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Cloud Gate

I was in Chicago with five friends for the weekend to celebrate Inge's birthday, happy me! It's just a 4-hour drive, and we don't get there often enough.

Inge's sister flew in from Germany, and three friends from Minneapolis took the low cost intercity Megabus, which turned out to be a 13-hour nightmare Friday of three miles forward and two miles back through the flooded plains of Wisconsin. Horrible! I hope they're home by now, since the bus driver for yesterday's return trip didn't seem to have a clue about the floods and after 4 hours on the road last night they were headed BACK from Milwaukee toward Illinois!

But we had a fantastic couple of days in the city, with gorgeous blue skies.
I had never seen the stainless steel bean sculpture by British (but Bombay-born) Anish Kapoor called "Cloud Gate" in Milennium Park. (Please click on the link in "Cloud Gate" to see the bean shape, which I didn't photograph.) It's inspired by liquid mercury, which I remember playing with as a kid when a thermometer broke. Do you see my reflection, below? (Sorry, I don't know why the image doesn't enlarge when you click on it. That feature is so inconsistent for me!)
The weekend was clouded for me big time by the death of Tim Russert. I still can't believe he's gone. No one will be able to take his place. And in one of the most stimulating presidential election years ever!




I added a closer picture for you, Sharon. Me in the bottom right wearing my new $7 linen skirt from Filene's Basement.

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after

After days of fits and outbursts
from sky to ground . . .

. . . light softened into evening,

and I was healed,

I adjusted . . .

. . . as if an angry word had never been spoken.

The torn tree still lies in sawed pieces. The honeybees still swarm around their hive in the fallen limb. The leaves on the standing remnant bend in the breeze.

I bend with nature, I submit - holding on, like a spider on a blade of grass.

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tapping the maple

After Anet's neighbor's tree fell in a strong wind, we got ours.

While a group of 20 of us played outside Sunday (some of Don's family were visiting for the day), the weather started to change. Before we realized what was happening, sirens were blowing in town, and our neighbor Bill came over to warn us to get inside.

Just before we got to the basement, the funnel cloud was forming above our house, and this maple tree, the home of the honeybees, split at the Y and fell across the driveway.

We waited out the storm in the basement - my first time ever to do so, and I live in a tornado state!

Then the lumberjacks chain-sawed, tugged, rolled and dragged the fallen timber out of the way.

Only one bee sting, poor Mike.

If you're going to have people visit for a day, be sure to provide thrilling entertainment, and Nature activities. Oh, and if you have a tree fall in your yard, be sure to time it for when there are six burly types to clean it up.

We're so grateful no one was hurt.

(Well, besides Mike's bee sting, and Clyde having a branch fall on his head while he was using the chainsaw.)

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swallowtail

Mid-spring (now), two large flowering shrubs/trees bloom. The white one is a mock orange, whose light, delicate blossoms emit a heavy fragrance.

The pink one is a, um, I don't know what it is. I can smell no discernable scent, although Don can.

















In our yard, these trees are not visible to each other.

They stand about 200 feet apart, on either side of the house.

Every year the swallowtail butterflies make a frenzied path between them, drinking, drinking, drinking. Such immoderation.

First at the mock orange.

Then at the, um, whatever-it-is-pink tree.









Each swallowtail adult lives about one month. There are 500 species of swallowtail. You can see one of them here is predominantly yellow, while the other is black.

I just added this different swallowtail to show another color combination:

I never knew that a gentleman's cutaway coat is called a swallowtail.

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l'atelier

Don and Peter
turned this
chicken coop
into a studio.


That was before
we knew Don
would have
chickens.

I think we began calling it l'atelier because we moved to the farm the same year we went to Paris to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary (2003).

It's not just mine, but everyone acts like it is.

Lesley gave me a hammock chair that hangs from the ceiling. I challenge you to try to read in this chair and stay awake more than five minutes.

Besides read

and sleep,

sometimes I write here.

I started painting last year, and didn't even finish my first painting. It's hard work! I don't want to show you what I have so far. Here is my little canvas before I started. That's my Grandma Olive's easel. She was a professional artist/designer.



I was following instructions from Brian Simons online.

I got the underpainting, value study and colors blocked in, but I never finished the painting.

If Gwen, Sharon or Laura
will come give me lessons,
maybe I'll finish it.

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my state, his poem

If you want to see this temporary collage better, click on it. And no, everything doesn't have significance. A few things do. Can you spot them?

-

Oh, and it isn't easy to make a collage when you've cleaned out your junk drawers after reading the wabi sabi book. I had to dig into the jewelry box, the feather vase and a few other storage places.

Three New Yorker magazines had piled up without my reading a single article. So I put them in order and started with the May 19 edition.

I always read the poems first, and this was the first poem. It tickled me so much I want to share it with you. Well, and it also has a couple of funny but sad lines.

(I was born in Lansing, Michigan in 1956. I've lived in other parts of the country and the world - Oregon, Chicago, Pasadena, Istanbul - a few years here and there, but I've lived in the mitten state almost as long as this poet, Bob Hicok.)

* * * * * * *

A Primer
by Bob Hicok

I remember Michigan fondly as the place I go
to be in Michigan. The right hand of America
waving from maps or the left
pressing into clay a mold to take home
from kindergarten to Mother. I lived in Michigan
forty-three years. The state bird
is a chained factory gate. The state flower
is Lake Superior, which sounds egotistical
though it is merely cold and deep as truth.
A Midwesterner can use the word “truth,”
can sincerely use the word “sincere.”
In truth the Midwest is not mid or west.
When I go back to Michigan I drive through Ohio.
There is off I-75 in Ohio a mosque, so life
goes corn corn corn mosque, I wave at Islam,
which we’re not getting along with
on account of the Towers as I pass.
Then Ohio goes corn corn corn
billboard, goodbye, Islam. You never forget
how to be from Michigan when you’re from Michigan.
It’s like riding a bike of ice and fly fishing.
The Upper Peninsula is a spare state
in case Michigan goes flat. I live now
in Virginia, which has no backup plan
but is named the same as my mother,
I live in my mother again, which is creepy
but so is what the skin under my chin is doing,
suddenly there’s a pouch like marsupials
are needed. The state joy is spring.
“Osiris, we beseech thee, rise and give us baseball”
is how we might sound were we Egyptian in April,
when February hasn’t ended. February
is thirteen months long in Michigan.
We are a people who by February
want to kill the sky for being so gray
and angry at us. “What did we do?”
is the state motto. There’s a day in May
when we’re all tumblers, gymnastics
is everywhere, and daffodils are asked
by young men to be their wives. When a man elopes
with a daffodil, you know where he’s from.
In this way I have given you a primer.
Let us all be from somewhere.
Let us tell each other everything we can.

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