Writing Up A Storm

Scrapbook: P.S. There Is Always More

I made this particular scrapbook, featured in recent posts, as a prop to be used with children with my picture book, The Secret Remedy Book. But when I had completed the pages showing the seven remedies from the picture book story, I did not want to leave the impression that there are only seven remedies in this vast and bountiful world of ours. So I made a page to indicate that there is always more. More remedies. More dreams. More ideas. More this, that, and the other thing, everywhere.

A pegboard format seemed like a good way to go about doing this.

And I added a quote by Mary Oliver in one corner because it hits me full force every time I see it, for is there any other question more important for each of us to answer?

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"

.

I love this shy little girl holding out an apple to the world, with her little boots, the weathered wooden sled, the weathered wooden basket of apples, the old rope in her mittened hand, all those lovely driftwood-grays contrasted with the cheerful holiday-red of her smock-like dress and the fuzzy red wool of her hat with its fluffy elfin pom-pom.

"The little applegirl" is a card by artist Lisi Martin. The card company is Pictura Graphica in Karlstad, Sweden. It says on the back of the card that Lisi Martin was born in Barcelona, Catalonia. Years ago, a dear cousin of mine in Michigan sent this card to my mother in Texas. After my mother died, I found it inside a large brown envelope that she kept right beside her chair. My mother had written on the outside of the brown envelope: "Important Things."

It isn't just a gimmick of movie magic that takes us on a time-space-travel sequence from a brown envelope in Texas to Michigan to Sweden to Catalonia. It is the reality of our lives: we really are all connected . . .

Here is the full two-page spread inside the scrapbook on the brown-bag paper made from old grocery sacks.

I used pushpins to hold some of these bits and pieces in place, but then, in order to actually close the book, I had to remove them. They were a problem in sticking through to adjoining pages as well. The colored paper clips and miniature clothespins have worked better as placeholders, although I should admit here that I have not yet used enough glue or tape to keep things from routinely falling off this particular page.

I wanted this "pegboard" page to be attractive to a child, but to also come with the kinds of things that adults put on their own inspiration pegboards in their studios or over their desks. So I added a few quotes that seemed to me to fall into that realm of words that are so simple and yet so mysterious that they are both reachable for a child and yet unreachable at the same time.

I find these quotes to have the same effect upon myself, but then I love ideas that are almost within my reach ~ because they make me reach for them.

Here is one from Emily Dickinson: "To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else." Oh my! How Emily startles us with her thoughts sometimes!

I didn't think about it at the time, but now that I look at it, this quote seems a perfect contemplation to go with that "Happy Birthday" stamp, and for all the birthdays that we each of us celebrate to honor the years in which our being alive is so breathtakingly astonishing.

And I have always loved this Latin proverb: "Solvitur ambulando" or, in translation, "The problem is solved by walking around."

I have actually solved some problems in just this way. At any rate, it's a very good beginning for problem-solving, and, by the way, it is also another mere coincidence that I attached this quote right next to a Chinese "Happy New Year" stamp. But what a great way to start a new year, by walking around and solving problems!

There was a title for this page, "More Remedies & More Dreams," but it got lost among all the bits and pieces, or perhaps it simply became one of the bits and pieces.

The title is hand-printed on a piece of box cardboard. It is very 3-dimensional on the actual page, but that extra dimension gets lost in my photograph.

This whole page is a kind of addendum to what came before, a postscript to let us know there are more remedies and there are more dreams. The page started out with images of old-timey remedies like cups of hot tea and Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup, and then progressed to pencils, stamps, and bottles of ink, and from there to Dr. Seuss, greeting cards, and unforgettable quotations.

Last thing, I added a flurry of stars and flowers, those bright, petal-rayed pinwheels of heaven and earth.

And just now I searched WikiCommons to see if anyone had given their pegboards or pinboards or bulletin boards to the world, and I found two that I loved.

Here is a pinboard produced as a wonderful work of art by Cornelia Durka & Birgit Vogel. It is dated 14 February 2006. Valentine's Day!

I love the playing cards, the scissors, the butterflies and roses, the upsidedown words, the maps, the whole fantastic hodgepodge of colorful things.

It makes you look and look again, and think and think again. Dream and dream again.

And here is one that everyone who has ever been in a school has seen stretching down some endless hallway, enticing us to join up, to attend, to participate in, to show up for, to grace an occasion with our presence, to report for duty, to witness, to stand in the presence of, to partake of, to be a part of the world at large.

The description of this display is: "Builletin board on the Infinite Corridor at MIT."

