it to, how to set up a website and how to design my blog better. The technology aspect is my least favorite part, and yet it is what enables this great union of spirits around the world, so I must be grateful for it.

Yesterday I sent out a story I wrote about the end of the Christmas season 10 years ago at my house. One of my friends says, “Too many words.” So I will end with this:

I have written a total of 162 blogs in 3 years which averages out to one a week haphazardly. I read many more than that every week and am amazed that some of you write several times a week. I have enjoyed learning through you and sharing with you.

Happy New Year and New Blogging Year, too.

Holly

Putting Away Christmas

2012-01-02T17:36:00.001-08:00

The phone rings. I snap to adrenaline-induced attention and hop out of bed. No one there. Back in bed, covering cold spots, the phone rings. Miffed, I answer shortly. It’s my son’s hostess for the weekend, calling to give him directions, which I will pass on. I head downstairs before I forget.

The kitchen is a disaster. I can’t face it before my cup of tea. My daughter straggles in and I fix hot chocolate for her. Last night I had a little plan that she and I might ride downtown on MAX together today to pick up my books at the bookstore and have a chance to talk about her life before she heads back to college on Saturday. The vacation days have been so full of friends and activities that I realize sadly now she may have gone again before I have a chance to say, “How’s everything going in your life? I mean, really?” So I ask her now to take this jaunt with me but she says she sorta made a plan with Amanda. Then she woefully admits she doesn’t know what she’s going to do about the rest of the week because she has so many friends left to see and no money and even if they just go out for coffee it takes money and when she gets back to school the cafeteria will be closed Sunday night and she will have to go to a restaurant…

I’ve got company coming tonight and it’s not just the kitchen that’s a disaster. It needs to be a floor-scrubbing, bathroom-cleaning kind of day. So, I offer Lindsay the opportunity to earn cash at bribery rates in order to support her social habits and save my own social reputation. It works. We make a list of chores and their dollar amount.

The phone rings. Instead of going out, Amanda will just come over with a movie.

The phone rings. My father, wondering if I’d gotten the message he left last night, wonders which would be a good night to take the family out before the kids go back to school. And when can we get together to see the photo project he’s been working on for me? There are no nights left this week to have dinner with everyone at home, but I promise to check it out.

Lindsay says I should be the one to put away the Christmas stuff since I’m the only one that knows where it goes, and she can do the kitchen.

The front door opens and my high school son comes in. It is mid-morning. “What are you doing home from school?” “It’s early release. Can I go out on my bike? And can I have five dollars to get the front brakes put back on?” “Wait a minute. We’ve got company coming tonight. How about if you do something to help?” “How much will you pay me?” “If you clean the downstairs bathroom, I’ll give you the money for the front brakes.” “Okay, and then I’ll be home in time for you to take me to my drum lesson.” Oh, no! I totally forgot about the drum lesson! How am I going to get my books downtown and clean the house and get the Christmas stuff away?

The phone rings. It’s Bobby, home from school, too. Can he come over while Brett cleans the bathroom? No. Can Brett have some money to go to McDonald’s with Bobby? No.

Heading downstairs for the Christmas boxes, I carry the laundry piled by the door. I’m surprised we’re out of detergent already. I really need to get to the grocery store. No bread for lunch, no detergent…

The phone rings. It’s Amanda, calling from the video store. She needs to talk to Lindsay about which movie to choose. I explain that I am in the basement getting out the Christmas boxes and Lindsay is two flights up in the shower, getting ready to go to the grocery store for me. I will pass the message.

Wrapping the angels and Santas and Christmas mugs, I think how fast it all went by. I am not tired of looking at these treasures yet. Should I leave out the little gnome for a while? I really can’t bear to put away my Santa cream and sugar. We were so busy over the holidays, I hardly even saw them. I put away the tins, but leave the cream and sugar Santas on the windowsill.

Amanda arrives, but Lindsay has gone to the store. Could she just make herself a peanut butter sandwich? she asks. Sorry, no bread yet.

The phone rings. My sister-in–law has Mom in the car, running errands. They’re in the neighborhood. Is this a good time? Maybe after a while.

Lindsay comes in with a flush of pleasure at her successful shopping trip. She found just the right mascara at the grocery store. She and Amanda pile the groceries in the middle of the kitchen floor-still no room on the counters-and start to make their lunch before watching the movie. I am hyperventilating.

The phone rings. Ron, calling from work, needs the number of the furnace guy, and how is everything going? Just a minute, I say, there’s a knock at the door. It’s Mom and sister-in-law Pam, come for a cup of tea! I’ll talk to you later, I tell Ron.

Pam wonders why all the dining room chairs are in the living room if I’m having company tonight, and I try to explain the aborted plan to mop the wood floors. Forget it, she advises. Just stash the Christmas stuff someplace and put the chairs back. They leave, Mom a little confused about not having tea.

I need to breathe deeply. I need to pray. I head upstairs to my bedroom for a couple moments of petition and peace. My thoughts are as cluttered as my house. Lord, I have the growth group coming tonight. Lord, I need to read that book for tomorrow, the one that’s downtown. Lord, I’m supposed to read it before I write something. Linguistics, Lord! I don’t know if I can do it. Do You think I can? Lord, what about my dad? I hate to disappoint him…. I can’t even pay attention to You while I’m talking to You. I keep putting you on hold while I think about different things. Help me to focus. Help me to know what to do next.

I remember the detergent is available now, so I head to the laundry in the basement. The machine fills.

The phone rings. It is Tracey, my new friend from school, wanting to hear about my classes and how linguistics is going. I tell her I’m supposed to be doing some poetry writing or something thoughtful for tomorrow, that I’m overwhelmed and behind before the second day of class. She wonders if I’m trying to do too much. I AM JUST TRYING TO PUT AWAY THE CHRISTMAS ORNAMENTS!!!

In the kitchen, I get the counters cleared of the dishes Lindsay washed. It’s almost time for Brett to get home for his drum lesson.

The phone rings. It’s Evan, my older son. His car won’t start. Can I bring the jumper cables and help him? Yes, he’s sorry, he thinks he might have left the lights on. Sure, I say, but then could you take Brett to his drum lesson? Yah.

I carry the Christmas books back to their space in the library. Two new ones this year and I didn’t even get to read them. I’d like to sit down –well, I can’t now—I could leave just these out for a while and enjoy reading them still…

The phone rings. Brett’s friend Joel wants him to come over.

The phone rings. A girl’s voice asks for Brett. No message.

The phone rings. Ron is on MAX. The guy who was supposed to give him a ride home forgot. Could I pick him up at 122^nd in 15 minutes? I say, Evan is coming back this way then and you could connect with him. Okay.

I carry the Christmas boxes down to the basement thinking, “I can’t do this. I can’t do this.” I sit on the steps and cry for a minute. Upstairs, Ron asks what the dinner plan is. I say, we had a plan but now I don’t want to get the kitchen all messy because COMPANY IS COMING! Lindsay says her shopping was good and got everything we needed for a healthy dinner and she doesn’t want to do fast food. They start on spaghetti.

The phone rings. Lindsay’s friend Danielle wants to know about their plans for tonight. Can Lindsay get a ride? Lindsay makes several calls to see who is going.

The spaghetti is ready. I am finishing loading the dishwasher. Go ahead and start, I say.

The phone rings. She just sat down to eat, I say, can I have her call you back? Oh, never mind, it’s okay. Here she is. Lindsay has a ride.

A nice supper. We’re all here tonight (except Emily, of course, who already went back to school). The dining room looks nice, the table cleared of the things that collect there. Brett pats my back. I am starting to breathe again. A knock at the door: oops, sorry we’re so early. Still finishing up supper? That’s okay.

I go upstairs to change out of my cleaning shirt. Should I go down, or plead homework? I really don’t have time for this. Then I think, “It’s only an hour and a half, and these are friends… I need to keep my life in balance”. I go down.

After seeing the last one out the door, I come into the kitchen to clean up the refreshment debris. “There seems to be water leaking under the kitchen sink,” my husband says. I can’t think about that now, I say, because I have to go write a poem or something.

And what I’m thinking is that there are parts of Christmas that you don’t wrap up and put away but leave out to savor all year. The back pats from an awkward fourteen-year-old son, the spaghetti-making-team cooperation, my husband’s offer to run to the downtown bookstore at 5:39 (it closed at 6), the question “what can I do next?”…These are the sweetest of Christmas moments. Even the grieving which has already started in my heart at the anticipated departure of Lindsay and Evan this weekend bears a sweetness, the sweetness of loving them and being loved. Some of my Christmas treasures get wrapped up and tucked away in my heart.

(written in January, 2002, a true account of the day)

Bringing Christmas to the Living Room

2011-12-12T11:14:00.001-08:00

When we were in Leavenworth, Washington in late summer I went to the remarkable Kris Kringl shop. I was looking for an advent calendar. As a child, a friend of my parents had sent us one from Germany, a traditional street scene in a Bavarian village with all the stores bedecked with boughs of greenery and people carrying packages and Christmas trees across the town square. It had a sprinkling of white glitter on it, like fairy snow. We had loved it for years, competing to be the one to open the window for that day, searching through all the ornamentation to find the right numbered door.

Now I was in a Bavarian town that looked like an advent calendar itself, minus the sprinkle of glitter. It reminded me of my wish to find a real, authentic German calendar. I wanted to buy one for my friend who now has grandchildren coming to her house –it could be both a souvenir of our trip and a teaching tool for the grandkids. Leavenworth seemed like the place to have them, being German and all. And they had a store dedicated to Christmas goods! Perfect.

So I went to the Christmas store, Kris Kringl. There I found every conceivable collectible: fairies and sugar plums, gingerbread houses, elves, Snow Babies and Santa Clauses. There were hand blown glass ornaments and carved wooden ones, fabric elves and crystal icicles. There was vintage Christmas with Lucia brides and 1950’s diner scenes.

