Writing Up A Storm

The Red Geraniums

These red geraniums were painted from a photograph. The photograph was of geraniums that my mother-in-law Oleta grew herself. And then she grew them again, here, on this canvas with oil paints.

I read somewhere that, in the pioneer days of America when there were people living in sod houses on the lonely prairies, sometimes the only bit of color a housewife might have would be her one pot of red geraniums. I don't know if this is true, but I love the image of a pot of geraniums by the doorway of a sod house. What precious jewels such bright flowers would have been to these pioneer women living in the brown earth in that brave new land.

There is something so intense about the color red. We use it for such opposite extremes, don't we? For red lights and red-letter days. It stands out and calls to us in the landscape of our lives as a warning or as a thing of beauty. I do think the color red is fascinating. Blue is my very favorite color, but oh! how the color red catches me!

I love how Oleta has painted these fragile red petals a little indistinctly, a little bit blurred, making them glow with a soft red warmth.

And here is the very humble and homey clay pot! Really, there is nothing that says home and garden more than the flowerpot. And what I love here is the light that Oleta has captured.

But how does a painter paint sunlight??

It seems an impossible task. But Oleta has done it, for there it is, dancing upon the terra cotta pot and glancing off the table surface.

Well, speaking of clay pots, here are some weathered old ones of ours on a makeshift shelf alongside our weathered old garage.

To the far left, you can see a collection of plant identification tags ~ honestly, neither my husband nor myself can throw away anything!

Above the flower pots are two old temperature clocks. The one on the left says it is 83 degrees today, and the one of the right boasts 82 degrees.

Oh, how we wish! It has been 102, 103, 104, 105 for days and days!

Here is a closer view of our jumble of flowerpots. I know you must be thinking, really, this is hardly high art! But I do love these old pots!

I love how they are paint-splattered and smeared with good old garden dirt and scoured with rain and wind, sun and earth. What we have here is a flowerpot laboratory awaiting further development.

Awaiting red geraniums . . .

The green and the red in Oleta's painting reminded me of this Vincent van Gogh painting on the left. Among all the swaths of green and brown and cream and mustard, there are those red chimney pots and that one red roof. I put Van Gogh's painting here so that Oleta's red geraniums can hang alongside the work of another master artist, just where her paintings belong . . .

And below is another masterpiece:

I searched Wiki for geraniums, and that is how I found this lovely young man above. "Rubens Peale With a Geranium" in 1801. Rubens was the brother of Rembrandt Peale ~ and don't you love the names their parents gave them? Rubens and Rembrandt, such glorious names! And perhaps such glorious expectations, too . . . Rembrandt obviously became a very gifted painter, and Rubens, the youngest child, had a love of gardening, hence this beautiful portrait with a red geranium.

I have included this painting because Oleta had three very fine boys, and there is not much about boys that she does not know. My husband, for example, had a very high-tech no-girls-allowed laboratory behind their house growing up.

If anyone would understand a son with an inclination for investigating anything remotely scientific, it would be Oleta, especially if it were a red geranium with some kind of antennae tapping into the son's mental powers! Hmmmmm. Is that little two-pronged thingie above a true part of the geranium plant or is it a quirk of Rembrandt Peale the artist?

(A Red Geranium, photo by Lewis Collard, WikiCommons)

Well, I will leave you pondering. I love how one thing leads to another, for I have wandered from Oleta's beautiful red geraniums into musings about the color red, clay flowerpots, Van Gogh, and the life of a young horticulturist.

And I do especially love having you wander with me!

Have a very lovely weekend!!

Little Girl in a Red Kerchief

This little girl ("Kleines Mädchen") is from the nineteenth century. She lives in this painting by Nicolae Grigorescu (1838-1907). Such a sweet little face, with that open-to-the-world look that children do so often have, so ready to believe. I love how Nicolae has haloed her head with this red cloth cloud. She seems to be not so much wearing the kerchief as looking out from inside it.

Nicolae Grigorescu is said to be one of the founders of modern Romanian painting. Romania! Truly, I can never see the word Romania in print without immediately thinking of all things romantic. I know that I am always making leaps like this, but I do like how my mind seems to constantly draw me into anything romantic, poetic, lyrical. Somehow, it never seems like the wrong place to be!

The little girl in the red kerchief interests me for two reasons. The first is because the way in which her kerchief billows out around her head is somewhat like the way in which my folded fabric kerchiefs also stand out. My kerchiefs, however, have the advantage of crisscrossing the "face" so that I have no need to worry about creating a face at all.

But I do love the look of that little girl's kerchief.

So I made a tracing of it.

And then I cut it out of fabric. Such a tiny little piece of cut-cloth! And isn't it amazing how the mind adds so many details all on its own? Especially if you have already seen the painting above, then you can see that, yes, this is a little kerchief all wrapped around a little girl's head.

But to try to get closer to the effect of Nicolae's painting, I cut an oval out of black art paper.

On the left, I placed my little red piece of cloth upon the black oval as if it were a Victorian miniature. On the right is "Kleines Mädchen" again, for comparison, and I do think I have echoed this lovely painting in some very tiny way.

The second reason this painting interests me so much is that I wrote a children's picture book story about a little girl who goes on a train to the far north. Her mother ties a new red kerchief around her little daughter's face, something bright and fancy to wear as she sets off upon her journey. My story is titled "The Wolf in the Memory Box" and, yes, there is a wolf in it! Alas, this little story keeps coming back to me, no matter where I send it as I try to find a home for it in the great and vast publishing world. I've been sending it off for about ten years now, I guess.