Infinite corridor! Honestly, it's dangerous to use words like that around me. I just go spinning into infinity when people toss out words like that.

The photographer is Joseph Barillari. Okay, Joseph, I'm willing to be very open to the idea that there is a word spelled "builletin" that has a super-esoteric, guru-geek, top-secret technological meaning that is way above my head, but I could not find this word ~ yet. It might be a code word for "bulletin," but I'm still looking . . .

Well, I think I will leave you with a quote I put on my little scrapbook pegboard from our very own Austin, Texas, Gilbert Shelton's Oat Willie, or so the legend says:

"Onward through the fog!"

And there are days when there is really no other way to go forth into this world.

.

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Writer's Wretreat

I'm on a little writer's wretreat. If I could, I would go here, but it appears that this perfect little hut belongs to someone by the name of jacknky1. Well, that's obviously a code name. So, who knows? it might belong to Baba Yaga, or The Three Bears, or one Henry David Thoreau. Anyway, I think I'll just spend a little time in the deep, dark woods of my own imagination. Be back soon. xo Kari

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Scrapbook: Seventh Remedy: Dreams

 

Without dreams, where would we be, really? They are all we have sometimes to keep us going.

"I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."
Yeats

Because my story, The Secret Remedy Book, ends with Auntie Zep tucking Lolly into bed, it was very natural to have the seventh remedy be all about dreams. I had already made a card called "Sweet Dreams." It is a bed floating in the starry heavens, with a puffed-up pillow, a plaid wool blanket with a fringe, and a cotton ruffle with little eyelets peeking out from beneath the comforter.

In the secret remedy scrapbook, I put the "Sweet Dreams" card on the left-hand side of the seventh remedy spread, with a sprinkling of star-stickers to frame it.

The card on the right is a Marcel Schurman holiday card. The artist is Nancy Taliaferro Faulkner. I love the be-ribboned earth, and also the very atypical view of our topograghy. It is good for children, and adults, to know that there are many versions of the halves of our planet besides the "western" and "eastern" halves.

Well, I got our very old globe down, dusted it off, and compared it to the card. I think that top land mass is Africa, but I couldn't quite identify the bottom land mass. Artistic license, then! I'm all for it, especially if it makes me get an old globe down and roll it around, wondering which way is right-side-up, which way is upside-down . . .

Especially if it makes me think about all my dreams, my old flower-child dreams, my newer "older but wiser" dreams.

Of course, the seventh remedy isn't about nighttime dreams. It's about daytime dreams. And not just any kind of daytime dream. My secret remedy story is for children, but I'm always writing for the grown-up child, too, and I do really want children of all ages to be able to dream about "doing great things." Not just any old thing but something well and truly worth doing. Something that might even be bigger than just one person can do alone.

Something like Peace On Earth.

I'm always reaching for the stars and then having to back peddle to something a little more within my reach. I don't know where my grandiose conceptions of what I think I can do came from.

It's so easy to sit in one's armchair and dream of all the great things that one could be doing ~ I do it myself all the time.

So I had to add the all important caveat in order to make this last remedy something that really can be done: "You must think of one small great thing you can do tomorrow." Note: It really needs to say "today" to give it a sense of immediacy, but in my story it's nighttime now and so it has to say "tomorrow."

I can't tell you how many times I changed this one little sentence from "one small great thing" to "one small thing" to "one small great thing," back and forth. Kept taking that one word "great" out and then putting it back in again.

It took a painting like this one above to make me keep the word "great" in, because how can a great painting be great if each tiny dab of paint along the way isn't of the exact same quality? And then I began to see how other steps along the way were of the same importance: getting out of bed, finding the palette and the paintbrushes, mixing the paints, standing back and just staring ~ for hours if need be.

This painting is titled "The Flying" by Anchise Picchi, 1911. It has a dream-like quality, don't you think? I love how those geese and the grasses drift in and out of the canvas, just the way in which the sleeper sometimes drifts in and out of dreams. And few dreams have captured the imagination of humankind more than that of flying.

I live with an aeronaut who flies a hot-air balloon on the weekends and who sometimes flies in his dreams at night, too. His flying dreams are without his balloon ~ he's flying on his own. I've never ~ yet ~ had a flying dream. Have you?  I keep hoping to have one.

This document above is the 1786 description of the historic Montgolfier Brothers' 1783 balloon flight. It includes the illustration of the balloon with engineering proportions and description. Here is a whole different kind of creative process that depends upon one small great thing after another in order to end up with one monumentally great historic event whose ramifications still go on and on, from Kitty Hawk to the lunar landing to little robot rovers on Mars with names like "Spirit" and "Opportunity."