I wandered around between the Jack Frosts and the crystal snowflakes looking for an advent calendar. Finally I asked a sales clerk. “Oh, is that religious? That’s upstairs, at the back.” I couldn’t find the stairs and she said “The stairs are over in that corner behind the door”.

So upstairs at the back behind the door I went. No advent calendars here. Some Fontanini nativity pieces, relegated to the back of the ~~inn~~ store. In a store about Christmas there was very little of Christ’s birth. I felt the chill of “No room at the inn.”

I like elves and sugar plum fairies and snowmen and snow globes, don’t misunderstand me. I just want it to be remembered that the reason for Christmas is that Christ came to earth. The angels filled the sky to announce it to the shepherds and a star led the learned men from different countries to welcome the new king. All of history pivots on this event, and it needs to be more than “Upstairs, at the back.”

How Lovely Are Your Branches

2011-11-18T13:01:00.001-08:00

Oregon has a lot of Christmas tree farms. Besides the larger nurseries and tree farms, many folks with a large piece of property plant Christmas trees on their acreage as a tax write-off. I think our neighboring state to the north, Washington, is the Christmas tree capital of the world (so I’ve heard) but Oregon has its share of the green.
There are many styles of trees and how a Christmas tree ought to look is buried deep in the human psyche. Often a couple’s first serious argument will be about the shape of the tree: bushy or open. Personally I say that ornaments show off better on an open (Noble) tree.

Of course, there are Grand Firs and Scotch Pines and Blue Spruce (I don’t recommend; they have very sharp needles) and Douglas Firs (so plentiful and native here that they are somewhat despised) and many more varieties of fir and pine trees. How long the needles should be is a subset argument.
Another debate looms large: real tree or fake tree? Your feelings about this, deeply ingrained and prejudiced as they are, may change over the years with the shrinking dollar and your waning energy. When the kids are little, it is magic-making (even if you’re miserably cold and wet) to tramp around the forest (tree farm) looking for just the right tree and cutting it down and dragging it back to the car and tying it on top of the car (trunk end forward) and driving home and untying it and bringing it into the house dragging half of the forest floor with you. Magical. Especially the hot chocolate when the ordeal is over and the tears of those who didn’t get their tree of choice are wiped away.

Later in life when money is more available you can just go to a lot of precut trees and choose one. They tie it on top for you (it may even come baled if you don’t mind getting one sight unseen—but who is that trusting?) Then you bring it home, cut the end off and put it in a bucket of water to try and revive it after its sojourn in the tree lot, and after a day of soaking bring it into the house dragging it across the floor with half of the tree lot behind it.
Still later in life when you realize that 1) the smell of fresh pine is what’s making you sneeze through December and 2) for the amount you have spent on live trees over the years you could have had an artificial, light weight one with detachable branches that you keep in a box in the attic and never have to crawl on the floor to water and 3) it’s already got the lights wrapped in it so you don’t have to mess with miles of tangled strings of lights and replacement bulbs and then taking them all off again on Jan 1. 4) besides which, you can spray pine scent around in the air…
Or you can just get a teeny tiny tabletop one like the folks in the nursing home.
After you have settled the Basic Shape issue and the Real or Artificial issue and the Variety of Tree issue, you must settle the last one:

TO FLOCK OR NOT TO FLOCK

I recently attended an open house at my local gardening store. They had a back room filled with flocked trees. Apparently the flocking seals in moisture in the needles so they do not need to be watered and thus can be ready to purchase by Halloween or so.
But wait! There is a new style of flocking. It is called

FIRST SNOW

It is truly lovely and as natural looking as any snow-covered tree residing in a snow-free zone can be. The store says that putting lights on it is problematic but you can get around that by putting spot lights on it from below. I guess you need a horse trailer to get it home from the store, or maybe they deliver…

O Christmas Tree
English Version 1
Author unknown
O Christmas Tree, O Christmas tree,
How lovely are your branches!
In beauty green will always grow
Through summer sun and winter snow.
O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree,
How lovely are your branches!
O Christmas Tree, O Christmas tree,
You are the tree most loved!
How often you give us delight
In brightly shining Christmas light!
O Christmas Tree, O Christmas tree,
You are the tree most loved!
O Christmas Tree, O Christmas tree,
Your beauty green will teach me
That hope and love will ever be
The way to joy and peace for me.
O Christmas Tree, O Christmas tree,
Your beauty green will teach me.

Victoria reigns!

2011-11-07T19:47:00.001-08:00

When I left you in Victoria, it was still summer and we were having lovely days in the sunshine. After spending a day at Butchart’s Gardens, we came back to our timeshare in the city where had been moved into the penthouse because of last minute reservation grabbing on my part.

What I want to observe is that we had a great time in our 6th floor unit and we had a great time in our 1st floor “penthouse” unit (yes, they call the ones closest to the harbor the penthouse, not the top floor units.) Our friends actually liked the 6th floor one better because of the view toward Parliament and the Empress. Being on the first floor end unit put us right on the harbor with a front row seat to the seaplanes taking off and landing, the cruise ships and dragon boat races, the water taxis, and also all the joggers, dog walkers, and strollers. We could have fed them over the railing. I’m not complaining, I’m just saying that the the big advantage to the penthouse was 1) not having to walk the length of the hallway and down the elevator and across the lobby in our swimsuits to get to the hot tub because there was one on our own deck and 2) in the penthouse they give courtesy bathrobes which you really don’t need because you are not walking down the hall, down the elevator and across the lobby in your swimsuit, anyway. So as an improvement, it was a wash. I couldn’t leave the drapes in our bedroom open in order to see the early morning light as I like, because the passers by right outside my window would have been seeing me, which I don’t like. To sum up my thoughts on penthouse dwelling: It doesn’t matter either way. You make your own fun wherever you are. Most of the time we were outside, anyway.

But I want to show you the last pictures of Victoria. I got up at 6 AM because I was determined to take an early morning picture of the sun on the houseboats. I sat on the deck waiting for the light to hit. I made coffee and sat some more. I dozed. By the time the sun rose high enough to hit the fronts of the houseboats it had also diffused over the whole sky, so it wasn’t as spectacular as I had hoped. But it was lovely:

6:08 AM

6:37 AM:

6:59 AM: 7:00 AM 7:34 AM

Our no-can-see-um room: Penthouse perks: Remember how we ate ice cream for breakfast on the first day of our trip? This last day, we had Hot Dogs for breakfast on the deck! Other wonderful last sights: water taxi ride to Chinatown:

Tents set up for the dragon boat races tomorrow ^

Pretending to be Queen Elizabeth at the Empress:

Victoria had hanging baskets of flowers everywhere!

Dragon Boat races:

Leaving on the ferry, but we’ll be back, Victoria!

Happy Halloween and other treats

2011-10-31T00:19:00.001-07:00

A room with a view, Oakridge Covered Bridge

Mt. St. Helens on a recent drive Yacolt, Washington

Diane’s Grapes

In Estacada, Oregon for a weekend retreat (just us chickens)

Last of the season dahlias going to the retreat

Hope your Halloween is filled with treats!

Butchart Gardens

2011-10-24T18:40:00.001-07:00

Butchart Gardens employs about 500 people to keep its pristine condition. There was not a weed or a fallen leaf in sight. We spoke to a neighbor of the gardens who has a yearly pass and comes every 2 weeks because new plantings and seasonal displays are always occurring. In the evenings there are fireworks but we had worn out our feet by then and didn’t care to stay.

So we went home and made supper in our Penthouse which they had moved us into while we were gone. (Yes, the second night I found available was in the penthouse, so we had to suffer. But we packed our stuff up in the morning and it was in our new room that night. Nice!)

Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

2011-10-24T17:23:00.001-07:00

From Leavenworth we drove northwest to Anacortes, Washington to catch the ferry to Victoria. I have always loved ferry rides and ones through these San Juan Islands are a favorite.

While we were in Victoria we walked everywhere, but one time we rode in one of these darling little taxis we had seen bobbing in the water. I put the 2 mosaics together just for nautical flavor!

After we arrived in the city and found our place, first we enjoyed our room with a view: Then we went to find some delectable fish and chips at the famous “Barb’s” which happened to be on the wharf near our unit.Then began several days of walking and talking and enjoying the beautiful city of Victoria. The sun shone every day and it was even the week of full moon, so life was grand!

Houseboats on the wharf:

From our unit it was a lovely stroll around the harbor to the Parliament Building and the Empress Hotel. (Will and Kate had just stayed there a week or so before.)

Parliament Building is outlined with white lights year round, making a beautiful sight (which is improved by a tripod, sorry).

Victoria has flowers and hanging baskets everywhere!

The Empress:

Ron took this one:

But tomorrow is another day and we have big plans for it! So our tired feet took us back to our rooms where we hated to shut our eyes to the views outside…but we did.

And another thing…

2011-10-22T18:52:00.001-07:00

This was a sign I saw and liked in a shop in Leavenworth. I didn’t buy it probably because it was too much money and I am trying to train myself that I don’t have to buy everything I like (I’m not there yet.) But I really liked it.

Please don’t copy it and sell it, etc.,because of copyright laws. I don’t want to be responsible for you falling off the straight and narrow path. While you are thinking these beautiful thoughts.

Here is something else I was attracted to, but it was nailed down so I couldn’t bring it home either: Yes, it is a darling mailbox. The detail is quite astonishing. It even has a ‘flag’ you pull down for outgoing mail. The grill pulls down for the mail deposit. Apparently the folks up here in the country haven’t heard about the horrible fad kids have of hitting mailboxes with baseball bats. Or maybe they take it in at night. It is a work of art.

Suddenly Last Summer

2011-10-22T18:20:00.001-07:00

Dear friends,

I didn’t mean to leave you with a tease for so long—you will have forgotten by now that you last saw me in a sea plane. But no, not really; the planes were just taking off and landing from right in front of our time share unit on the inner harbor of Victoria, BC!