But, in the back of my mind, I also keep thinking about illustrating it myself. I can just see my little girl, a black silhouette of a girl in a red kerchief, flying through the northern woods in pursuit of a wolf!

This nineteenth century painting, this little piece of cut-cloth, this splash of red against black, might be all I need to get me going on this!!

Wild Baby Again

Here is our wild baby opossum again. Oh, how tiny he looks! I love that pointy little face with its suspicious little expression, those incredible little fingers, that long pencil of a tail. He is crouched on a makeshift ledge between a shovel and a very fat Buddha-like stone cat.

The stone cat is a memorial for Missy. Missy (short for Mystery) was Boo's sister, and Boo is our very fluffy, very black stealth cat who lives a top secret and undercover life all of his own and is impossible to photograph. I am quite sure, however, that Boo and wild baby opossum have a sneaking-around-the-edges acquaintance with one another.

There are any number of owls, raccoons, opossums, frogs, snakes, geckos, and mice who visit our back yard. And we are hoping to make it a good home for all such wild creatures.

As I speak, we are filling out the paperwork to see if we might qualify for a Texas Wildscape Backyard Wildlife Habitat sign. These two signs are posted in a neighbor's yard just a few blocks away, and you can see the wild habitat behind this post.

I must say I do believe our backyard can rival this one for wildness!

To certify as a Texas Wildscape, your yard must be composed of 50% native plants and have a year-round supply of food, water, and shelter for wildlife. We have two huge pecan trees, several fig trees, a peach tree, a very secret garden, a flock of birdhouse/birdfeeders, a Rube Goldberg water fountain, a birdbath, a kitty watering bowl, a Sleeping Beauty hedge of wild roses, two compost piles, a brush pile, a wood pile, a junk pile . . . Really, I think we might qualify.

Hmmmmmm. Another ongoing work-in-progress?

Yes, yes, along with The Kissing Fence and A Hundred Guardians, now this venture into wildscapes. Plus I really really need to clean my house ~ it is of major priority, in fact, for my house is verging on some kind of tipping point. But how does one get around to housecleaning when things like saving the wilderness, saving the planet, saving the universe, all seem so much more important? There is simply too much to do for one lifetime, isn't there?

Onward, then, through the fog!!

And I could not resist adding a photo of "Peaceable Kingdom" by Edward Hicks, 1834. For I do long for the peaceable kingdom!

Do You Believe in Reindeer?

I was looking through a box of cards that I made years and years ago and stopped at this one: "Reindeer in the Pines." And just sat, pondering it. Maybe it's the heat. Maybe I want to linger on reindeer and arctic wolves and all things polar because it's so very hot this summer here in Texas. But, if truth be told, I have another and very secret reason for lingering upon reindeer.

When I was in 7th or 8th grade, I came home from school one afternoon and discovered the most amazing thing. I didn't tell anyone for the longest time. For years, actually.

The latest National Geographic had arrived, and it contained the most shocking article on reindeer. I remember that I sat stock-still, stunned beyond belief. I turned the pages, peering into the photographs, squinting into the photographs, looking away, looking back again. For there, right before my eyes, was something so unbelievable it took my breath away.

This is a re-creation of the scene after school: a healthy snack and the latest copy of National Geographic. Not this particular one, but it would have been similar. This one has an article about "Following the Reindeer in Norway." (Okay, the apple is a total fantasy. I never once in my life came home from school and ate an apple. As I recall, I always ate a candy bar and drank a Pepsi, which was the only soft drink allowed in our house as it was my father's one and only favorite.)

But back to reindeer.

Here is what I found out that day: National Geographic was actually showcasing photographs of reindeer. And this, mind you, was long before photographs were routinely doctored up in PhotoShop. So these photos had to be true.

But how could this be? Photographs? Of reindeer??

You see, I had not realized up to then that reindeer were real animals. I thought they were fictional, along with Santa Claus, elves, and the Tooth Fairy. And here they were featured in National Geographic as big as life. Here were photographs of real-life reindeer.

Some real-life reindeer in a photo I found in WikiCommons: "Traveling with Reindeer," about 1890-1900, Arkhangelsk, Russia. 

I didn't tell anyone about my revelation because I was embarrassed that I had not known that reindeer were real animals. But inside I was thrilled beyond words.

For how often in life do you get to find out that something magical is really real? Usually, it's the other way around. You spend any number of years finding out, one by one, that things you believed in aren't real after all. This was one truly incredible moment when fiction turned into fact right before my eyes.

I still feel the power of that moment to this very day every time I think about or read about or see images of reindeer. For, to me, these wonderful animals will always be fairytale creatures that have come to life.

Here is a reindeer on a holiday card from P.S. Greetings in Chicago. At least I think it is a reindeer. Maybe a reindeer fawn. You might think this isn't a reindeer, but I do believe the red nose gives it away. (And that, of course, is a whole other story.)

The dearest woman in the world who worked in our house while we were growing up and who helped raise me and my siblings sent this card to me some years ago now, so I especially treasure it.

The artist's name is not mentioned, but I love how he or she has made the plant grow right out of the inner frame into the red frame, and then let the large star rise up out of the red frame into the gold frame. It's the smallest things, like these, that give an extra dimension to a piece of art.

And, in my case, this slight altering of reality, this artful plant growing right out of its own little canvas and climbing up the frame, fits in with my experience of reindeer leaping right out of a poem into the real world.