While I was teaching, I was also trying to illustrate what would become my first children's picture book. I was so tired at night that some nights all I could do was get out the paper, the scissors, the fabric. But then the next night I might make a tracing, the next night cut out the paisley dress, and by the end of a week I might have one illustration pieced and patched together into a very rough draft.

Eventually, I sold the text to this story but not my illustrations. Still, I've always felt that maybe the artwork gave my story a little edge that it wouldn't have had otherwise. If I have time enough in my life, I'd like to work on becoming more of an artist someday, but I might love words too much to make the time for it. Not that I couldn't try to do both.

But I've learned, or let's say I'm still learning, that whatever it is a person embarks upon, a letter to a friend, a new recipe for peach cobbler, an embroidery for an apron, a flying machine, it has be be done one small great step at a time.

And I do forget this ~ a lot.

The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron is one of the best books I know of for helping people to get in touch with their creative souls so we can start doing and keep on doing whatever it is that we were born on this earth to do.

It's the kind of book that can help people find the way to make their dreams come true, one step at a time.

I do hope that your dreams are coming true for you!

And now we have come to the end of the seventh, the last remedy. It isn't quite the end of the secret remedy scrapbook, however. I'll try to explain that to you this week, I hope.

Suddenly they heard the soft, trembling hoot of an owl
in the darkness outside the window.
. . .
Lolly was all sleepy and cozy and full of great thoughts.
She was busy dreaming of tomorrow.

.

Scrapbook: Sixth Remedy: Reading

There are no more wonderful words in the English language than "once upon a time." If you gather a class of children around you for story time and you begin with these words, there will not be one child whose full attention will not be riveted upon you. It's like casting a magic spell.

I understand that in some countries the words that begin these kinds of stories are: "There was, and there was not." I like these words, too. They bring into play something that must be held in a state of high suspense, a thing open to belief or to disbelief.

I've always thought that to wonder about a thing is, well, wonderful. And I guess I have spent most of my own wondering, not alone, exactly, but with my nose in a book, reading words written by someone else.

So the sixth remedy in The Secret Remedy Book is all about reading. Here is my two-page scrapbook spread, and I realize, looking at it now, that there is more writing on it than graphics. More words than pictures. Hmmmmm. Perhaps that is as it should be, being all about reading.

I did put my "Once Upon A Time" card on the bottom left-hand side, and a magazine clipping of a "shelf" of old books on the top right-hand side. Even with a magnifying glass, I can't quite read the titles, but most of them seem to come from "The Stoddard Library," and the others look genuinely old, the kind of books that I inherited from my mother from her mother.

The bottom three books on the right-hand page are from a catalog or a flyer: All the World's a Stage, A Chair for My Mother, and More, More, More, Said the Baby. Children's picture books. I would have put more of these on this scrapbook page, but at the time these were the only ones I could find that were in full color and small enough to fit on my page.

Sometimes a thing gets done or not done for the most obscure or the most simple of reasons.

The sixth remedy has two special caveats. The first is to "Read in peace and quiet from a favorite book." I know it's possible to read on a crowded bus, but it's blissful to read at home in your favorite armchair in peace and quiet, and since this is a remedy for feeling better, I felt it might be best to pick a favorite book rather than take a chance on an unknown one that might, I don't know, plunge you into depths of despair or heights of terror or who knows what these days.

It's not like the Jane Austen era anymore when you could count on a little bit of decorum.

The second caveat is one that I find to be invaluable to impart to children. "You must find one special part of the book that is so wonderful that you feel like reading it again and again."  Sometimes children think that being a good reader means never making a mistake and furthermore just plowing on ahead, getting from the first word to the last word as quickly as possible, then coming to a full stop.

During story time, when I was always the reader, I tried very hard to model something different for my class. If I made a mistake, I went back and redid the whole sentence, not just the one word. Sometimes I redid a whole sentence just to read it differently, in a different tone of voice, or to emphasis one word over another, or simply to make sure I was making sense out of what I was reading.

But the most important re-reading was when I found a handful of words so wonderful that I wanted to read them again. And again. And again. "Listen to this!" I'd say. "Don't you just love these words?"

I do hope that these two girls will love some of these words so much that they will want to read them over and over. I hope that when they come to the end of this book that they turn right back to the beginning and start it all over again. I think this is one way in which language becomes a part of who we are. It gets woven into our story, the story of our own lives. "The sky is falling" and "the old woman who lived in a shoe" become threaded into the things that happen to us, or the things that don't happen to us.