I will start at the beginning. Tech Guy had 2 weeks of vacation together (and 3 others scattered through out the year), the first of which we spent camping. I like camping to a point but I ~~thought~~ knew I’d be ready for a real bed–not-in-a-tent for the second week. So I got to work looking for a vacancy in our pool of time share units. We had been wait listed for a couple months to no avail, but then, it was the first 2 weeks in August. The reservation system is different than the bonus time system: if you are diligent you can snap up cancellations in the last 2 weeks before your desired arrival date. The key is diligence. You can check online every 15 minutes and the picture will have changed, but you want consecutive nights in the same place, not Tuesday in Idaho, Wednesday in BC, and Thursday at the Oregon Coast.

We were willing to go anywhere with our week, anywhere within driving distance. I was delighted when Leavenworth, Washington opened up for Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday nights, and then Victoria for Thursday and a few days later, Victoria for Friday. Yay! Not the smoothest way to plan a vacation but it was in the nature of an adventure.

We had planned to take my Mom-in-law but that fell through, so we kidnapped willing victims so as not to waste the 2 bedroom units. And for fun.

First stop: Leavenworth. Very first stop: ice cream cones at a ‘sort-of famous’ place in Cascade Locks. Can you believe it? Ice cream cones at 10 o’clock in the morning on a Monday? Decadent! Our friends made us do it. You have to keep your kidnapees happy, you know Then we moseyed along the Columbia River and stopped to observe the wind surfers who ‘hang out’ there.

How can so many people be out surfing on a Monday morning? Don’t they know it’s a work day? Apparently not. The wind is good.

We headed up the road east along the mighty Columbia: and then north into Washington’s fruit valley. First a little reconnoitering in Toppenish, the town of murals. The visitor’s center has a miniature replica of all 82 murals which tell the area’s history:

From Toppenish we headed further north, looking for a fruit stand to get fresh veggies for the week:

We continued in the spirit of adventuring. My husband saw on the map a town that was “named after him” so we went slightly off course to check it out. Ronald, Washington: not a booming metropolis: On the way to Ronald we went through Roslyn which was just a wide spot in the road except for this amazing home and garden. We pulled to the curb to snap a picture and before you know it, my friend is up on their front porch knocking on the door and becoming BFFs with the lady there. No kidding, Diane is fearless about opening conversations with people. (We had already observed this with the wind surfers, the ice cream makers, and the fruit stand people.) The lady was delighted to discuss watering systems and fertilizing schedules ^

Now we headed directly to Leavenworth and our lodging. This was the view from our dining table and deck.

Leavenworth is a town that historically was a spot for Indian hunters and fur traders. When the Great Northern Railroad opened the way to the west, it became a logging and saw mill town, but in the mid 1900’s the mill closed and the train station was rerouted and the town gradually was dying. In an effort to save it, the townspeople came together in 1964 with a plan to make it a tourism center, capitalizing on the nearby mountains they called “Alps”. Everyone in town got on board with this plan and created a Bavarian Village out of Leavenworth. The shops are painted and shuttered and half-timbered with window boxes overflowing. Their festival Center:

We didn’t spend too much time in the shops, actually, which turned out to be too expensive or not the type of stuff we like to shop for. We did make it to a fabulous fudge shop “The Alps”:

and went exploring

and went swimming or hot tubbing every day put a puzzle together (nearly finished)But the best part, we all agreed, was going to an outdoor theater production up in the “Alps” of The Sound of Music. Diane got wind of the shortage of tickets and went to stand in line, returning home victorious with 4. Our last night in Leavenworth we sat in the amphitheater as the sun was setting and watched the hills become alive again for Maria.

Marta led us to our seats and visited a while: The Baroness and Mother Superior visiting before the program began. The set was fascinating, opening up and closing and spinning around to become different structures or rooms. (No photos during performance)

All the next day I found myself singing “The hills are alive..with the sound of music…with songs they have sung..for a thousand years”. It was the best part of Leavenworth for us, although we all agreed that it would be fun to go again in wintertime, with the sleigh rides and snowmobiling and caroling and skiing and cheeriness of the season. And today I read about Octoberfest in Leavenworth, and am thinking that would be a lot of fun, polka-ing in the streets…

Next stop: Victoria, B.C., Canada (Make sure the folks you kidnap have their passports )

Van Gogh and Me

2011-10-14T15:49:00.001-07:00

Dear friends, At the risk of having nothing thrillingly important to say I am going to write anyway just so you won’t wipe me off your ‘Blogs I Follow’ List.

My days have been occupied with 2 major thrusts: teaching a Bible class once a week and taking an online class which is called Creative Courage, designed to push us fence sitters into action. Both of these pursuits are very satisfying and challenging. Both take more time than I would have guessed. Both have fully engaged my mind and I have had to deliberately switch from one to the other to keep the delicate balance. When I was doing my time management plan for this period of life I neglected to factor in things like housework and cooking so my dear techie guy is suffering (but uncomplaining as usual). The biggest sacrifice he’s making is solving all my computer crises that I’m creating with these new ventures. There’s so much to learn!! And I don’t even have a website yet.

You wouldn’t believe the caliber of the people in my Creative Courage class. Many of them have had well developed art backgrounds and have produced works for sale but are at a transition point or in a career quandary of some sort. These guys would be hugely intimidating if they weren’t so NICE. But besides their training and experience they are also very tech savvy. I guess you have to be to market to the online community. I wonder where Van Gogh would have been if he could have sold his paintings on websites, Etsy, and using Flickr with boosts from Twitter and Facebook. Maybe he wouldn’t have had to cut off his ear if he’d succeeded in mass selling. But trying to maneuver through these ‘advantages’ is enough to make me cut off my ear. I see where he was comin’ from. I try not to call TG (Tech Guy) at work more than twice a day with my computer crashes and concerns.

My plan for this blog was to show you some photos from a recent little adventure we had, but a friend just called and asked me to meet her at our favorite watering hole. Apparently my plan does have some discretionary time in it because I said YES in a hurry.

I will give you a tantalizing photo for the next blog.

One Heart, Many Loves

2011-10-02T14:03:00.001-07:00

In high school art classes I did the calligraphy for this bit of philosophy: ”There is love and there is art but a man has only one heart.” (Author forgotten). I didn’t like it then and I still don’t want to agree, but it festers. I want to have it all. Why can’t I have it all?

Finding a balance in my life has always been a difficulty for me. I tend to throw myself into projects which become all-consuming until the event is over or the deadline is met. Back in the days when I was event planning for the women’s conferences and banquet decorating, my creative side took over and now, in hindsight, I think I short-changed my family. Over time, a desire to take care of my aging parents and the extended family and the household improvements and my Bible study group and my writing group and my book club—not all at once, mind you—with an occasional holiday dinner thrown in, overcame my creative performance self which got buried somewhere under the laundry and the dirty dishes.

Not that there was anything wrong with what I was doing. All those things are part of my heart, my Self, too. Its just that I’ve had a longing to be expressing something else along with managing everything else. The way I go at things tends to support this unlikable quote, that a man has only one heart, at least at a time.

So to redress the balance I am taking an online course “Creative Courage” taught by Stephanie Levy and her artist friends. http://stephanielevy.blogspot.com/2011/07/introducing-my-new-e-course-creative.html This week we have explored many facets of our creative drive and vision and goal setting. I have had some revelations but I can’t just go off in a gypsy caravan to follow them, appealing as that sounds. What I need is to find a way to incorporate my creativity into the circumstances of my life, and control some of the distracting circumstances.

Hence this picture. I am trying to turn my dreaming into doing. The scales show the dreaming (in the clouds) to be light weight and the work of doing (with necessary tools) to be more significant. The clock represents a sort of time management which seems to be in competition with the free flowing artistic spirit of the vines. This is where I am now. I think I’ve been fighting this battle since high school.

I want it all. I just have to figure out how to get it all in.

Walking in NW Portland

2011-09-28T17:23:00.001-07:00

When my friend was here from Arizona, we walked in Northwest Portland. It is a unique district with older homes and trendy shops. Many of the enormous older homes have been subdivided into condos and apartments, but in the streets above the shopping district there are still stately single family mansions, former homes of the people who built up Portland. A guidebook of the neighborhood reads like a who’s who in 1890.

In fact, we had lunch at Besaw’s on NW 23rd which was opened in 1903 and became a popular watering hole during the 1905 World’s Fair in Portland. After Prohibition, Besaw’s was the first place in Oregon to get a liquor license. During Prohibition they had become an eatery in order to stay in business. If this intriques you, see http://www.besaws.com/about/ . Sadly, I have no pictures of my delicious Reuben Sandwich or our outside seating.

Below the mansion district are the regular homes of the earlier day, now highly sought and not so “regular”(see below). People know how to have fun in NW Portland! It’s a little bit classy and a little bit wacky.

Parking is quite a problem in this area since cars were not invented when the homes were built, and no allowance was made for garages.

A curbside treatment:

Outside this home’s (retrofitted) garage and entryway, natural colored stones were used in mosaics as focal interest:

In a flower shop entry I was caught by the last-of -season snapdragons and alstromeria and the first-of-season fall wreaths. I noted the natural hand tied framework for future reference:

Sadly, I did not bring home anything but ideas.

Orange you glad it’s Fall?

2011-09-26T03:55:00.001-07:00

I had fun on Friday pulling out some different things from my cupboards to get a fresh look. I was really intending to be doing laundry and dishes but I kept getting distracted by fun. So here are some pictures of the small scale autumnal decorating I’ve done. I have plans for a Indian corn embellished wreath yet, and some other things, but I really do need to get the clothes out of the washer and into the dryer.

I borrowed this idea of orange books from the header of Debra @Common Ground. It was amusing to take books out of their categories and group them by spine color (okay, so I am easily amused).

The books are on an old school desk my son in law gave me. Okay, I admit: it usually looks like this:

A good friend from Arizona recently visited bringing this vase on the right because when she saw it she “knew it was my colors”. So right. As a matter of fact, she gave me the square plate on the left a few years ago from the Portland Ceramics Showcase, where I also purchased the tall vase in the back. Portland has a wealth of potters and the annual show is always a great treat and temptation, free to get into but costly to leave , in my experience.

