I’ve been feeling off my game the last few months and, even though the worst of the illness is over, I’ve been waiting for the painting fever to return and finally decided to go back to where it started this summer – to black and white. I also hoped drawing the mountains with snow would help me really see them – and the snow – so I can conquer my fear, pack up my paints and go out into the cold to really see — and paint — winter.
Call it fear of trying to paint snow or obsession, but on the first winter weather day of the season, I found myself painting the wheat fields in Eastern Washington.
This is the second version in progress – a barn that needs to be resized, details to be added. I’m hypnotized by the lines and soft colors but also by the magnitude of humanity’s fingerprint on this land that was mostly desert before modern irrigation allowed aquifers to be tapped. It is at once wild and the ultimate symbol of land tamed, of plenty being created in a country that somehow still has millions of people living with food insecurity.
The decaying barn was the only building interrupting the swaths of wheat in this stretch of field by the highway, but it reminded me how fleeting human accomplishments can be and how long our fingerprint can stay on the land – for good or for ill.
The weather has been mostly grey around here the last few weeks which pretty much reflects most of my December. A few days before Christmas, with the help of a lot of antibiotics, I began digging out from fever and pneumonia in earnest. The last few days the pain that’s radiated from my chest down my arm has diminished, and I got the only Christmas present I really wanted – to be able to hold a brush or pencil without pain. The results weren’t spectacular, but last night wasn’t about results. It was about having a process again.
I’ve been fighting off a nasty lung infection for the last two weeks, and it’s left me too weak to even pick up a brush.
The heat in my head has created some very odd dreams – Eiffel towers in the mountains, watching my lungs break apart in the wind. I’ve been keeping a sketchbook and pen on the couch to keep track of it all as Thing2 hovers next to me, nursing every little cough and sniffle..
Often when I’m driving around our sleepy town of 300+/- looking for something to paint, I’m struck the number of widows I see going about their chores, feeding livestock, fixing fences, and holding down the fort — often for decades after their husbands have passed away.
I don’t like to think of life without the Big Guy, but a few years ago he was laid up in the ICU for a week and that became a distinct probability. For a few days I wasn’t sure if he would be life-flighted to a larger hospital or would he even survive the flight.
I was scared. There was the emotional prospect of losing the one person who is able to put up with me for more than 24 hours a day, but there was also the fear that I wasn’t capable of managing life and parenting Thing1 by myself.
Thankfully the local hospital was able to treat him, and, after ten days of tears and crossing my fingers until they ached, the Big Guy came home, but I made up my mind that week that if disaster ever hit again, I was going to be ready to do more than just cross my fingers.
I’ve made job and attitude adjustments since then to try and keep my promise, but watching these other women tackle homesteading gives me courage.
Today thru Sunday, Dec 6, I’m offering free shipping on all prints & cards. You’ll see the discount on the Buy My Art page.
Cards and Prints make great holiday and housewarming Gifts. Items are in stock and ship the next business day.
I’m not religious, but I’m a sucker for family traditions. Most of our traditions are handed down, but there is one we accidentally created on our own.
A number of years ago healthcare issues and crappy insurance had nearly bankrupted us, and we had money for only the bare essentials. We knew a tree was out of the question and had satisfied ourselves with decorations we had collected in the first 10 years of our marriage. I had cobbled together food for our feast from gifted grocery cards and my latest paycheck and had about $35 to last the few days until my next paycheck when I headed to a thrift store that had been advertising $5 coats for kids.
I had completely excavated a corner of $5 coats when I noticed a long box behind the clothing rack. A few tugs and I unearthed an artificial tree. The masking tape holding the box closed had a few sentences promising a complete tree for the low, low price of $10. Reason failed me, and before I knew it, a six-year-old Thing1 and I were packing the box and his new coat into the station wagon.
It was the perfect find at the perfect time. The bank account may have been empty, but the house was full. As far as Thing1 knew, it was the perfect Christmas, and he was right.
Since then, jobs have changed and bills have been caught up. When it’s our turn to host Christmas we occasionally spring for a tree from the nearby tree farm (we love the tree-cutting ritual). Most years, however, our $10 second-hand fake fir still occupies the spot of honor in the living room and in my heart.
When he says the Thanksgiving meal blessing, my father always prays that we remember the many who are living without peace or plenty or even barely enough. We couldn’t be with him or my mother this year. However , as I sat snuggling on the couch with Thing2 after our Thanksgiving feast, feeling utterly at peace, I thought I heard his prayer.