These girls were painted by Laura Muntz Lyall (1860-1930). The title of her painting is "Interesting Story." I wonder if the beginning sentence in this storybook is: "There was, and there was not, an interesting story?"

Here are a handful of words that I love to read over and over. I copied them onto my brown-paper-bag scrapbook page. They are from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.

Then I found a photo by Wing-Chi Poon in WikiCommons, below, that comes pretty close to illustrating these words. As you will see, it makes me want to repeat those words again.

"The wind is rushing after us, and the clouds are flying after us,
and the moon is plunging after us,
and the whole wild night is in pursuit of us."

And I am quite sure that if you think about these words of Dickens and then think about the way in which I tend to put words together, you will see that I have made this way of using language a part of me, too. I love the kind of repetition that Dickens likes to use, and I often try to capture this same repetition when I write for children, or when I write for myself, or when I write for you.

And oh! how I do love this little girl in this painting by Jessie Willcox Smith (1863-1935). Here is the most sublime depiction of my sixth remedy I can imagine: a little girl truly lost in reading, in a safe, comfy place, alone with her book. And, I'm not sure, but I almost think that she is reading out loud just to herself, just to hear the sound of the words, this word followed by that word and then that word . . .

I hope you and your children or your grandchildren will have a few moments equally sublime today or this weekend. If you can, make the time for it. Make the place for it. Please do find a way to make this kind of reading take place!

And now there is only one last remedy, the seventh remedy, the most important one. Please do come back next week and find out what it is! For that owl is just about to hoot now.

Lolly was getting very sleepy.
"Did you hear an owl hoot?" she whispered.
"Not yet," said Auntie Zep.
"We still have time for the very last remedy."

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Scrapbook: Fifth Remedy: Letters

We often frame a piece of work like this and hang it in a place of honor on a wall, or maybe we attach it to a refrigerator with magnets. I found this rainbow-bright image on WikiCommons under the category of  "Child Art:"

"The artist was 1 year 10 months when this was drawn. Soft crayon on paper."

I wonder why we so quickly define these early works of children as art rather than as literature. There's no recognizable word or even a letter from our alphabet here, but then again I don't see a recognizable object either, not one hut or cow or princess in sight.

What I'm trying to think about out-loud here is that I see this beautiful piece of work above, with all of its runic and hieroglyphic and incommunicable dimensions, as "correspondence." How often does a child dash off just such a missive and oh-so-proudly hand-deliver it to a parent, a teacher, a friend?

It's a letter! Of course! And could it be that this colorful message above represents that magical time in child development when art and literature are one and the same, before they diverge, and one goes one way and the other goes the other way?

In only a few fleeting years, the child artist-writer who flourished such bright swirling messages will be bent over her desk, Louisa May Alcott style, using paper and pen and words to send letters and manuscripts out into the world in envelopes, all properly weighed, stamped, and sealed.

This is the very last piece of my Louisa May Alcott stationery ~ a treasure, indeed! And that lovely pen is the modern version of the old pens you had to keep refilling from an inkwell. This one, alas, will simply run out of ink, and that will be that.

It took me a long time to put my toes into what seems to me to be the colder waters of email, but, to my amazement, I have found that I love the ease and the immediacy of these aerial messages. Still, there is really nothing like the old-fashioned letter.

Perhaps that is why The Fifth Remedy is all about writing letters, the old-fashioned kind. I loved creating this scrapbook page, finding magazine photos of writing desks and old letters, adding a very small envelope that can be opened, and decorating the brown-paper pages with loose stamps from my stamp box.

And I loved creating the remedy itself! My mother was the world's very best "cheerful-letter" writer. She was such a master at this that, honestly, the whole house could have burned to the ground, and she would have written a totally cheerful letter about it. I looked for her rose-colored glasses after she died, but for the life of me, I could not find them anywhere.

But I wanted something more than cheerfulness in the fifth remedy.

So, when I added the all important caveat, it seemed to me it had to be the inclusion, not of words, but of something else. Something unexpected. This "something unexpected" would have to be fairly two-dimensional so that it would fit into an envelope. Finding just the right thing that is also the right size makes this remedy even more challenging.