In context:

The plate rail in the dining room has gone quite wild this season. Not sure if I can stand the blue for long. The dark bowl is actually red with black patterning—I brought it home from Tunisia in February.

Just to prove I’m not always garish, I have this oh-so-subtle vignette on the hutch. The copper bowl is a new acquisition from an antique mall (where I was just going to have coffee, honestly) and it seemed to request the company of other filigree, scroll-y type things.

I am having an almost irresistible pull toward English transferware these days. Hold me, hold me back.

Just to finish and get this whole autumn thing out of my system I will show the tables from last Thursdays meeting (which I told you about in the previous blog but without pictures .) The top tablecloth is from Provence, the gift of a French exchange student we had a few years ago.

The bottom cloth and topper is from Cameroon, the gift of my African ‘sister’ whose son married my daughter.

The other two tables are sporting runners which I made up at the 11th hour the night before.

Tomorrow I am starting an online course which I am very excited about. Creative Courage. I am hoping that great things will emerge from me as a result and that this blog will be enhanced beyond measure. [At the moment it is embarrassingly white because in an attempt to update it I erased everything and didn’t have enough time/energy/ to get it put back together again.]

So tomorrow begins my class and also the preparation in earnest for teaching on Thursday. I want to pursue The Artist’s Way and do the prescribed Morning Pages. With the other reading I want to do it makes for a very jam-packed sabbatical. But rich and satisfying.

Summer Mosaic: “What I Did This Summer”

2011-09-23T11:51:00.001-07:00

Today was the first real day of autumn for me. Bloggers have been talking about ‘that crisp feeling in the air’ for weeks, and tomorrow is the official first day, but today was like the first day of school as my women’s Bible study group started up again. Therefore, my responsibilities kicked in and I was nervous and eager and had a little jumpy tummy just like grade school days. I packed the decorations, the zucchini bread, the new lesson books and the handouts to the car. Flowers. Pumpkins. Indian corn. Squash in all shapes colors and sizes. Doesn’t that just scream Autumn?

But before I can speak of current things—all the things I should be doing before writing this blog—I want to fulfill that first back-to-school obligation: write a page about WHAT I DID THIS SUMMER.

I already told you about Girls’ Week at Eagle Fern Camp. That was a big deal for me. Afterwards, I had a few days’ recovery time to prepare for a camping trip with some of our kids and friends and their kids. We went to a campground in Central Oregon for the second year in a row and although we had a good time, we want to go elsewhere next year. Over to the coast. Where it doesn’t get to 98* in the afternoon. One day it was so uncomfortable that we actually drove into town to sit in an air-conditioned matinee!

But you can’t argue about blue skies and fresh air (with a strong scent of juniper.) I was reading April Cornell’s book on decorating with color and was intoxicated by the colors around me: Fresh fruit,

the sage and juniper,

the local farmlands,

the people,

the water,

It was all good.

It was wonderful, in fact.

Maybe the first camping trip we’ve had that I actually felt relaxed. I think that’s because the kids have grown up and now they are helpers! And they know how to make the fun happen. Yay for grown-up kids!

(Author’s note: due to having way too many photos I consolidated by making collages of some of them. Not all. I hear your sigh of relief.)

Abide with Me

2011-09-17T20:45:00.001-07:00

Abide with me; fast falls the eventide; 
	the darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide. 
	When other helpers fail and comforts flee, 
	Help of the helpless, O abide with me.

I heard this hymn today on the Arts channel sung

by British soloist Lesley Garrett with images of

soldiers in trenches behind her on large screens.

The photo I took last weekend as we were on

our way home from Klamath Falls at sunset.

They seemed to go together.

Tulelake

2011-09-14T11:38:00.000-07:00

Plaque reads:

May 1942 Tule Lake March 1946

Tule Lake was one of ten American concentration camps established during World War II to incarcerate 110,000 persons of Japanese ancestry, of whom the majority were American citizens, behind barbed wire and guard towers without charge, trial, or establishment of guilt. These camps are reminders of how racism, economic and political exploitation, and expediency can undermine the constitutional guarantees of United States citizens and aliens alike. May the injustices and humiliation suffered here never recur

California registered historical landmark No. 850-2 Plaque placed by the State Department of Parks and Recreation in cooperation with the Northern California-Western Nevada District Council, Japanese-American Citizens League, May 27, 1979

During my college days I had a gifted friend who was Japanese-American. He taught me about the shame brought on US citizens of Japanese ancestry during WWII. A government proclamation ordered them “for their own safety” to be sent to relocation camps in out-of-the-way, generally uninhabited, places. Ten such camps were created in the US eventually housing 120,000 people (sources vary). Tulelake was one of these internment camps, as they came to be called.

Two books I have since read on the subject of the Nisei, these Americans of Japanese descent, have increased my awareness and impacted me. They are Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson, and Silent Honor by Danielle Steel. A more recent movie, “Come See the Paradise” (with Dennis Quaid), gave a vivid and unsettling portrayal of the camps. Later, my friendship with a school secretary who was married to a Japanese man born just after his parents’ internment gave further insight into the racial discrimination they suffered while being loyal citizens of the US. They lost their family business, a florist shop, gave up treasured household items to neighbors, and suffered many indignities. Her husband was born in a hospital hallway because they would not give his Japanese mother a room.

However, this subject is still controversial. From accusations of racial profiling to defensive protestations of protecting America’s west coast from possible attack by the Japanese after its Pearl Harbor attack, from deep shame at turning against our own citizens (declared unconstitutional on Dec. 17, 1944 by the US Supreme Court) to defense of the internment as a necessity of wartime due to continuing loyalties between the US Japanese and their homeland and relatives with whom we were at war: there is still a debate concerning whether or not the interment was justifiable. Particularly the West Coast military installations and factories were considered vulnerable. But there is a deep shame about it, too, when the scab is uncovered, much like the issue of slavery can be spoken about in terms of both economic necessity and wrongful treatment of human beings.

Michelle Malkin has written In Defense of Internment: The Case for Racial Profiling in WWII and the War on Terror (2004). I have not read it but I plan to. In Malkin’s book, internment was the result of national security concerns and not just racism or wartime hysteria, says the publisher.

After seeing Tulelake I spent the next day online looking for more information. I watched a couple of documentaries:

Children of the Camps http://www.pbs.org/childofcamp/documentary/index.html

A Challenge to Democracy :

http://www.archive.org/details/Challeng1944

These propaganda films showed life in the camps in a positive light, the Japanese happy and content. Although most of the locations of the relocation/internment camps were in desert lands never before farmed or previously occupied, the films indicated that the ‘industrious’ Japanese (many of whom had never farmed) were happy to clear the land, dig irrigation ditches, and cultivate crops. They were given a 20x25 foot single room per family in a barracks that housed several hundred. The ‘resourceful among them’ could build partitions to make rooms and compartments for bedrooms, and using their ‘ingenuity’ women could make curtains for their windows (here a happy Japanese homemaker is shown hanging her new curtains.) The food in the cafeteria was “nourishing but simple”. The schoolrooms were manned by Caucasian and evacuee teachers who “trained the internees for better jobs outside”. Elections were held “in a democratic manner.” There were hundreds of baseball teams, and parades with floats, and Boy Scouts, and beauty queens. Admittedly home life was disrupted, and the training of children abnormal, but the Japanese “responded cheerfully, happy to help the American war cause.” Their businesses were leased to others, their fishing fleets impounded, orchards lost, doctors and dentists lost their practices, but the young Japanese men who enlisted in the war effort saw themselves as “soldiers fighting for democracy and freedom of opportunity, regardless of race or creed or national origin.”

“The Tule Lake Unit is a reminder to all Americans that the Constitution is no more than a piece of paper unless we are willing to defend its principles.” quote from plaque, above

Wildlife and lava beds and country fairs, oh my!

2011-09-12T12:20:00.001-07:00

Our second full day we decided to go further afield-pun intended-and deeper into the hot spots of the country, the Lava Beds National Park. Ho-hum, you might say, and I agree: basically rocks are not my thing, but I am married to a geologist-at-heart and I love him and owe him big-time. The surprise was the beauty we saw on the way (there is a moral here).

On our way to the lava beds we crossed the state line into California and drove through the Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge:

I found out later that the above ‘weed’ is called the tule plant, from which the Native Americans built their canoes, and the reason for the town’s name, Tulelake.

This lovely thing is a Great White Egret:

Lava Beds National Monument:

Somewhere in this picture above is this man (below), which gives you a sense of the scale of these lava beds. I believe he is 1/3 of the way from the left on the center line in the upper photo.

There are many caves which one can explore but we declined as there is a bat disease going on currently. And it’s very dark and very cold and wet in them. Hard hats and hiking boots and jackets and long pants and lighted head gear advised. (I don’t owe him THAT much!)

Photo and sample of the tule plant

Details of our anniversary date at the visitor’s center

Leaving the park, we took another back road out to the highway—we hoped… pavement became gravel… Ponderosas scattered thin

We did eventually get to the highway which led us back to the town of Tulelake (which makes Klamath Falls look like a metropolis). But Tulelake will have its own post tomorrow as it had a sad part in the history of America. But for today, our outing took us into the annual Tulelake Fair:

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Old Time Fiddlers

And then on to a really great filet mignon dinner on our way back to the Running Y Ranch!

A Weekend in the Country

2011-09-12T09:57:00.001-07:00

In celebration of our 34th anniversary we took 4 days away from the hustle and bustle at home to have peace and quiet in the country. (Well, we didn’t have to go to the country, the beach or the mountains or anywhere would have been fine but the middle of nowhere is where they had reservations available.) We drove 5 hours southeast to Klamath Falls, a town you only want to see passing through.

We took our books, of course. Bags of them, and his laptop, and my recipe project, and a few videos. Heaven. The phone only rang once: it was the front desk checking to see that everything was satisfactory. Cell phones rang a few times: kids calling to say “happy anniversary”: welcome.

Impressionist photography on the way over, reminded me of “The Gleaners”.