High Tea and Hand Stitches

Oleta (my mother-in-law) invited me to go with her as her daughter to a Mother-Daughter High Tea. What a lovely compliment to me! Thank you, Oleta! So we went together to the High Tea. Everyone brought their own cups and saucers to the event. Oleta brought hers for us to use ~ I love these sweet flower-painted cups!

Helen is the guardian angel of these events where Oleta lives, and we sat with her and Helen's favorite niece in all the world. And then the High Tea turned into something unexpected!

Have you ever been so taken by surprise that you didn't know what to say?

Well, I was taken by exactly that kind of surprise.

But now the cat is out of the bag! For Helen and Treva and Tom and Fenwick (Fenwick the dog! Yes, yes, it's really all true, do please read on) presented me with a gift at the High Tea.

And, furthermore, it turns out that my husband knew all about this surprise gift and had even contributed a package of transfer sheets so that Tom and Fenwick the dog could do some copying magic.

And that for months Helen and Treva (and, really, I am not sure who all else) had been stitching and stitching and stitching to make something wonderful just for me.

Here it is ~ an incredibly wonderful quilt with images of seventeen of my cards on it. Tom and his trusty dog Fenwick figured out how to use the transfer sheets and they are the ones who put my cards onto cloth. Then Helen and Treva put the cloth images onto the quilt cover. Oh, and found the fabric and cut the fabric and stitched the fabric . . .

I hung the quilt across the bookshelves in my box room to take a photo of it. This is the room where I work, read, hide, during the day. You can see all the brown boxes across the top of the bookshelves ~ hence the name "box room." This is the room, when we first moved in, where everything in boxes ended up until we could sort them all out, and then somehow, the box room became my room ~ my Virginia Woolf "room of my own" hideaway.

And now the box room is graced with something new ~ this wonderful quilt.

Here it is on the chair that I can usually be found in, reading, or typing away on my laptop. Now I can be found enfolded in this quilt.

And I do believe that a quilt is really the supreme gift.

It is a work of art, it is practical for it can be used for warmth and comfort, and it is a true labor of love (all those hundreds of tiny stitches!)

Here are the stitches, traveling up and down, back and forth across the fabric of this quilt. Such tiny hand-made stitches, bobbing up and down in this ocean of cloth.

I can almost see silver needles breaking through the surface, rising up into the air, and then plunging back down again.

Very dolphin-like, I would imagine.

Here are the wonderful colors and patterns that Helen chose for the border of the quilt.

Do you see the yellow polka-dotted fabric? Helen explained to me that it was chosen because it matched the fabric in my first children's picture book.

Yes, there on the cover are the magical polka-dots that Nancy Carpenter, the illustrator, designed for the baby's dress and sash in my children's picture book story, A Far-Fetched Story. Oh my! What a kind and thoughtful detail to add to such a kind and thoughtful quilt.

You can see how simply overcome I was by such a gift.

I have sat with this lovely little quilt in my arms, thinking of how, in the cold months of late winter and throughout the spring and into the summer, a gift was being made for me, and I never knew it.

Is it not that way with so many things that happen to us in our lives? While we are off doing other things, something wonderful is being prepared for us, and then, suddenly, it is bestowed upon us.

Created by Treva, Helen, Tom, Fenwick, 7-3-09

Maybe someone just like our guardian angel Helen and the lovely Treva and the wonderful Tom and the magnificent Fenwick are making a surprise for you this very minute. I have this sneaky feeling that someone is getting ready to astound you, too!

Well, I do know one thing for sure. I will be carrying this quilt around with me everywhere, dragging it from room to room, a regular Linus blanket, for the rest of my life. I will treasure every teeny tiny stitch of it, forever.

Thank you! Thank you!

And goodbye until next week . . .

May Your Cup Runneth Over

I loved making this card! I don't know where I had the good fortune to find this particular fabric, but I love its bright, happy colors. I must have had to hunt all over the pattern to find a place to cut out her dress. I no longer remember doing this, but, thinking about it now, I do like how I chose a darker place for the top half of her dress, and let the brighter colors flow into the skirt.

Her sleeve was cut separately, although it does seem to melt into the rest of the dress at the shoulder. The flower in her hat is a sticker, and her little hand is probably the one hundredth try in my attempt to get some semblance of real-life human anatomy in place.

Here is a peek at a larger piece of this fantastically whimsical color pattern. Isn't it beautiful? It has the look about it of the universe being born.

When I first made this card, I had originally cut the little tea droplets out of black paper to match the lettering on the card, but then I thought to make them out of colors that match the fabric, and now I am glad that I did.

I tried many, many ways of getting of the tea to spill out of that cup! At one point I had it cascading out of the cup in art nouveau curly swirls, which I did like in a way, but then, on second thought, it looked more like a flood verging on something out of a horror movie. The little droplets seemed by far the better way to go.

Because this card is so brightly colorful and about cups that runneth over, I chose it to tell you about a blog called Domesticali. I can't imagine a nicer place to have tea and conversation than with Ali at Domesticali. That is what her blog is like, a get-together with a friend.

Ali ranges far and wide with her topics. One post that brought back memories for me was this one, in which she talks about A Very Hungry Caterpillar Party. Years ago, a second grade class and I created a very flamboyant dramatization of Eric Carle's wonderful children's picture book.

There is really nothing more magical (and more challenging!) than working with a class to put on a play, especially a play with props and costumes that you and your class have made together.

Here is a photo of our grande finale. From left to right, as I recall, we have a very tall brown cocoon, the moon (you can almost see its face), the apple, the nice green leaf, the pear, the caterpillar in its full butterfly glory, the ice cream cone, the lollipop held very high, the Swiss cheese held very low, the cupcake, and one slice of watermelon. The rest of the props from the story are hidden from view, the strawberry, the pickle, etc.