In The Secret Remedy Book, Auntie Zep finds a heart-shaped leaf to put in her letter, and Lolly finds a mockingbird's feather. For my secret remedy scrapbook, I found a small envelope, 3 and 1/4 inches by 2 and 1/2 inches. It is affixed to the scrapbook so it can be opened and peeked into. Which means I can get inside it, too, and change its contents as I please. A very nice feature, if I do say so myself . . .

Yes, I put something unexpected into that envelope!

It's a piece of ribbon from a longer roll that I have ~ ribbon so beautiful that I have never known what to do with it. Someday the perfect art project will come along, and then this ribbon will find its true home!

You see, there is this huge part of me that wishes art and literature could be more entwined, the way they are in that first image on this post, when writing and drawing are all one and the same thing, once upon a time.

And while I was contemplating art and literature and the fate of my ribbon in one part of my mind, another part of my mind found this painting of two women on WikiCommons, sharing a letter. It's a 19th century painting by Alfred Stevens titled "Pleasant Letter." I love these two faces so close to each other, looking into the letter together. It reminds us that there was a day when letters were sometimes the only view into the outside world. And if the letter was not a love letter, it must have been passed around from one person to another, and read over and over.

And oh, how I do love the fabric in this painting! That shawl and its fringe . . .

But the day is beginning to draw to a close for my two little characters, Lolly and Auntie Zep. They are getting closer to the moment when that owl will give out its first hoot. I hope so very much you will return tomorrow for the sixth remedy! We must hurry now. The owl will soon awaken.

"Will an owl hoot now?" Lolly asked as she sealed her envelope.
"Soon," said Auntie Zep.

.

Scrapbook: Fourth Remedy: Wild Things

If you have ever fed geese, you know that wonderful feeling of joy you get from feeding wild things. My husband and I like to camp out in a park called The Lost Pines of Texas ~ just the name is magical enough! But The Lost Pines comes with wildlife, too, among which are the most exuberant and downright gossipy geese you will ever find anywhere. A gaggle of long-winded chatty little souls.

We always take old bread and chips and sometimes popcorn just for the geese. There's a pond where they live, and when they see people coming down to the shore, they swim right over, waving their wings and honking hysterically like long-lost relatives. A few shy ones will stay in the water, doing water-ballet exercises, but most of them will waddle right up to us, just the way these geese are sauntering right up to this little girl.

She was painted by Hector Caffieri (1847-1932), and this is from a birthday card that my husband gave to me a few years ago, a Marcel Schurman greeting card, printed in England, © The Medici Society, and beneath the title on the back of the card, "Feeding Time," is printed "By courtesy of John Spink." Isn't it amazing how many people are connected into the making of one card so that one husband can purchase it for one wife for one birthday? It's really pretty mind-boggling!

And then I found this on WikiCommons:

 

And doesn't she seem like the same little girl, only with a goat this time? She happens to be Heidi, from the 1922 cover of the classic children's book by Johanna Spyri, illustrated by Jessie Wiilcox Smith.

When I was nine years old, I read the first few chapters of Heidi over and over. Those were the parts I loved the best, when she was in the mountains with her grandfather, drinking milk out of a wooden bowl. We had some wooden salad bowls, and I sometimes used to insist upon drinking my milk out one of them. My mother let me, bless her heart!

I wanted to live in the wilds with wild animals, and that is probably how the fourth remedy came to be about the feeding of wild animals.

Here is the two-page spread in my scrapbook for The Fourth Remedy.

On the left you can just barely see three somewhat smashed wasp nests, three bird feathers, a coin bag full of bird seed, and some clippings featuring animals, but from where I no longer remember.

On the right is a holiday card, which I will show you in more detail below. But first, the fourth remedy:

 

The Fourth Remedy
Feed a wild thing. You must make a solemn promise
that you will always do everything you can
to protect it from hunger and harm.

The Secret Remedy Book, being a story, has a story's sequence of events to it. Lolly and her Auntie Zep have had their apple juice, they've planted their seeds, they've taken a walk, and now they have eaten lunch and the scraps from their lunch have gone into a pail. In the book the scraps are fed to an opossum in a hidey-hole. And so, because I wanted my scrapbook to follow my story, I wrote about feeding an opossum in the scrapbook pages.

Yes, we had opossums way back then, but we never saw the mother possum with her babies the way the artist Wendy Anderson Halperin illustrated them in the published book ~ although I wish we had! I love the vignettes that Wendy put into her pages about feeding the possums, how the babies travel in their mother's pouch or on her back, how a possum hangs by its tail. It is absolutely wonderful when an illustrator gives you more than you even knew to ask for!