Moon over Klamath Lake

View from our deck the next morning

Afternoon sun

Evening drive

Drama in the country

“September Morn”, “Summer’s End”

2011-09-06T17:37:00.000-07:00

How can Summer be leaving when she has just gotten here? After waiting through the longest, wettest, coldest spring on record for 50+ years, the sun has just come out to play nicely in the past week or so. It has been beautiful: blue skies and warm but not too hot, and a breeze blowing. Perfection. At the very end of August. Insult to injury that Summer should be so nice just when she’s leaving.

But the forecast here is for a beautiful September. Lovely: the kids are put back in school and activities have died down and now we can enjoy this loveliness without all the summer commotion.

As another late fling of summer, the dahlias are out in their finery. I went to the Swan Island Dahlia Festival on the weekend and walked up and down the rows bemused by the names and distinctives of the infinitude of varieties. So many choices! So many different kinds of dahlias, let alone colors of each. Maybe you already knew this.

A couple of the first ones I noticed were named “September Morn” and “Summer’s End” and “October Sky”. The flowers and the warm sunshine belied the turning of the seasons.

If you would like to see their catalogue, phone 1-800-410-6540 or go to www.dahlias.com

Have a wonderful September!

Hood-to-Coast Relay

2011-08-30T21:04:00.001-07:00

The MOTHER of All Relays

Hood To Coast Relay
200 miles
15,000 runners
30th Anniversary
4,100 volunteers
August 26-27, 2011
Largest Relay in the World!
Incredible Adventure with Unbeatable Scenery
From majestic Mt. Hood to beautiful Pacific Ocean in Seaside

It was early morning dark when I left the house. As I drove east to Mt. Hood there was a line of pink along the foothills and the blush of pink above. I drove through the towns heading up to the mountain: Sandy, Welches, Zigzag, Rhododendron. The sky was slashed a few times with lightning and a light rain fell.

Somewhere along the empty highway I saw the first runner, reflective tape glowing as he moved along on the shoulder of the highway. Then another, then another. Soon I began to see road crews out setting up orange traffic cones for the crowd to come. Vans of runners drove past me, honking their horns and cheering for the runners on the road.

This year the organizers allowed 250 additional teams to run bringing it to 1250 teams of 12 each, mixed male and female, 15,000 individuals participating. Each team is given a start time based on their calculations of running time. The first twenty teams left Timberline Lodge at 3:30 AM, then the next wave at 3:45, then Emily’s team along with 19 other teams started at 4 AM and so on through the morning and afternoon. The elite teams of runners (Nike, Adidas, etc) will start in the afternoon and during the night will likely pass the other competitors.

Each team has 2 vans with 6 runners each, so there are vans going up the mountain to start at their appointed time, and vans coming down from dropping one runner off to drop off the next one at the hand-off site. The vans leap frog over each other so as to give more rest time to the runners. The race is scheduled to take about 30 hours and by alternating their 2 vans the team members actually get a little sleep time—sitting up in a crowded-- and possibly smelly--vehicle, of course.

I drove and drove through the little towns and passing runners. I went by landmarks familiar from other races and began to worry that I had missed the check point for Emily’s lap. I was looking for the Rhododendron Mt. Hood General Store and imagining buying a cup of coffee to enjoy as I waited. But I became increasingly anxious that I had missed it, so I did a U-turn and pulled into a wide shoulder to call my darling husband who would know if I had gone too far or not far enough. I sat in my car with the windows rolled down because of condensation. As my husband answered the phone, a runner called to me “Hi, Mom!” and I looked in amazement as my daughter ran right by me. “It’s YOU!!”, I said in shock and delight, and she and the runner behind her laughed. Of course I didn’t have my camera ready for such a perfect opportunity and I couldn’t ask her to stop in the middle of her race.

After I gathered my wits I pulled out slowly and went down the road with my passenger side window open, hoping to get a shot of her as I passed. These are the great results:

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I drove down the road looking for the hand-off point. I passed runners and vans parked on the shoulder to wave their runners on. I drove past a couple intersections where volunteers in reflective vests were directing traffic. I drove slowly, looking for the end of the leg. I eventually decided I must have missed it somehow. This leg was 7.2 miles and it seemed to be forever. But finally, ahead of me was a weigh station filled with tightly parked vans and crowded with runners wearing everything from spandex to tutus.

A van pulled in with a row of pink flamingoes on its roof. Another van of dentists was titled the “Molar Express”. People were having fun, cheerily chatting in small groups and watching for their team member to come in. Their next runner would be getting ready, stripping off the sweat suit and tying back the hair. The energy was palpable in the early morning air.

I stood watching the runners come in. They pulled off their wrist bands and snapped it around their team mate’s wrist as he/she took off. Everyone clapped for everyone: the personal effort is laudable. Some come in lightly, bouncing on their toes. Some come in with awkward strides, twisting shoulders side to side. One man was quite heavy with a pot belly: I wondered how he could run 7.2 miles. Gray-haired or teen, thin or chubby, conditioned or not: this is Everyman’s race.

As runners come in, people crowd in front and want to see who it is. Some have clipboards and are checking their watches and keeping track of their schedule. Volunteers have to keep the crowd from encroaching onto the runners’ path.

There she is!! I see her and recognize her from quite a distance. I take a picture while no one’s in my way. Too far away. I try to take another but the camera is still in review mode. I snap again and get her exiting right out of the frame. She’s still running, running strong. Right past me.

I came home with thoughts of a morning nap enticing me, but for the runners, the race goes on. Emily’s next leg is during rush hour in Scappoose, and after that at 3 AM tomorrow in Jewel, near the coast. The race ends in Seaside where the beach is crowded with runners and sightseers watching to see the last runners come in and stretching out on the sand before they get back into their vans for the drive home.

COURSE & LEG MAPS

Vacation Reads

2011-08-25T21:33:00.001-07:00

What I filled my book bag with to go on vacation. I just love my red-lined western style bag from Trader Joe’s—makes me happy! Concerning the choice of furnishings we have in our home, April Cornell says;

“Simply said, get rid of unattractive disharmonious stuff. Add only items of value, richness and integrity. Value, richness and integrity don’t mean expensive; these qualities come at all price points, as does poor quality and bad design.”

“Being an artist doesn’t mean you can draw; being an artist means you can see.” Cornell, April, Decorating with Color, Sterling Publications, New York, 2004

Portrait of the Artist’s Studio

2011-08-19T16:45:00.001-07:00

I took a satchel full of books to read on my vacation. I only finished one while camping. Our second week in 2 resorts, I flipped through the pages of the others but had to come home to pay serious attention. Camping, I read Decorating with Color by April Cornell. Just last night and today I have read and studied and made notes on Where Women Create; book of inspiration by Jo Packham and Jenny Doh. It is this latter book I would like to comment on.

Where Women Create is a fascinating and beautiful look at the spaces women artists have as studios. For some, their studio is just an understair closet. For many, their work began with only a cupboard and the kitchen table but has grown to a spare bedroom, a top floor, a converted attic or basement, even a rented space. With about 4 pages per artist, we don’t have too much exposure to their actual creations, but we do learn something about how they fit their art into the circumstances of their lives, what inspires them, what their favorite palette is to work from, and what materials they hunt and gather for their creations. In a sense, the book is biographical and has a lot of human interest. Many of these artists have creative and artistic parents and grandparents [which would be an interesting avenue to pursue: nature or nurture? Are they genetically disposed to producing art, or did they lose the art fear factor from being around people who weren’t afraid to take a risk on income producing through their craft?]

My main frustration with this book is that it didn’t really show the creations of the artist. Mostly it showed the rooms where they have boxes and bins and baskets and Mason jars full of buttons and laces and paint brushes and rubber stamps and Victorian jewelry and bits and bobs of treasures for their particular craft. The photos looked like still lifes, beautifully rich and overflowing with their treasures. At page 102 during the night I was pretty frustrated with the book (well, it was 4:37 AM) because it was calling most of the women “mixed media artists” and telling what they used but not showing their actual product. I suppose that was outside the scope of the book, but it was frustrating to me to see so many “mixed media” artists who like to go to flea markets for their inspiration and shopping for supplies. Presumably they have different outcomes, which is what I would like to see as well as their working space.

Question: How many collages can the market bear made up of vintage sheet music, buttons and Victorian hat pins?

I guess I wanted someone to have a big empty space with a window and an easel who said “I’m a painter, pure and simple.” A can of brushes, a box of paints.

I guess the joy of the book is the beauty of their work spaces as well as the tidbits we glean about the artist’s obstacles which she overcame in order to follow her dream. One helpful item is that a website was given for each artist and another for her blog site so I can learn more about what they actually do.