You can't tell it from this photo, but the little caterpillar/butterfly girl got the part (everyone wanted it!) because she was the tiniest person in the class, a miniature doll of a girl named Amber. I suspect this launched her into a theatrical career in the future!

I love remembering this play, and I particularly recommend Ali's post because she shows a very ingenious way to make Eric Carle's caterpillar with stamp-pad ink, a hole punch, and fingerprints.

In another post, Ali did a little magic that made me want to persevere with this little non-starter shown below: my great idea for having lettuce all summer long, right outside my backdoor, just ready and waiting for the picking.

You can tell this is lettuce because the marker says "LETTUCE," otherwise you would have to be endowed with X-ray vision or precognition or the ability to make incredibly lucky guesses. I've been a little discouraged, but then Ali did a post about her miraculous amaryllis, and now I have high hopes, or at least higher hopes than I had before, that maybe something will come of my great lettuce idea, after all. So I am waiting to see.

But what I really want to tell you about Domesticali is a secret about her that I discovered by accident. I only just discovered these arts-and-crafts blogs in April, and I was immediately captured by them. Right away I got the idea to do a blog of my own. So I began to read a dozen blogs all the way through, from their very first post right up to the present day, to see how they got started and how they grew.

Then I started reading comments on blogs, too, to see what that was all about, and that's when I discovered something so special about Domesticali. I saw her name on so many comments on so many posts on so many different blogs, encouraging, complimenting, and reassuring others. Somehow she makes the time in her busy life to send out countless little messages of goodwill all around the world. She made me feel that a very kind and loving community was possible in the blogging world where women from all over the world are connecting with one another.

I must admit I felt some of my old flower-child hopes of peace on earth.

This blogging world is like a 21st century version of the telephone, isn't it? Except now strangers are dialing up strangers online and sending all their best wishes . . .

(This old-fashioned telephone above is a greeting card by Stephen Mackey, 1994, Cape Wrath Design Co, printed in England.)

I don't know where this sisterhood of the cloud can take us, but surely it cannot be a bad thing if people from all over the world are talking to each other, encouraging each other, making beautiful things and sharing them. Sharing, for example, how to make an apron, how to bake the perfect rhubarb pie, how to make very hungry caterpillars with stamp-pad fingerprints, or how to help when your child is heartbroken because the ice cream truck didn't wait long enough for her. There really is no end to what we can learn from and share with each other . . .

Do please read Ali's very recent and heartfelt post about the last day of school and a father who takes his boys camping only to discover that they have forgotten the sleeping bags. And then read the comments, too. So warm and thoughtful and funny!

Thank you, Domesticali, for trying so hard to make a kind and loving neighborhood out of this brave new blogging world.

And truly, may everyone's cup runneth over!

It Takes the Whole Kingdom

This is a castle I made from a handful of fabric scraps. It is not sewn together nor adhered together in any way. If I were to whistle over these tiny scraps, they would scatter to the four winds. I assembled them simply in order to take a photo of them, for I was hoping to take you on a little trip around a castle that stands just four blocks from where I live.

As it turns out, I could not do that. I will tell you why.

Can you see the castle through the tree tops? This was the country studio-home of Elisabet Ney (1833-1907), a very famous sculptress. It is now the Elisabet Ney Museum. I wanted to photograph both the front of the museum and also the back, for at the back, where there is a very large and very high window, the head of one of Elisabet's sculptures just barely peeks over the window ledge. And just behind the museum is a little creek, and a bridge over the creek.

Before I went through the gate, I remembered that my camera has a Zoom, and so I was able to get a closer view of the castle's turret. I understand that when Elisabet lived here, she often worked here alone. She would have been very much isolated. She lived here during the last 15 years of her life, from 1892 to 1907, I believe. There were no homes nearby back then, and it must have been a very lonely place for her sometimes.

It certainly seemed a very quiet and lonesome kind of place just past daybreak, which was when I stood at its gate and took these photos.

Then I went through the gate and began to approach the castle's front door. But I only made it a few steps inside the gate, for there, underneath this large tree that you see in the photo, someone was sleeping. The sleeper was just to the left of the tree trunk, out of view here, on the castle grounds, lying on a thin blanket with a bag or two and not much else. A homeless person.

So I tiptoed back to the street.

In the past few months, we have heard that homeless people have been camping down by the creek behind the museum, but this is the first time I have seen someone. It is very hot here in Central Texas this summer. It must be much hotter down by the creek, for it lies below the reach of the winds. Perhaps this person moved to higher ground to be a little cooler.

Oh, it gave me great pause to see this sleeping person! This is an 1869 painting by Wilhelm Leibl, and it looks so very much like the person I saw on the Ney grounds. And in an almost identical pose.

I walked very quietly away, for I did not want to disturb him, and I did not know what to do, and I was a little bit afraid, too, for I was alone, and it was early morning.

But I have sent many prayers his way ever since. And I wish I might find some other way to help him, too. Though I do not know yet what my way to help this one person will be. Sometimes, I guess, we have to trust that by helping others we will eventually end up helping everyone.

It is good to know there is much we can do. I really do believe we can always make the world a better place. And to that end, I made this particular greeting card one winter a number of years ago. I cut out dozens of little houses, and attached them to starry backgrounds with double-stick tape, then blanketed them with flowered green fabric, and mailed them off as holiday cards.

It takes the whole village.