I originally thought about writing about feeding birds, but then I decided to make the creature a little more unexpected. If I had a goat in my backyard, I might have made it all about feeding goats.

I love this painting I found on WikiCommons by Jacques-Francois Ochard (1800-1870). I love the tenderness between the woman and the little goat. How quietly and trustingly the goat stands before this woman, eating from the bouquet of grass that she holds in her hand. Her other hand so very gently lays a caress upon its horns. There is such great peace here. The peaceable kingdom painted so lovingly.

Well, I don't have a goat, or geese, or rabbits, either, but I do have opossums aplenty, so I made my remedy page about the feeding of a possum.

 

Here the extra thing that has to be done is a promise. A solemn promise for the future. A promise that this will not be a one time thing. For when I wrote this secret remedy as a children's picture book, I wanted to touch on things that need to be carried forward with every step that we take in our lives.

I guess I wanted to find some way to say that it isn't enough to just scatter a handful of bird seed or take one pail of table scraps to a hidey-hole. We have to think about what we can do to truly protect our wild animals, our wilderness areas, our whole wild world.

And how to do this without being preachy about it? It's always such a thin line to walk down when we are trying to talk about things that touch our hearts so passionately.

This greeting card, which I sent one year as our holiday greeting card, was the graphic that was most important to me on this particular scrapbook page. It's from the collection of Thomas L. Cathey, and the card was produced by Portal Publications. The title is "Tree of Life." There is hardly a single version of the tree of life that I do not instantly fall in love with. I find this one wonderfully appealing.

But wait! There's an owl staring right at me from out of this card! Right there, on the left-hand side, near the top, with a very stern look. Fierce, if you ask me.

Because wouldn't you know it? I've forgotten all about that fairytale owl warning!

If you should be reading The Secret Remedy Book while you are reading these scrapbook posts, you'll see that Lolly has forgotten about the owl, too. She is way too busy making her solemn promise to the opossum. And I have found this to be true in my own life, that the tiniest little creature can distract me from a whole host of troubling thoughts and important errands and household chores. Happens every time.

But please don't forget to join me tomorrow for The Fifth Remedy! I hope so much that you will come back and visit me again.

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Scrapbook: Third Remedy: Walking

Just a very few blocks from where I live lies this secret pathway. To the left is a fence and a very old historical house with a widow's walk. (I'll show it to you someday.) To the right is a street and on the far right across from the street is a firehouse with a fire engine.  And in between the street and the widow's walk house is this sidewalk so enshrouded by flowering bushes and leafy plants and tumbling shrubs and tangled branches that it is more of a tunnel than a sidewalk.

And oh! how I do love to walk down it, or through it might be the better word. I have to bow my head to make my way beneath its overhanging greenery, but if I were nine years old, it would be just perfect. It is a child-size walkway.

Walking is a serious business. It can take you in and out of secret tunnels. Sometimes, it can take you into joy and out of sorrow. It can take you to places you've never been before. It can take you to the ends of the earth.

This curve of the earth was taken from a long-lost calendar of antique maps. I used it in my scrapbook for my third remedy, which is all about walking. I wanted a map of the earth in my scrapbook to pay homage to the old saying about walking to the ends of the earth to find the beloved, to prove our love, to fulfill our destinies.

I love how these old maps added such wonderful artistic flairs, or flares, too, for sometimes there is both flourish and flame. Here Aër, or Air, is represented by a woman with a halo of stars and what appears to be a moon-shaped tiara. The rest of the map (not shown here) includes Ignis (Fire), Aqva (Water), and Terra (Earth). Aër makes four. The four elements.

I find it sad that we can map out the whole world in the 21st century and never once make mention of air, fire, water, earth. Perhaps we should put these elements back into everything we create and think about and contemplate.

Here is my scrapbook's two-page spread for the third remedy about walking.  In addition to the piece of the ancient map, I added my greeting card, "Walking on Air", and the rainbow and train tracks, which I will explain below, for they come from a sentence in my children's picture book, The Secret Remedy Book.

If you have ever taken a walk to clear the fog in your mind, to soothe your soul, to cool your emotions, to find your footing in the world again, you know what a powerful medicine walking can be.

I did not have a car of my own until I was 31 years old, and so I walked ~ a lot. I walked to all my university classes from wherever I lived. I walked to bus stops to catch buses. Honestly, I walked just for the pure joy of walking.

 

The Third Remedy:
Take a walk as far as you can.
You must see something that you have never noticed before.