It would take an entire blog to list all the things my family and I have to be thankful for — each other, friends, time to acknowledge the good in our lives. I’m even thankful for my worries because they are reminders — like Thing2’s small hand in mine — of how full my life is these days.
As we snuggled watching the football game, I kissed the back of Thing2’s head and prayed with my mom and dad for that same peace and plenty or at least enough for the rest of the world.
Bouquet of Roses
Alice Walker, in her novel Possessing the Secret of Joy, once wrote that the secret of joy is resistance — collective and individual resistance — to injustice (In the case of the book, the abhorrent practice of female genital mutilation). I have often thought, however, she was also talking about resisting apathy and isolation in the face of injustices you may not have the power to stop.
I was thinking about that a lot as I painted my ‘Cards for Humanity’.
Every hour, if you choose to listen, you can hear another story of man’s inhumanity to man in almost every part of the world. With every inhumanity you can also hear someone justifying their inhumanity and someone else promising more inhumanity in (justified or imagined) retribution and/or simply revenge.
Listening to stories of innocents caught in crossfires, knowing distance and lack of logistical and political where-withal make me only a toothless witness, I was tempted to withdraw from the world. To worry only about the people under my roof and to build my barricades.
Then I began painting a card for a loved who was sick and remembered a connection to them. I painted another I’ll send out to another friend who is down and remembered my connection to them. Then I painted another for a faceless person who might be suffering, remembering our connection to each other that the people who create the crossfires are trying to sever.
I painted more, knowing flowers won’t stop bullets or bombs, but I did know they will stop my apathy. They keep me from isolating my family from the world and surrendering to fear. And, if the only thing they do is make one person happy, that’s okay too (because, as Jimmie Durante would sing, it’ so important to make someone happy, and you will be happy too).
You can purchase Cards for Humanity at this page: Buy My Art. After thinking long and hard , I decided that helping is the best antidote to feeling helpless and decided that 10% of sales on that page will go to two causes I really care about: kids and community.
5% of all sales on my Buy My Art page are going to Save the Children to, you know, save the children, a group of people that, as a mom, I’m pretty sappy and passionate about.
The other 5% will go to support education at Hubbard Hall, a community art and theater center in Cambridge, NY. Why should you or anyone outside of a 10 mile radius care about Hubbard Hall? Because through their efforts to bring the arts to kids and grown ups of all ages, they have touched the lives of people around the country and the world. They are a model of how to build a vibrant community – something humanity could really use. As devout member of the ministry of encouragement, I support their mission of inclusiveness and nurturing the creative spark whole-heartedly.
Nolans Farm
6×8, Watercolor
I’m going to commit sacrilege here and say that I think the few weeks after foliage and before the first snow are actually more beautiful that foliage season itself. The roads are quiet, and the colors are subtle and layered.
It was all bad news all weekend, and it’s getting colder outside. I feel like the world is getting ready for a long winter, literally and politically, so I went up to my studio each night and started prepping.
I made a few flower cards for some people I love who aren’t feeling well, but then I couldn’t stop painting flowers. I didn’t fight it because I think I’m right in saying that, heading into a long cold winter, you need something bright as much as you need an extra cord of firewood.
It’s been a sad weekend all-around. Worry about loved ones in poor health and grief for people victimized by terror made it hard to focus on hope. There are so many negative elements beyond the ordinary person’s control that it almost seems as if hope is pointless sometimes.
I didn’t think I was in the mood to paint this morning and decided to go for a drive instead. I was driving toward the Equinox mountain when the sun, warming the mountain from the east began pushing the clouds out of the valley and over the peaks. It was a perfect moment, completely un-plannable, and I knew I needed to paint and connect with the mountain.
I painted for an hour and packed up to go home and get online for work. As I drove along the Battenkill river in Arlington Vermont I saw a white object in the sky coming toward me. It was gliding and then flapping, and as it got closer, I realized it was a bald eagle. Trying to drive and watch the eagle, I didn’t even bother reaching for my camera.
For that moment I felt my spirit lift and I let go of everything – sadness, fear, despair – feeling a loss of control of everything – (except the wheel – I did keep hold of that) and for a brief brilliant moment feeling complete serenity.
I stopped at the country store moments later, breathless and energized, knowing there are tragedies that are beyond my control but also aware of the miracles that are equally so. I marched to the cooler at the back of the store, accepting that bad things happen and often there is nothing you can do except accept. Denying the miracles around you, however, doesn’t make you any less helpless, and embracing them may help you get through the tragedies.
Picking My Battles 