Two quotes which caught my attention:

“When I feel uninspired, I know I need to start writing my morning pages and get into the process of listening…largely to my inner voice.” Janice Lowry (I liked this because she is referencing Julia Cameron’s recommendation in The Artist’s Way which I am also reading)

“For Jenny, art is about doing. ‘It’s not about envying, wishing, grumbling, complaining, criticizing, regretting, bemoaning, or any of the many blocks that become erected by negativity and passivity,’ she says. “I don’t like excuses that waste time pointing to blocks or walls that get in the way of life. We all have access to the same hours in a day. I choose to use those hours to make a life that I love.” Jenny Doh

Introspection

2011-07-28T20:25:00.001-07:00

Do you get messages from the universe? Where everyone seems to be saying the same general idea and you decide you’d better listen and take it in? Well, I do, once in a while, where everything converges and I hear a tune made out of the notes in the air, and I want to sing that tune, too, because it seems to be the Most Important Thing Happening. The trouble is I am often in a scheduled situation with pressure to meet commitments and responsibilities and I have to put that floating musical temptress out of my mind until I get my chores done. Whether that is nobility or avoidance, I do not know. Discipline has always been a tough pill for me to swallow: I want to fulfill my obligations but sometimes the cost seems so high. Time management and dreaming seem at cross purposes….In any event, I can’t follow every fairy note I hear. So, much of these whisperings and want-to’s get put on the back burner.
I have many back burners, so many that I can’t remember them all until the familiar notes play again, or a picture or a color reminds me of what is under the lid on that saucepan on the back burner. And sometimes I forget what was there and it just blows away in an unfulfilled state.
A few months ago I had one of these convergences. Several people whom I admire for their creative pursuits mentioned the very same book for its helpfulness to them in understanding their creative drive. In the space of a few days, at least 3 different people mentioned this book, The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron. I know one of them was Sue at Mouse Notebook. I believe one was Susan Branch who is always telling me (kindly) to get off my duff and do something creative. And I can’t remember for sure but I think the other one was Stephanie Levy at Artists Who Blog. I am mad at myself for forgetting what those harmonic chords were that led me to go out and buy the book.
But I did. I acted on it and I paid money to make it a concrete plan, even though it had to go on the back burner until after camp. When everything was going to settle down. So I have the book even though I’ve only read the Table of Contents.
It happened again. Just this week. A harmony of suggestions and possibilities that I heard, that got loud enough to attract my attention. But I can’t remember what I was thinking or reading that made my mind turn the way it did. I am so mad at myself for not being able to reconstruct the alleyway that brought me here. Even last night at dinner I was able to tell Ron about what inspired me to sign up for an art course.
Maybe it was this from Ann Somerset Miles’ blog:

Searching for a change of vision

seeing with new eyes

adapting my usual way of working;

letting myself loose, and

not being afraid of failure.

That's what today gave me:

surprising the great leap forward -

- and I did no fall into the water,

did not drown in indecision.

Just those few short hours

with a masterful tutor

is all it has taken;

and I will never be the same again.

Such joy. A day of wonders."

http://annmiles.blogspot.com/2011/07/visual-ancestry.html

Or maybe it was Stephanie Levy saying this that made me so crazy jealous to create:
12 Countries in 12 Months.
For one In just a few days, I am beginning a new art + travel project called year, I will take a trip each month to a new city in Europe where I'll be making photos and sketches, collecting ephemera, and documenting my journey by creating mixed media artwork and illustrated journals.
http://stephanielevy.blogspot.com/2011/07/12-countries-in-12-months-my-new-art.html

Or perhaps it was this course description in another blog from Stephanie that made my ears prick up and my heart beat faster:
“Topics will include:

believing in your creative dreams
pushing through your fears and developing your self-confidence
celebrating prosperity and earning money with your artwork
increasing your financial abundance by creating multiple income streams
using the internet as a way to stretch and grow your career as an artist
creating artwork without inhibition and how to avoid getting stuck
ditching procrastination for more creative play and practice
nurturing your body and soul to increase your creativity
avoiding burnout and promoting balance in your life
finding positive support for your work and building a network
connecting and collaborating with others to energize your creative business
creating daily adventure and making your life more interesting
expanding your horizons and finding your unique role in the world
developing practical strategies for time management for busy women
and much more! “

http://stephanielevy.blogspot.com/2011/07/introducing-my-new-e-course-creative.html
Or maybe it was just a composite of everything that has come my way from all the creative blogs I read, to my own yearning for expression.
In any event, I have decided to take a sabbatical from my normal, helter-skelter life and look seriously into my creative life. I don’t know what it means at the moment, exactly, or if I will in fact produce anything that brings me joy or money or brings anything of consequence to the world. The sabbatical aspect means that
1) I am not going to fill all my time with other people’s agendas. I will not be selfish, but I will be setting boundaries (I hope) on my time and energy.
2) I will set aside hours for the purpose of addressing back burner ideas and impulses.
3) We will not have international students living here this year, not so that I can be lazy but so I can give concentrated time to producing.
4)I will actually thoughtfully read The Artist’s Way and do the exercises it prescribes at the pace it recommends. I will journal, sketch, and pay attention to this drive in me.
5) I will follow through on my ideas, even if they don’t work. I hope I will keep following past the point of discouragement to the breakthrough of success.
6) I will take the e-course on Creative Courage and see where that leads me.
7) I will address all the stockpiled back burner issues for which I have already purchased paints, fabrics, patterns, or taken up storage space in my basement or craft room.
8) I will find that listening to the music of my life will bring me a quietness and satisfaction that I am missing currently.
9) I will plan little field trips to enjoy nature and art forms which will refresh and energize me, even if it’s just down the road or to a garden or toward the beach.
10) I will not sacrifice other significant relationships for this cause, such as my husband or my children or my God. I will also have time with them.
************************************************
I am very excited about this turning point. Calling it a sabbatical gives me the sense of permission I need to do things a little differently. I hope I am able to maintain my purpose; being in a class will help.
We are going camping this next week. I am taking my camera and a sketch pad to be ready for what comes!

Summer Camp

2011-07-27T18:49:00.001-07:00

Last week was my week as Director of Girls’ Camp at Eagle Fern. I feel today that I am just waking up from it, from the recovery process of a long haul of preparation and execution. In some ways this feels like my first day of summer vacation: the first discretionary time I have had since school let out. Today I can choose what I want to do first: shall I do laundry, or water the plants, or go out to lunch, or write, or organize my craft room jumble? The joy of choosing is part of the summertime freedom.

If I told you about camp from a camper’s viewpoint I would tell about the skits and the s’mores, and the counselor dress-up With the judges and the campfires and the western day and the crazy hair day and the pajama breakfast and the skill sessions where we learned to sew or go on the challenge course or do woodworking or dancingHip-hop class

or cheerleading or french braiding with ribbons. I would tell you about how nice Amanda is and how her stories about Much-Afraid in that book made me think she was just like me. I would tell you about free time and the store where we got to spend money every afternoon and do crafts and go swimming or go on the zip line or the giant swing or the challenge course or do archery or shoot BB guns. There were so many things to do and it was so much fun to be with my friends for a week to sleep in the same cabin and stay up late whispering and giggling.

If I told you about camp from a director’s point of view I would start in March with a sheet of names and email all of last year’s counselors. I would tell of searching for the unknown group of 24 counselors needed to staff 12 cabins of girls, and the repeated phone calls and emails and unreturned messages left until just the right group of counselors was solidified the week before camp. April was spent leaving phone messages so my trip with my dad in May wouldn’t interfere with camp progress. The big worry was getting an activities person and a music person, two vital roles that eluded me until the week before camp. I called every musical person I knew who could lead and play an instrument at the same time; you’d be surprised how many of them are otherwise employed during the summer. Our activities person was a new-to-me recruit from Amanda’s university, and what a relief to have her! Every morning and evening there is an all-camp activity such as the counselor dress-up for the “Miss Eagle Fern” Pageant, a scavenger hunt, etc. Five evenings we had planned prior to the activities person coming on board: a movie night, a hoe-down,

Electric slide after the Virginia Reel wore out

Hoe down fiddlers

2 campfire nights with s’mores,

a banquet night and the Miss Eagle Fern pageant.

So, besides recruiting, a great deal of energy before the week started went into scheduling the classes, chapel times, cabin activities and all camp activities. Charts were made as to what was offered each day and sign-up sheets made. Skill sessions were planned with various counselors leading them. The girls had to be divided into their cabin groups including their requested cabin buddy and/or counselor. And then on the day camp started new registrants walked in the door with plaintive voices “I thought my grandpa was signing me up. Can I be in -----‘s cabin?”

After that, the camp was in session and the momentum was rolling. At that point, the counselors became the key players and the director’s job was mostly done, Me and my co-director, my daughter Emily

apart from time-keeping, bell-ringing for each transition, and keeping the high school and college staff apprised of our needs and paper towel shortages.

Was it a good week? Very. That’s all you really wanted to know but I just had to say the rest of it. On the last day as I led the line of campers to the rec center to be picked up by parents, a camper said to me, “I waited a whole year for this week and now I have to wait a nuther whole year.” Another camper said, “We never have breakfasts like this at home. This food here is so good.”

Some of our girls come from very poor circumstances and some from financially comfortable. Their heartaches have no economic boundaries, however. Loss of one parent or another affects many. Trouble with friends and self image is common. Knowing that they are loved by us and, more importantly, by the Lord, is the real mission of the week. In this, Amanda did a wonderful job of sharing Hinds’ Feet on High Places (Hannah Hurnard), the allegory of a young girl learning to trust the guidance of a Shepherd. Trying to make a team cheer

A misty flag salute

Finally, after a few wet days, blue sky

The cooks get to eat at last

Displaying headbands made in Crafts

Learning to crochet Learning to play Mountain Dulcimer--she did!

New Friend

Old friend

Hangin’ out in the plaza, waitin’ for the bell to ring This cabin’s counselors made matching book bags and tie-dyed shirts for their campers!

Ezekiel entertains at campfire Chapel

A Happy Camper

and a happy director! But I don’t mean to give the impression that it is our doing which made the camp successful. Everything was prayed over and our prayers were answered. We had so many last minute personnel changes and the Lord supplied our needs. The books which were to be the big prize on Friday night arrived on Thursday via UPS at camp. The flu which was going around from the previous week didn’t spread to our campers (however, I came home with it). We had no accidents or injury except a bee sting and some homesick tummy aches. No behavioral problems. No whining or grumbling about the weather or anything! Everyone did what she was supposed to do and the staff genuinely cared for the campers!

Yes, it was a great week!

Away from my desk

2011-07-15T23:56:00.001-07:00

Starting tomorrow I am directing a week of camp for girls grades 4 through 6. I have been swimming in lists labeled “to do”, “to buy” and “to gather”. At the moment I have a load in the washer and a load in the dryer and have just finished previewing the movie we plan to have for movie night—I had to make sure it wouldn’t give the girls nightmares or giddiness. In cabins with 10 girls there is a certain amount of hysteria expected.

My daughter and son-in-law and grandbaby who have been here for a month are leaving tomorrow also. So I have to kiss that chubby sweet baby face goodbye for another stretch of time.