The extra thing here that you must do besides just walking is to "see something that you have never noticed before." It's amazing how easy this is to do. You can do it by walking from your back door to your back gate on any given day. Truly, you can do it by walking from your kitchen to your bedroom.

But in The Secret Remedy Book I made Lolly go a step further: I let her find something she had never noticed before, a piece of railroad track that was partly buried. But then I made her mind stretch out into the universe to make a connection between the way in which the ends of the track disappeared into the earth with the way in which the ends of a rainbow also disappear from view.

I found this photo on WikiCommons, taken by Michael Sanders, in Thuringen inside Germany. I couldn't find a photo of a railroad track that exactly fit my story, but I could picture my two characters, Lolly and Auntie Zep, walking along and seeing the curve of these tracks and making the kind of poetic connection that I used in The Secret Remedy Book:

"Both ends of the track disappeared into the earth,
as mysteriously as a rainbow."

And I love Michael Sanders' photo for the "two roads diverged in a wood and I ~ I took the one less traveled by" idea that it brings to mind. I do love how one thing leads to another to another to another . . .

Sometimes a thing takes us to Robert Frost and "The Road Not Taken," and sometimes it takes us to rainbows. I found this photo in Wikimedia when I looked up "rainbow."

Something like this just puts me into orbit for days. It's called a supernumery rainbow, which means (I think) that it contains some inner rainbow bands and that its colors do not fit the usual color pattern for rainbows.

I put it here partly just for its extraordinary beauty. The image has been enhanced and given to WikiCommons by Andrew Dunn so that we can marvel at it. What a lovely gift, Andrew Dunn. And Michael Sanders, too, for his diverging railroad tracks. Together, they make it possible for us to see ~ visually ~ the curves that these two completely different things can make, rainbows and railroad tracks.

I know it seems a far cry from Andrew Dunn's rainbow to my cut-paper tracks with the little train made out of stickers added below (and off-center, by the way). But, as a teacher, one of the most important things we look for in our little students is the ability to "transfer knowledge." Can they take something that they learned in one situation and apply it in some meaningful or creative or totally original way to a brand-new situation?

When I write for children, I try to give them little examples of this kind of transfer. Similes are great for transferring what we know about one thing to something else. But children are natural geniuses at making transfers and connections, if we will only listen to what they are saying. They are doing it all the time, and sometimes, when we are in a hurry, we miss it.

Here are some of the kinds of treasures that children find when walking on the earth: a metal washer on a loop of rope, a ticket, a red bead, a handful of coins, some nuts and bolts and more washers, a marble, a stone, some thingamajigs that I haven't a clue what they might be. And I didn't even add here the acorns and feathers and leaves and berries that are abundant almost anywhere.

(Note: That bright coin in the middle at the bottom is Sacagawea.)

When I read in other blogs like tinyhappy and soulemama about the pockets that they sew into their children's clothing, it makes me so happy, knowing that these odds and ends are the kinds of things that are going to end up in those pockets.

And who knows what a child will make of these things? Tiny things that fit in pockets have a way of enlarging the universe for children, for they make it possible for children to begin to imagine the world in new and wonderful ways. There is a secret world inside that pocket, and they can put their fingers inside and feel the edges of it, the infinite possibilities of it . . .

Please do come walking with me and see where this secret path will take us! We will find something we have never noticed before. We will walk and talk about this, that, and the other. We'll come up with ideas that we never thought of before. One thing will lead to another . . .

But we must not forget the fairytale warning about the owl! There are seven remedies, and we must complete all of them before the first hoot of that owl. Oh, I do so hope that you will join me tomorrow for the fourth remedy!

"When will an owl hoot?" Lolly asked,
as soon as they were back at Auntie Zep's.
"We have plenty of time," she replied.

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Scrapbook: Second Remedy: Seeds

This is from the cover of The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett and illustrated by Tasha Tudor. It shows the moment when Mary has entered through the ivy-hidden doorway into the inner sanctum of the long-lost garden. The caption for this illustration inside the book says that "she felt as if she had found a world of her own."

I truly cannot think of a picture more befitting of my second remedy than this illustration for this particular book and by this particular artist, Tasha Tudor. Especially since Tasha Tudor spent a lifetime planting seeds and growing things and making things, not to mention baking things, and all the while simply adoring the natural world all around her.

I grew up with The Secret Garden illustrated by Nora S. Unwin, and I treasure this 1949 book which I still have, the cover, alas, long gone. But when I went looking for gently-used copies of The Secret Garden to give to my little third-graders, it was Tasha Tudor's illustrated version that I found. I had fallen in love with Tasha by that time, and since this is the book that I gave away to so many of my little students, it has the dearest place in my heart, and that is why I have featured it here.