This became a very popular saying during all the years when I was teaching. I read somewhere that it is an African proverb, and then I read somewhere else that it is of Chinese origin. I think it is wonderful that the lineage of this idea goes back in time to very different cultures. It is an ancient idea, then, that comes from our humanity, no matter who we are or where we come from. Very beautiful.

Here are two girls sleeping on an oven bench in an 1895 painting by Albert Anker. The title is "Zwei schlafende Mädchen auf der Ofenbank."

Though they look very peaceful, still they are sleeping on what looks to be a very hard stone slab, with a chair drawn up to keep them from rolling off, perhaps. When I was teaching, I had so many children who came from situations that were not what we would hope for. At my school, we made home visits to every child's home, and it was very hard to have to know where some of my little ones were sleeping at night.

(And I really really must add here that I have been in the homes of very affluent children whom I sometimes feared for just as much, for, truly, the making of a good home is not about material wealth.)

But I am glad to say that I know for certain that some of the most endangered of my children are doing very well today, and so I have high hopes for the sleeping man beneath the tree.

Well, I meant to write this post about a castle! But I have followed my heart, I guess, and it has taken me somewhere else. I will return another day and show you the Elisabet Ney Museum. But today I am very humbled by the thought that a mere four blocks from where I live there is not only a castle, but there is also a homeless person who sleeps in the shadow of the castle.

Okay, just one more thing. Did I say that my fabric castle is very fragile? If I look at it, the flags or the flagpoles will move right before my eyes. If I blow upon it, the whole thing scatters into disarray. But wait! It started from disarray in the first place.

And now it's back again, in tact. Is this not a metaphor for something larger, like how can we save the planet? Yes, yes, it will take the whole kingdom, but I know we can do it. . .

Or is this just the plight of the would-be artist, bending over her fabric pieces in the wee hours of the night, trying to make art out of cotton scraps?

Walking on Air

This is the first card I made, some years ago now, in which I used both beads and embroidery thread. Because of the bag, the tiny beads, and the embroidery thread, I am using this card today to tell you about Melissa and her blog at tinyhappy. Melissa makes the most beautiful embroidered art, children's booties, and lovely bags for carrying things. And she has a way of finding the tiniest detail in something that captures its very heart and soul.

I love the way Melissa often photographs her embroidery alongside the very wildflower or little fern that inspired her art. I've been trying to find ways to photograph my cards in a similar way, to somehow create what I think of now as "a tinyhappy still-life." In this particular still-life above, I have included the embroidery thread that I used in my card, some tiny wood beads (although not the same size beads as I couldn't find them ~ anywhere), and some eucalyptus nuts (because I wanted something from nature in my photograph, too ~ like tinyhappy puts in hers). Below is a closer look: 

In her tinyhappy blog, Melissa also puts her finger upon the most endearing things that her children say or create, such as Keira's ice cream machine and Arlo's story box. Truly, reading her blog is like a journey into a very lovely place, for even the sadness of having the ice cream truck not wait for you is made beautiful in a wonderful drawing.

It was last week that Melissa wrote the post about Arlo's idea for a story box. Arlo is six. He thought of making a box that has a story drawn on its very bottom, so, for example, when you take out the gift that came in the box and peek down inside, there is still something else wonderful to find. What a very fine idea!

For some reason Arlo's idea about story boxes made me think of a box of my mother's that has long sat in a drawer of mine all wrapped up in an old pink scarf.

Here is the box and the very pale pinkish scarf. It is an ancient mohair scarf, so fragile and so loosely woven that it is more of a cobweb than a scarf. The box is a card box for cards and envelopes, about 5" by 7" in size.

But the cards and envelopes are long gone, and something else is inside this box now.

Here is a closer look at the cover. Mackintosh Flowers are flowers illustrated by Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928). So the cards that once came in this box were his flower designs. The back of the box says: "Though Mackintosh's international reputation today rests largely on the buildings and interiors he created in his native Glasgow, these flower studies reveal his life-long passion for nature and his outstanding skills as a painter."

These flowers are so exactly like Melissa's blog at tinyhappy!

Opening up the box reveals a swath of tissue paper, and even the tissue paper is like Melissa's embroideries: A green-growing vine and those sweet little red berries. . .

And when I open the box I am made very quiet all over again by the sight of these little treasures. These things meant something very dear to my mother, for she kept them separate from all her other things, right here, in this box. 

I wish I knew the stories behind these special treasures: A lovely necklace of large beads that have been wrapped in a delicate pink fabric and then tied with the same fabric, a second smaller necklace of silver flowers, a very tiny old-fashioned key, a cameo brooch, and a river stone in the shape of a heart. Each treasure so sweet, so precious.

Yes, these are definitely tinyhappy treasures!

Now the box is empty. I peer into its emptiness. But wait! What if Arlo's story box idea could come true, right now, right here?

What if there is something else waiting for us beneath the last layer of tissue paper? At the very bottom of this box?

Slowly, I pull back one edge of the tissue paper. And there! Can you see it? Something is coming into view!

My goodness! It is a drawing of Arlo and Keira, in a boat, off exploring the whole world!

But how did this particular drawing get inside the bottom of my mother's card box? And here in Texas, of all places. All the way on the other side of the world from New Zealand, where Arlo and Keira live. How could this be?

Oh my! This is A Very Great Mystery.

Well, my favorite quote is by Francis Bacon: "The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery." And I do believe the mystery has been well and truly deepened here.

Thank you, tinyhappy family, for giving me such joy!