You can imagine with all of us doing errands and buying and gathering and packing what a commotion there has been. The past couple of days my phone and my cell phone have been ringing every 5 minutes with last minute questions from counselors and late camper registrations too.

All week I have been looking for wrapping paper on a roll that is maps, old maps or fanciful maps (I was even thinking of Pooh’s “100 AKER Wood”), anything that would look like a map to be a table runner for banquet night. Our theme is “Journey” using the book Hinds Feet on High Places as a starting point. I went to Craft Warehouse, Pier 1 Imports, World Market, Learning Palace, and IKEA. Not one map anywhere, let alone on rolls of paper. I know I have seen it at other times. So I came home from my last effort to find it today and next to “Map wrapping paper” on my “to buy” list, I scratched it out and wrote a note to self: “forget about it”. Then I went down to the laundry and rummaged in my basement behind the hurricane of half-done projects and kids’ stored left-behinds, and guess what I found. A big roll of antique map wrapping paper, perfect for table runners on the banquet tables.

What is the message here? It’s hard not to interpret it as proof for the “Never throw anything away because you might need it” school of thought. Or I could get the message, “Keep better track of your inventory”, or “Don’t let your stuff get into such a mess that you are driving yourself crazy looking for it” (only I wasn’t looking for it because I had no idea that I had such a thing in my basement). Another interpretation is “God is good, He is my Help in times of trouble, wigged-out stress, and other incompetencies”. That’s the one I’m going with. I’m counting on it for the whole week.

water balloons

a happy camper after store time

modeling the hat she just learned to make

Backing up to go forward

2011-07-10T20:17:00.001-07:00

(in which I take you back to my road trip in order to get myself home so I can start writing about the things I am currently doing.) Leaving Ogden, Utah A Utah Dustbowl

You know how it is when you are headed home from a good time and in a way you can’t wait to be back at all the comforts of home, but on the other hand you are really are dragging your feet about leaving the fun? That’s how it was leaving Denver for me. The next stop of any significance to me was Portland where my sweetheart was enduring the care and feeding of 2 high school boys. I was eager to see him but not the kitchen or the housework or the stacks of mail. Or the phone messages.

I just wanted to keep on going in the car, on and on seeing things, watching the world out my window. Staying in motel rooms that I didn’t have to clean or make up the beds, eating nightly in restaurants: What’s not to love?

But besides getting home to my soul mate I had a burning desire to get home and paint, to express some of what I had taken in visually. I was so full of images! Colors! Textures! The beauty and drama of our good land. My photos don’t begin to express what my eyes saw; the lighting in a camera can’t do justice in a split second what the eye has seen and absorbed. So I am bummed about my photos, to say nothing of the fact that the car was moving when I took a lot of them. Through the bug-splotched, rain-dropped windshield. You see my problem.

I am not at all sure that painting will be any improvement over the photos. I don’t know if I can really express what my heart was filled with, passing by. But perhaps the expression is what I really seek, not the outcome.

So I went to get some new paints and brushes. I have painted in the past but I’m sure the tubes are all dried up by now. In the past few years I have dealt more with fabric textiles in banner making. I want to start out fresh with this.

Knowing I want to use acrylics was just the start. Do you know how many kinds of acrylics there are? There are professional grade and student grade and all levels of density, opacity, and translucency. In different brands. They have numbers leveling them from 1 to 9. Who knew? And the higher the level number the more the tube cost.

Then there are the colors. Back in ‘my day’ you just had primary colors, secondary and tertiary colors plus black and white. Now if you want a “Red” you have to choose between 6 or 8 tints, shades, tones, what have you. I just wanted red Red. And if I want it to go bluish I’ll add blue. Simple. The same with all the colors, the endless variety. Artists aren’t supposed to need such a business sense before they can express their creativity. Fortunately I had a non-artist friend along with me to help make these financial decisions.

So I have about $86.00 invested in the hope of self-expression. I have 10 small canvases which I hope will be filled enthusiastically, sending me back over and over to get more canvas. Then it would be nice if I could find a market for them so I can go out and buy more paint.

I hope it works, I hope it works, I hope I will do it.

Shoshone Falls, Idaho

But who would believe it in a painting?

Is this June, or what?

2011-06-21T15:40:00.001-07:00

Since getting back to Portland I have been caught up in a whirlwind of activities, graduations, arrivals and departures and birthdays and baby showers. Oh, yes, and a high school reunion of sorts. First of all, my first Sunday back we celebrated Mother’s Day and four of our May birthdays, son-in-law John, me, daughter-in-law Nichole, son Brett.

Then it was Memorial Day and some of us went to the cemetery where many of my forbears are buried. My brother cleaned their headstones

and we talked about who was who and family history

and remembered the lives and sacrifices of so many…

Then it was on to graduation time and we celebrated with our Chinese student “Jeff”

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On the same day I had an all-class reunion/farewell party at my high school which is closing its doors forever. Portland is eliminating 3 high schools this year whether for budget cuts or demographics or repair costs, I don’t know. I saw my old art teacher that I spent a lot of time with, and my old principal who is still looking pretty dour. Some things don’t change. I was surprised at how unchanged the building itself was; amazing after almost 50 years. It was fun to walk the halls and look at my old lockers, remember the sounds of high school…

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Then we had another graduation. My darling daughter-in-law Nichole graduated from Nurses Training and got “pinned”. At the pinning ceremony Brett was the one to “pin” her. He has a new job now as an ambulance driver so we feel quite safe with them around!

A friend made these totally edible nurse cookies for Nichole’s party, and her dad made the cake below: There was time for coffee and catching up with friends:

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and then it was time for our undergraduate student to finish up and go home to Korea for the summer. Alan, alarmed at the sizzling fajitas he’d ordered: Farewell, Alan!

Then we enjoyed the arrival home of our daughter and son-in-law and our grandson. They are staying with us for a few weeks so I get to enjoy seeing my grandson for a while.

My girls: And then we had Father’s Day. It was a perfect day of enjoying our Heavenly Father in church, then taking my father to his favorite restaurant, then having my husband’s choice of a good time: having his kids over to play games. We were going to do Hand and Foot, but we ended up playing Battle of the Sexes which always gets lots of lively conversation and friendly competition going at our house. And a nice Sunday night supper.

My DH, the one who won my heart and who wins it still: (looking a little more rakishly charming than usual with his camping beard and sunburn) But, there’s more to come. Today is another birthday of a son and this weekend we are having a baby shower for which Emily made these darling invitations:

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I know I left my trip somewhere in Ogden, Utah, and I hope I will get us back home soon but so much was going on around here I felt the need to stay current so abandoned the trip temporarily.

Higher and Higher

2011-06-09T18:26:00.001-07:00

This blog is dedicated to Gilly who needs to come and see the Rockies herself.

We left Denver on Saturday morning having said our good-byes to the family on Friday night. Dad chose our route with input from me ;) saying how much I had enjoyed the Red Rock Canyon west of Glenwood Springs a few years back on a train. I had noticed in narrow spots there was only room for the train, the Colorado River, and a highway which I hoped to traverse some day. Subsequently, my DH and I drove it, but here was another chance! A remarkable piece of road.

We were sad about the clouds going up into the mountains, afraid that we would miss the views:

But soon the sun broke through:

Coming up to the famous Eisenhower Tunnel:

The Eisenhower Tunnel is so named because of his effort to get an interstate highway system. It is the highest vehicular tunnel in the world, at 11,112 feet elevation. It is 1.69 miles long which seems like a long ways when you are in it. It is clean and bright which you can’t tell from my photos taken at 55 mph! Through the windshield, no less. At the summit is Lake Dillon, now frozen over:

Ski runs visible in Vail:

Many ski condos in Glenwood Springs and Vail:

Coming into the red rock area:

Nice textures:

There is a bike trail running alongside the river below the highway: The photo below shows the train tracks on the left, the Colorado River, a very small ribbon of bike trail and then the split-level eastbound and westbound lanes of I-70:

I did not “fix” this rock color, I swear. It was all like this, which is what makes the other photos disappointing. Impressive clouds; rain in the distance:

The day’s not over yet but it’s time for me to quit.

[I have struggled to move between Windows Live Writer, Picasa 3 for collages, and my original blogger site. For some reason when I do a collage and post it , it always goes to Blogspot and not Live Writer where I am working. Can anyone out there help me?]

Now, what shall I make for dinner?

Give Me Land, Lots of Land, Under Starry Skies Above…

2011-06-09T16:10:00.001-07:00

This is the first view we had of the mountains coming into a Denver neighborhood. They just loom over the town; at first you wonder if they are low-lying clouds.

From my sister’s street in Denver (which they are soon moving from):

We went on a drive to the mountains where my sister and her husband are rebuilding his family cabin to be their year-round residence. On the way we saw:

We enjoyed the sunshine, especially because it had snowed in Denver the night before, yes, on May 13!

We had started out the day having breakfast with them at their favorite, The Original House of Pancakes. We laughed when they told us the name because we have The Original House of Pancakes in Portland. Come to find out, their daughter-in-law has one in Winnipeg, and our brother has one in Maryland. So we thought they were all fakes.

When we got to the restaurant I found it suspiciously reminiscent of ours in Portland, the cozy knotty pine and dishes on the plate rail. Sure enough, the menu tied the two together as having the same origin. They are famous for their Dutch Babies, which I couldn’t resist (Oh, with lemon and powdered sugar they are heavenly!):

Ron and Gretchen had Strawberry Crepes:

So good to have time with them!

Then we went up to the mountains for the afternoon, but we had to come back for a birthday celebration in town with my niece, their daughter, who has the very same birthday as I do!

Life is good! So thankful for this short but full time with my sister and her family and Dad. We only were with them from Thursday afternoon to Friday night but every moment was full of good things and being together. Sweet!

