"Pictures" from The Lacuna by Kingsolver

" . . . in the first hour of dawn, just as the hem of the sky began to whiten." p.1

"In front of the flat stone breast of the church . . . " p.10

"The heat made a necklace of black pearls on each white tortilla as it cooked." p. 20

"Three long-legged girls in dresses straddling one grey mare, their legs hanging down like a giant insect." p. 37

"Married couples come at a clip, the children like rafts towed on ropes behind the ship." p.396

And on page 319 the following, which is very interesting to me because of where I come from and because I make an extra syllable of the past tense.

Her words seem scripted by Chaucer. She says "strip-ed" and "learn-ed", making an extra syllable of the past tense. A sack is a "poke." Surveying the piles of letters she declared, "Mr. Shepherd, you get mail by the passel." She says "nought" and "nary a one," and the garden greens she brought me were "sallets," the word Shakespeare used. She says "queasy" to mean worried, as did King Lear.

Jaime for Luck!

It's been a rough year. I'm hopeful that things will get better. We started out in February with a bathroom remodeling job that just didn't quit. Gary's good friend, Dewey, went into hospice care and died within months. Then Aunt Mary (Gary's) died almost simultaneously with our nephew Brian, who was only 40 and in a car wreck. At the same time our niece and her husband decided to call it quits. Soooooo, it hasn't been a pretty site. I'm hopeful the only way is up from here.

I took a figure painting class with Carla O'Conner and am hooked. Again. I've been heading this way for a while, but wouldn't admit it. Jaime is partially finished and I've included her in this post.

I've been oh, so happy with my flowers this spring. The crocus, daffodils, and tulips came first; then the redbud, fothergilla, and bridal white spirea, followed by the lilac, odorata clematis, sea thrift, and siberian iris. Now one of the day lilys is in bloom, the snow-in-summer, the henrii clematis and the berengaria. It's been one continuous show.

Jack B. Nimblequick

At the left you see a "sketch" for Jack B. Niblequick. I've spent 4 days at a workshop with Karlyn Holman and am inspired. Jack was actually an experiment gone wrong (we were using water soluble pens) but I liked him so much that I'm determined to do him again--this time with a candle holder on the window frame. I also think I'll do "bread and honey" and "four and twenty". See if you can guess what those are about?

Are we guilty?

Ghandi's list of mankind's seven social sins:

Commerce without Morality

Politics without Principle

Wealth without Work

Pleasure without Conscience

Education without Character

Science without Humanity

Worship without Sacrifice

I've just finished a book that uses the 1974 tight rope walk between the twin towers as a fulcrum. The book, Let the Great World Spin, was good, just not quite as good as I had hoped. But time will tell whether it lingers in my mind. There were several "mind pictures" that were satisfying. For instance, "I can still after all these years sit in the museum of those afternoons ..." and "... an old freckled mirror..." "She had told (her granddaughter) that everyone knows where they are from when they know where it is they want to be buried."

And I do.

Distractions, distractions . . .

I have started an intermediate knitting class. We're doing a hat. What we're really doing is learning to use round needles, then double points . . . as well as how to knit in two colors and decrease in some odd-ball way. The first class was good. There are only two. But then I'll be taking a sweater class. There are three of those.

Wednesday after next I start an online class. It will be a sculpting class. The finished product will be somewhat like the picture above.

I hope all these classes will distract me from the renovation that's going on (allegedly) in the master bath. So far the only thing that has happened is that all the walls, floor, fixtures, etc., have been torn out. What we have now is only a shell of its former self.

Despite everything I have done to distract myself, January and February are still tough!

My Dad at nine.

I watched a documentary on PBS last evening about the influenza epidemic of 1918. That flu peaked in November, and Dad would have turned nine the preceding April. I recall him telling me that he was sent by his parents to take care of an uncle and aunt and their children, who all had the flu. Compared to the expectations we have today of nine-year-olds, it's hard imagine what a grown-up child he must have been.

The first Martin Luther King Day

Yesterday was Martin Luther King Day. When he was killed, I had just moved to Panama City, Florida. I had been hired to teach in the local high school. On the day of King's funeral, very few, if any, of the black kids came to school . . . when they returned to school the next day, their reason for missing was "to attend a funeral". We (the faculty) had been advised to totally avoid the subject of Martin Luther King in class (can you imagine?). I found it impossible to do. All my classes had rip-roaring discussion.

Gary told me that his company used to excuse workers for MLK Day . . . but they were really upset if any white guys didn't come to work. Again, amazing.

Du Maurier

I just finished a Daphne Du Maurier book and gee whiz, it was GOOD. I had forgotten. This one was My Cousin Rachel. At some point in the past I read Rebecca and Jamaica Inn. I'm sure Du Maurier is only considered a popular novelist . . . but I'm also sure she was hard to categorize. Mystery? Crime? Romance? Anyway it was well worth it.

Bye, Bye December 2009

I have just managed to take a picture of our tree on the day we're taking it down.

I DID get to go to Raleigh, NC for a week of art lessons back in November. Great time! Four different instructors. I want to try that again in a couple of years. One of the instructors (Karlyn Holman) will be in Louisville this spring for a week (hosted by the Kentucky Watercolor Society) and I'm looking forward to that class in March.

I was ill the second week in December with no explanation (yet) about what caused it. Frieda and I had tentative plans to go to Williamsburg while she was on break from Delta State, but I was sick and her father passed away, so that didn't happen.

My mother always told me that what you do on New Year's Day is what you'll spend your time on the rest of the year . . . so I"m ripping around trying to do a bit of anything and everything I might enjoy. It certainly IS wonderful to leave this decade behind.