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Girl in a Boat

This is one of my most favorite greeting cards in the world. The artist is Lori Preusch, and the greeting card company is Dandelion of Pasadena, California. I found this card in the 1980s about a year before a dear friend of mine died. She and I exchanged it with each other to comfort one another in the shadow and the light of the great loss that we knew was pending.

Today I put my little paper gecko into the picture frame, to let him peer into Lori's painting and marvel at the company the girl is keeping in her boat. I love the wonderfully contented expressions on those big cat faces, the black and white cat with its expression of total disbelief, the bear and the bird in a little staring match with each other, the sunflower, the almost-falling-overboard doll.

The name of the boat is the S. R. Ruckus. I'm sure it has a special meaning to the artist, and though I don't know what it is, it makes me think of Max and the wild things. Maybe the girl is going to Where the Wild Things Are to let the wild rumpus, and the even wilder ruckus, begin. Although, really, she looks way too peaceful for a ruckus of any kind. . .

This card always makes me wonder what would I want to carry in my boat on my way to the land of the wild things, or on my journey into the unknown. Perhaps you, too, are pondering upon what you would stow away in your boat?

Meanwhile, now that I have a pair of light bulbs that seem to be keeping the whites whiter in my photos, I intend to take a little bit of time to redo a few of the very pinkest photos in recent posts.

So I will leave you, Dear Reader, until Monday when I will return. I hope you have a very lovely weekend!

Letting Go

I have long skirted around the idea of birds and letting go of things. Today this greeting card from ten years ago seems to express how I feel about writing this blog. I'm not sure I can really put why I am doing this into words. The reasons are so many, but one is that it seems like a place where I can let all the things that I love loose upon the world, instead of caged up in my heart.

I do know how very lucky I am to have published two children's picture books. But there are so many more stories that I have sent out into the world that have come back to me. If you have had this experience, then you know the incredibly mixed feeling of disappointment on the one hand, and (sometimes) a kind of relief on the other hand, relief that your "child" is safely back in your arms again, where no harm can come to it.

Finding this world of the cloud, as I am coming to think of this aerial blogging community, has made me feel that at last I have found a place where I can send all my little love children, my cards, my stories, my thoughts, my imaginings, my dreams. This way, at least, maybe they will find their way into the heart of someone out there. Otherwise, I fear they will be locked up inside my own heart, forever.

This is a black and white silhouette print that I did years ago ~ exactly 30 years ago, for I can see that I have signed this "Kari © 1979." This silhouette was done in ink ~ it is not a cut-out as my later card is. However, I gave the same title to this print that I later gave to the card: "Letting Go." I think we spend our whole lives having to learn how to let go of things, our children, our pasts, and ourselves, sometimes our loved ones, sometimes our friends, sometimes our dreams. And isn't it curious how "letting go" can refer to both giving and giving up?

The world comes into us and changes us. We, in turn, give of ourselves, or let go of ourselves, thereby changing the world. I think that is what I was trying to say in this print, but I created it so long ago that I have, alas, let go of my memory of what I was thinking, back then . . .

In making the photo of this print, I tore it out of the paper copy (this is a copy of a copy of a print of an original ink drawing) and laid it, oh so tenderly, upon a scrap of fabric, but not just any fabric! This black-flowered print is from one of my favorite dresses that I wore and wore and wore until I wore it out during my flower child days.

Letting go is very hard to do sometimes.

Speaking of letting go and birds, here are some old birdhouses that are being collected in our backyard ~ plus a few other things. If you look closely, you will see an airplane (truly, flying things are everywhere where I live), and, yes, that is a faucet coming out of that post in the lower left-hand corner. I wonder what fantastical liqueur will pour from its spout?

These old things are being let go of here in a backyard sculpture-in-progress, and Nature is slowly taking them back for herself. But my husband still puts birdseed into these old birdhouses, and the birds still flock to this little city on a wood beam.

I love this bright little cardinal with his bright little head just peeking above the potting tray! We have put seed out for him, too, and he has come. Maybe that is what I am doing. Maybe I am throwing the seeds of everything I love out into the world, wondering who will find them? Who will come?

Your Guardian Babushka Knows. . .

Here is my babushka in assorted browns with a little flock of bags and with the very, very last of the sunflowers, for nothing is left now in our little stand of sunflowers but the dry brown seed pods, as spiky as tiny pincushions.

When I created my first guardian babushka, I wrote a kind of thumbnail sketch to tell what she would do as a guardian. Here is what I put on the back of her card:

Your guardian babushka knows
the great-great-grandmother's secret remedies
for the collywobbles and homesickness
and any kind of sadness.
She knows all the old wives' tales.
She always keeps a kettle on the burner.
She will brew a pot of tea for you
or pine bark stew or sweet potato soup.
She will wrap you up in goose-down comforters
and handmade quilts.
Then she will send you on your way filled with
her wisdom and mystery.

Today I might write something different or perhaps add something more. Today, for example, I might want my guardian babushka to help me figure out how to work the white balance on my camera, if only she would!

I have some things that I am sure belong to my guardian babushka: a heavy iron kettle with its heavy iron lid and a very battered copper pot. I'm quite sure these cauldrons came from faraway and long ago. I have the most sincere intentions of cooking up a brew in them some day. I see myself bending over something bubbling and fragrant. Soon. Very soon.

I have had many thoughts about this babushka person. In my mind, she comes from Lapland or Peru or from a little clearing in the piney woods somewhere. She comes from all our long ago ancestors who lived nomadic lives during the day and gathered around fires in the dark, wondering where the sun went at night. And I do believe that if we trace everyone's ancestors back far enough, we all will find her, the one great-great-great-grandmother of us all. Lovely! Lovely!