Cabin in the Rockies

2011-06-09T15:25:00.000-07:00

This is the cabin my sister and her husband have been doing extensive remodeling on in order to live there year round. Originally his family's summer cabin, it has been the source of many family get-togethers and many happy memories.
They lifted the ceiling, insulated inside and underneath the house, knocked out walls of small rooms to make an open floor plan, and have rewired, replumbed and refinished every inch of it. It has a beautiful new bathroom (in the former days it had an outhouse. I remember that from 1968.) It has a new laundry set-up and lovely new windows. The kitchen is tiny but charming.
This is 700 square feet of space. How would you reduce the accumulation of 42 years of marriage into 700 square feet? The choices of what to keep and what to part with are mind boggling. Of course there are family mementos from earlier generations but what do you have room to carry with you?
I'm afraid the process would kill me. I am such a collector 1) because I love everything and am sentimental and 2) because I can think of so many ways to use my stuff when I am called upon to decorate a conference or banquet...But mostly, I just store it. I admire my sister for the philosophical way she is paring down in order to live the way they want, in a cabin among the aspens.
By the way, the pictures on the wall are photos taken by my brother-in-law who is very talented in photography.

In the Rockies

2011-06-09T15:01:00.000-07:00

Among the Lodgepole and Ponderosa and Aspen trees there is a cabin nestled on 5 acres of mountain valley. Deer wander through and birds fly by. The quietness is its own music. My sister and brother in law are making it their new home. Can you see it in 2 pictures above?

Pigs and Barn Quilts

2011-06-02T19:31:00.001-07:00

We took a lesser used route from Des Moines to points west in order to see some of the local sights and wonders that you don’t get on the Interstate. This house in Panora, Iowa, was one of them. I wish I had gotten a side view as well, but our car was moving and I didn’t want to miss the charming gate.

If these last 2 pictures seem familiar, it’s because we saw a lot of this. It is NOT a duplicate of a picture you’ve already seen. I told you, there are a lot of roads without much traffic leading up to and passing by little farm houses and barns and silos all nestled into a grove of poplars and willows (if they have a creek). I am going to paint this truth on canvas.

Earlier, in Oskaloosa, we went by a barn with a Texas Star on it. I thought to myself, “Oh, there lives a quilter.” But I didn’t take a picture. I kicked myself about this, especially when I came across a postcard of “Barn Quilts”. And now I kick myself for not buying that, either. What was I thinking?

So when we drove by this I yelped and we stopped so I could snap it. However, it’s not nearly the barn the other one was: the other one was red and in better shape generally. But no way was I going to pass up another barn quilt. And this one came with pigs.

PIGS

Lovely big fat pigs

While we are on the subject of pigs, I will tell you that at my new favorite restaurant, the Iowa Machine Shed Restaurant, I bought a book in their gift shop about pigs. It’s called All Pigs Are Beautiful by Dick King-Smith. He is also the author of Babe: the Gallant Pig which was made into the movie Babe, which is a must see for everyone. Especially if you are a farmer’s wife.

No conversation about pigs is complete without a salute to Wilbur of Charlotte’s Web. He was some pig, as Charlotte herself said.

But back to Barn Quilts: Barn quilts are large (usually 8 feet square) and brightly colored with primary and secondary colors in traditional patterns of an agricultural or natural theme. They are all over in Iowa. [And when I got to Colorado, I found a brochure listing all the different barn quilt tours (9 of them) that you can take in one county alone!] Did you all already know about this phenomenon sweeping the center of our country?

“The American barn quilt movement started in Adams County, Ohio, when Donna Sue Groves painted a quilt block on her tobacco barn to honor her mother, a master quilter. Sac County embraced the barn quilt idea and quickly became the Iowa leader in the number of barn and community quilts painted and installed around the county. While you can see a barn quilt in almost a third of Iowa's counties now, and in 25 different states, you'll see more quilts in Sac County than just about anywhere else!” http://www.barnquilts.com/about.html

http://www.offenburger.com/lspaper.asp?link=20051106

Somewhere before Ogallala, our destination for the night, we got into a terrible terrible rainstorm! Made all the worse by our need for a rest area. One was closed for repairs, one was made into a “for trucks only” stop. We got to a stop –finally- just when the skies broke wide open with thunder and lightning and buckets of water. We hesitated to get out of the car but as Dad said, we were going to get wet one way or the other, so we made a dash for it. These next 2 terrible pictures are included only to remind me of how powerful the storm was. Every car and truck pulled into the rest area after us because the visibility was so bad on the road.

The next morning at breakfast in our motel some other guests said that they had had snow all the way from Cheyenne for 350 miles the day before. They said they’ve done this trip every year for 20 years and it was the first time they’d been in a snowstorm in mid-May. We compared weather stories and set off for our relatively short trip to Denver.

More Iowa Than We Expected

2011-06-01T21:44:00.001-07:00

I hope you folks aren’t getting tired of hearing about my travels. I am combining several days here just to speed things up.

When we left our tale, Dad and I had just arrived in Des Moines after a big day. We were on our way to Denver, our next big goal of the trip, to see my sister and her family. It was Sunday night.

I liked the decorating details of our Sleep Inn so much I thought I would share them with my blogging friends. I was thoroughly indoctrinated into the farm and country motif by now.

In the lobby: 3 old screen doors fastened to the wall as coat rack. These were by far our hottest days and most humid, and no coats in sight.

In the dining area: metal chairs with animal cut-out backs and carved wooden table base with glass topper

Now this I loved: an old door converted into a coffee table with the addition of carved legs. It helps that the door was quite an interestingly carved one. Not like my closet doors at home; wouldn’t put them on display anywhere… Outside on the porch, an inviting row of rockers v

In the lobby:

On Monday morning we checked out after breakfast and headed west, stopping to visit long time Cedar Rapids friends from Mom’s girlhood. After a nice visit, I hopped out of the car to take this picture and we discovered a pool of oil under the car. Not good!

Our friends directed us to a repair shop which was also the Honda dealer in town and incidentally right across the road from our hotel of the night before. They diagnosed the problem as a hole in the oil pan from something we had run over in the road, and there were several other things that had gotten banged up. They were quite concerned about the amount of oil left in the engine and said we couldn’t drive it anywhere safely. They ordered the parts needed which would come from Davenport the next day. So we went back to our hotel, asked for our old room and prepared to stay for a few more days.

Did I mention this was my birthday? And the day before was Mother’s Day? I was a teensy bit homesick to be with my family at this point and felt like I was hostage in Des Moines. And it was really humid!

Dad went back to the dealership to sit with his car like a family member in Intensive Care Unit. He took care of the insurance business while I stayed happily in the air-conditioned room finishing my latest J. A. Jance mystery.

I found a new love that night at dinner: The Iowa Machine Shed Restaurant. Right next to our hotel, it was a celebration of farm produce and home cooking with all the decor to match, and a gift shop, to boot. Shades of Cracker Barrel. It was a perfect birthday dinner. Just look: old farm equipment and kitchen antiques decorated the walls

Dad had the pork loin ( 2 thick stuffed slabs, enough for 2 people, really) which came with fresh green beans , potatoes and gravy and I had pot roast. The meal started with a basket of different breads and the salad course was individual bowls of fresh-made cottage cheese and coleslaw for each. I was full right then! The funny thing is that although we were staying there for several days, we never went back there because Dad said it was ‘too much food’.

The next day I went back to shop, though, and enjoyed all the John Deere toys and farm cookbooks.

Aprons for sale:

The repair shop loaned us a vehicle and we went out to visit old friends. ( Mom and she were friends from 8th grade and were letter writers after moving away from each other. Dad and Mom always visited them on cross-country trips.)

We also went to Dallas Center to kill time. This pretty little chapel is where a distant cousin of mine got married:

Along the road from Dallas Center to Des Moines, the different dark brown soils, such rich earth:

And the other thing we did when driving in the country: Yum, yum.

Reading the paper:

Good Night! Good Night!

Travels with my Dad—Day 8

2011-05-29T23:58:00.001-07:00

After attending College Church in Wheaton, we decided to hit the road westward. Dad had in mind to show me some of the childhood towns where Mom lived before her folks settled in Cedar Rapids. She was born in Des Moines when they lived in Marshalltown, and as her dad’s business grew they moved to Fremont where she went to elementary school in a class of 8 students and then moved to Cedar Rapids for middle school and was thrown into a class of 200.

It was a beautiful sunny day for a drive. We enjoyed getting off the interstate and going through the Amana colonies, North English and South English and through the small towns of Iowa.

A generic small town in Iowa—just typical old brick , flags waving, only 2 storied buildings.

The farmland in Iowa is not flat. I loved the gently rolling fields and noted the greenways in the dips, presumably for erosion control, or perhaps ease of tilling.

Old and new, silos and cell towers ^

In Fremont there is a new school so we didn’t actually see where Mom attended,

v Margaret, (top row, 3rd child)

but we did see the bank where her saved-up nickels were lost during the Depression:

From there to Oskaloosa where her aunt and uncle and cousins lived, and then on toward Des Moines.

On the road is the charming Dutch town of Pella which is best known for being the home of Pella Windows and Doors. I will remember it for its tulips and windmills, however. It was getting close to dusk when we arrived so picture taking was iffy, and being Sunday night the streets were empty. We learned later that the tulip festival had been that weekend and we had just missed it. I could tell that it was a place I would like to linger: the streets were so tidy, the yards were immaculate, and the shop windows so enticing (but closed, alas). The businesses all had Dutch names: Van Dyke, Vermeer, Van Den Berg.

The town square, above and below.

At days end we arrived in Des Moines which seemed like a large and confusing city in our fatigue. Finding our way to the motel was stressful and once there we didn’t really want to go out to find supper at 10 PM. It was our only supperless day, and it suited both of us just fine.

Then and Now

2011-05-26T22:18:00.000-07:00

The Marion Wade Center at Wheaton houses the C.S. Lewis library as well as 6 other British authors. In the photo above you see the Lewis family wardrobe which was the inspiration for The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and was given to Wheaton by the family. The top center photo is the reading room of the Wade Center where I could happily sit and avoid going to class or doing homework. The bridge pictures of Dad are at the Lagoon, a healthy walk from campus for young dating couples. Dad took this photo of Mom at the Lagoon in the 40's: