hand thrown

When Gwen posted a watercolor ode to her hand thrown mug made by a potter friend, I remembered the feel of bygone hand thrown mugs wistfully.

But oh! We have a hand thrown earthen mug in our very own home that has never been filled with anything but pens. With mixed shame and pleasure, I rescued it from a little seen alcove table in the sewing/treadmill room. Lesley had bought this beautiful piece of craft from a fellow art student named Rochel and given it to Don, but the handle-less vessel didn't call to his hand, or to mine at the time.


















I abandoned my factory made snowman mug, also given to Don, by one of his students, and poured hot coffee into the earthen mug.

How had I settled for the straight, smooth factory ceramic when I could have felt the slight curve and the subtle striations in my hand and the slightly thicker glossy glazed lip on my lips, and looked at the artistic Rothko squares instead of a cartoon snowman?

And I never hold a mug by the handle anyway.

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the 'bastard'

Please click on the images to see the details better.

This old 7-foot cabinet stands in our family room. It was named "the Bastard" affectionately by a local antique dealer because of how it combines several furniture styles: bits of Empire, Rococo, Neoclassical, etc, and the extra wooden base added at the bottom for height.

My mom's mom, Grandma Olive, made a living as an artist~illustrator~designer as a single mom in the 1920s and -30s when she and my grandfather were divorced. My mom was just 6 then, in 1924. I think I met Grandma Olive at least once (she lived several states away), but she died in1960 when I was 4; I have no memories of her. I wish I could ask her about many things, including this cabinet, which belonged to her.

Grandma Olive painted the Romanesque scene on the door of the cabinet, above. Here's a detail, below.



Mom told me that Grandma Olive was always picking up stray pieces of furniture at a bargain on the back streets of NYC (they lived across the bay in Bayonne, New Jersey), then taking them home to rejuvenate with her artistic imagination.

When I got this cabinet after my parents died, it was hard for me to put anything on the shelves besides "pretty" things - like the vases on top. But something in me rebelled against pretty decorating for the sake of form and not function, so now I keep my oversized books and some of our CDs there. Since I think books are beautiful, and piles of books even more so, I am okay with my own "bastardization" of this old treasure.

I dream of someday writing a book about four women: Grandma Olive, my mom, me, and my daughter Lesley. In it I would have to "create" Olive, since all I have are some things she touched, created, repaired, loved, and a few words about her from my mom and dad, and my older siblings. Although Olive had, and created, many beautiful things, I've read a couple of her letters that show material things weren't all to her. She had a big heart, but didn't always know how to share it.

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standard rural

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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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