A Hundred Guardians

When I read Tollipop's invitation to make one hundred somethings, I knew that I wanted to be a part of this, too. Kirsten (at Tollipop) is creating one hundred dresses, or perhaps I should say one hundred ladies in dresses. Ladies with stories! Each lady and each story is a Victorian jewel. But I particularly love Kirsten's whole brilliant idea about her "hundred somethings" project. I think what she is saying is that if we were all busy creating one hundred things, we would all be happier and the whole world would be a better, happier, more creative, more loving place. But she says it so much better here and here and here.

At first I thought I could make a hundred greeting cards, and from that thought I leaped to my guardian greeting cards. I love the whole idea of guardians. I don't think we can ever have enough of them, whether they be guardian angels, or guardian hawks, or guardian wolves.

Here is a German Schutzengel watching over two children in a painting by Fridolin Leiber (1853-1912). Angels, of course, have wings and can swoop down out of nowhere and rescue us from whatever dangers, or naughtiness, we have gotten ourselves into. But there are other kinds of guardians, and a number of years ago when I threw out my net to capture a guardian or two, I found them everywhere, both near at hand and far afield, too.

Isn't Peter Rabbit's mother the quintessential guardian of all? This is one of the images I had in mind when I invoked the babushka for my first guardian. I love all the endearing details in Beatrix Potter's timeless illustration: the mother's apron, the way she bends over the cozy little bed, not to mention those sweet little ears and paws!

The word babushka is Russian or Polish for both "grandmother" and "kerchief," and so I enlarged upon this and began to think of my guardian babushka as the great-great-grandmother and to adorn her with a kerchief. Oh, and an apron, too! I saw her, and see her now, as that eternal mother-figure who knows what to do when we are in need of whatever.

I originally created many babushkas in many color combinations. I used a very simple child-like figure for her body and then wrapped her round little head in a kerchief, added the apron, and a wand, and then a bag for all her secret remedies.

Hmmmmm. Maybe her bag contains a jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and a copy of Lolly Willowes, which is a remedy for a whole slew of things, come to think of it. Really, who knows what in the world might be in that bag!

I only have a handful of my original guardians left, and there are so many more I want to create: a guardian writer, artist, musician, robot, mouse, turtle, armchair, fir tree. I look around and guardians are simply everywhere.

And so, Tollipop, I very much want to join your Hundred Dresses and make a Hundred Guardians. Yes, I am definitely throwing my hat into your ring!

A Hawk in Our Hands

My husband's mother, Oleta, is a true artist. She painted this hawk for my husband because he has an eye for hawks and can spot them miles away, on telephone wires, among the branches of trees, or on fence posts. I adore this painting so much ~ I simply get quite lost in the poetics of its colors!

We love it that Oleta has given us her hawk, and many of her other paintings, too, to hang in our home. There is something wonderful about being in the presence of original art. It takes you very close to the act of creation, for here are her brush strokes, one on top of another, right here. Here is the very paint that she used. It has dried, of course, but you can touch it with your fingertips.

And here are some fabrics that I couldn't keep myself from searching out among my fabric stash, to try to find the colors that Oleta used: charcoals, autumnal browns, russets, that touch of turquoise and amber, those snowy-whites, and those pale greens and sands in the background.

And speaking of snowy-whites, here are two snowy hawklets with either mom or dad. This is a photo from WikiCommons taken by Thomas O'Neil: "Red-tailed hawk with two chicks in a nest." These chicks were hatched from hawk eggs, but Oleta's hawk was born in a very different way, from pools of paint mixed and stirred and brushed into a canvas upon her easel.

You can see how Oleta has infused her hawk, not just with color and a pose, but with life. Look at that all-seeing-eye!

And I love how she painted him (or her) perched on an old fence post, with that wonderful detailing in the fence wire. In Texas, where we live, you can find these weathered old fence posts everywhere in the countryside, standing in rows like old soldiers keeping guard over even older homesteads. And, yes, you will often find a hawk stock-still on top of such a post, becalmed, perhaps, or biding its time.

Below is Oleta's painting in our kitchen, keeping guard over us. It hangs above a little shelf that holds the very last of the sunflowers from our garden, a family of brass angels (these were also gifts to us from Oleta), and two mallard napkin rings. A hummingbird feeder in the shape of a hot-air balloon hangs on the right from a bracket. (Note: My husband is a hot-air balloon pilot, among other things, and our house is full of treasured hot-air balloon memorabilia. And other flying things.) 

Thank you, Oleta, for your beautiful painting!

Emily Dickinson and the Fourth of July

I did a little double-take when I looked at one of my bookshelves. This is the shelf where I keep most of my poetry books ~ I have a haphazard kind of order going on in my box room, the room where I live most of the time. My box room is full of boxes and books, fabric and paper.

This particular shelf, along with the poetry books, is currently showcasing, from left to right: a square green-glass candleholder (it once held a grass-scented candle and now holds small pieces of concrete from the very driveway of the very house in northern Illinois where I was born), two emergency flashlights (you never know when a storm might blow out the power), a wooden monk and a wooden bird (in such similar poses I can never resist putting them side by side), my copy of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are (to remind me not to miss the movie this coming fall), a stack of language pocket-books (you can never have too many language dictionaries), an angel (you can never have too many angels), and a small trunk (with quarters inside for buying Sunday newspapers).

It is the stack of small pocket-size language books that caught my eye.

I put some brown cardboard behind the pocket books to isolate them so you can see them better. I wish I could tell you that I am fluent in all these languages, but, alas, the only language besides English that I took in school was French, and I can barely read it now, and then only with serious help from my Harrap's French-English dictionary. No, I simply love words, and I have long collected dictionaries to help me with the languages that I sometimes find quoted in whatever I might be reading.

Not that I often read something in Sorbian/Wendish (see the very bottom book) and have a need to translate it. Still, you never know, do you? And this little book says the Sorbian word for grandmother is "wowka." Truly, can there be a more wonderful word for grandmother than wowka?

Proceeding up my little stack of pocket books, we go from Sorbian to Arabic to an English Merriam-Webster Pocket Dictionary to a Roget's Thesaurus Vest Pocket Edition to Norwegian to Greek to Chinese to Emily Dickinson.

That's where I did my double-take. Emily Dickinson? Is she a language all of her own? And really, when you think about it, isn't she? And isn't each one of us a little language all of our own?

(This is the tiniest book, no taller than a clothespin.)

This thought about Emily and language has given me pause, especially today on The Fourth of July when those of us in the United States celebrate the birth of our nation. This little stack of books represents just the tiniest fraction of all the languages that have found their way to our country to make their home here, to inform us, to enrich us, to make us who we are. And I do just want to say that for all our faults (and we are so many and so large that our faults can also seem many and large sometimes), we do keep trying to make things better, to get it right, to break glass ceilings and tear down barriers. We do keep on marching for justice for all, and I am so very proud of us this particular year for we can now even more truly say that we are a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

And what is really wonderful is that wherever you are on this planet today, whatever language you speak, we are all together in our much larger planetary boat. I find that very comforting, being in this wonderful big boat with all of you.

A Lost Blue Riding Hood

I almost lost "The Lost Blue Riding Hood." Here is how it happened. When I take my walks among the avenues where I live, I often walk past this beautiful iron fence and its equally beautiful house.

I call it the lilac house because it is painted the loveliest shade of old-fashioned lilac. A few weeks ago, I noticed a very small blue riding hood hanging on the corner of the iron fence that surrounds the lilac house. A sea-blue jacket with a hood. It looks to be a girl's jacket because there are little flowers along its hem. I think it is about the right size for a four-year-old girl.

Several weeks went by, and this little garment continued to hang there, waiting to be found. I was working on getting this blog up and running, and I made a mental note to do a post about "The Lost Blue Riding Hood." Then last Sunday I walked by again, and as it was still there, I thought maybe I better get a photo soon. This instant, for example. By the time I had this thought, I had already passed the lilac house by about a block, going south on the avenues away from where I live.

So I retraced my steps.

But at this very moment a woman in the red-shingled cottage just to the left of my prize came out of her front door in her bathrobe, wielding a broom. And she began to sweep her porch.

So, brave soul that I am, I kept on walking, going north now, back toward home. I continued one block north, then halted in the middle of the street. For that little jacket wouldn't be hanging there forever. This might be my only chance.

I walked back to take my photo. But there was this woman, sweeping away at her porch. She might be the kind of person who just keeps on sweeping. Do you know the kind? They sweep their porch and their fronts steps and their sidewalk, and then they start in on the street. Soon they're off sweeping the whole world. That kind.

So I kept on walking right past her ~ again ~ and went one block south ~ again. Stopped. Got myself turned around. Walked back north ~ again. And at this point I am in some danger of being arrested for erratic behavior. But, really, I cannot help being in an altered state of mind when the world confronts me with both brooms and riding hoods ~ for these kinds of things throw me into fairytale mode.

Well, I almost kept on walking straight back home, but now, you see, I've got this blog. I've got responsibilities to my multitude of readers. So I did a due-west turn, plopped my backpack onto the curb, crouched down before The Lost Blue Riding Hood, and snapped off three photos, one, two, three, inching forward each time, in a kind of duck waddle. (Aha! I have since learned that my camera has this wonderful thing called a Zooooom!)

And the broom woman in the bathrobe? Honestly, I forgot all about her. She just fell out of my mind. My whole destiny was pinned upon this little blue garment.

And here is The Big Lesson:

Now you see it.

Now you don't.

Yes, I went back the very next day and it was gone. Poof! I had almost lost the lost blue riding hood. And by only a handful of hours. Maybe minutes.

(And here is something so sweet: Do you see that the lamp on the porch of the lilac house is lit? It's just past dawn, and, yes, she has a lamp on her porch! She has made a whole little room on her front porch. I want to do that, too!)

But back to my story:

Of course, I have lost the riding hood, because it isn't there anymore, but having a photo of it makes me feel that I have captured it somehow.

Still, where did it go, I wonder. Did its rightful little owner come to claim it? Did the broom woman snatch it up the minute my back was turned?

Or, wait! Did the whole avenue, having seen a strange lady loitering and taking photos, call an emergency meeting and decide to whisk the little blue riding hood into protective custody, dye it lilac, perhaps, and embroider it with all manner of symbols and signs for warding off would-be bloggers? Well, I will probably never know, although maybe someday I could just ask. But that would spoil the mystery of it all.

Meanwhile, I am basking in the treasure that so very nearly slipped through my fingertips. The Lost Blue Riding Hood! For there is no way to know where the tiniest thing will lead you, if only you will let it take you there.

And if you want to read a blog that pays attention to the very tiniest treasures in the world, you really must read TinyHappy. You will find such joy there. In the small things. In unexpected places. In wildflowers growing out of cracks in concrete, in children's booties, in vintage buttons. TinyHappy has a way of finding the smallest detail in something that captures its very heart and soul. Please do go there. You will find peace there.