I placed my copy of The Secret Garden on top of my little stack of brown grocery sacks. And, I don't know, maybe it's just me, but it looks so perfectly framed there.

I feel as if this paperback copy of this book belongs in a world in which it might be tumbled into an old brown paper sack along with a loaf of bread, a bottle of apple juice, a skipping rope, a trowel, and a packet of seeds . . .

The planting of seeds and the sprouting of seeds is miraculous ~ every time. Even when my success rate is less than anyone would desire, I still love putting a seed into the earth, tamping a bit of soil over it like a warm little blanket, sprinkling the earthen coverlet with water, watching and waiting.

And so when I was contemplating the second remedy, it really didn't take me very long to make it all about planting seeds.

Here is my two-page scrapbook spread for the second remedy. I really loved assembling these two pages because it was here that I began to expand my idea of what my scrapbook could be all about.

I added the actual seed packets, and then I taped one of the "Jack O'Lantern" seeds right onto the page, and then I put a handful of the smaller "Jack Be Little" seeds into a tiny coin sleeve.

Here is a photo from a long-lost magazine of pumpkins that grow from just such little seeds.

Amazing, isn't it? From seeds to pumpkins to Jack O'Lanterns and sometimes to pumpkin pies!

 

And here is the second remedy with its exhortation to do something above and beyond just planting the seed. You must do something sneaky to keep the seed safe. And not just something run-of-the-mill or ordinary. No, no, it must be something sneaky.

I find that children love the word "sneaky" in the same way that they love the word "naughty."

I have had a whole coven of scarecrows keeping my garden safe, and it is not the fault of the scarecrows if the gardener has been remiss in planting seeds, watering seeds, weeding round about the seeds, and all such things like that. For the scarecrows have not only been on guard day and night, they have been tip-top in the art of sneakiness.

This particular scarecrow is on guard right this very minute, somewhat faded from the above photo, which was taken in her prime. Her skirt was given to me by a very dear friend who had this large length of pieced-together fabric, a project she had never finished, one of those wonderful projects we all keep on hand, for years sometimes, hoping to get to it one of these days.

My friend gave me her unfinished project and I turned it into a scarecrow skirt. We both know Mother Nature will reclaim it, month by month. But oh! how this colorful-skirted scarecrow does carry on through the thunderstorms and the droughts, the winter freezes and the summer scorchers . . .

We had thunder and rain just this afternoon! She was drenched for a few minutes, a little shower on a hot summer day. She and the plants and all the seeds in the dry earth must have loved that unexpected drink of rainwater.

But enough of seeds. We've that owl to be worried about! When, exactly, does the first hoot of an owl occur? Can we possibly finish all the remedies in time?

Oh, I do so hope you will join me next week to see what the third remedy will be!

Lolly took Auntie Zep's hand.
"Let's run back and see what the next remedy will be."

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Scrapbook: First Remedy: Apples

The first remedy is about drinking apple juice. When I first wrote this remedy years ago for a friend who was going through a hard time, I wrote about drinking a cup of tea, for, truly, what can be more comforting than a cup of hot tea, in your favorite armchair, with your feet upon a cricket stool? 

But when I translated this into a children's picture book, I changed the tea to apple juice. And then I found that I liked the change from tea to apples. For, come to think of it, what is more nutritious than the ordinary and everyday apple? It brings to mind the old adage that "an apple a day keeps the doctor away." 

And then there's Johnny Appleseed with his great folkloric sack of seeds, leaving apple trees in his wake with every step he takes. When I think about what I want to do in the very last years of my life, I can't think of anything more wonderful than to walk the earth planting apple trees.

I have never been apple-picking, but I've been to a peach orchard near Fredericksburg, Texas, to pick my own peaches, and I imagine the joy of reaching up for ripening fruit and filling your very own basket with peaches is the same as with apples.

Or do you only pick apples off the ground, windfall apples? I've always thought that was such a poetic phrase, "windfall apples," and I have a secret wish to eat a windfallen apple.

Here is my apple-drinking spread in the secret remedy scrapbook. I'm afraid that my scrapbook is made up of bits and pieces torn from so many different magazines that I now no longer remember the origin of each one. But I can identity a few items here: a US mail apple stamp, with the cancellation waves crossing over it, a label from a bottle of R. W. Knudsen natural apple juice (unsweetened), and four cut-paper apples of my own with little brown stems and leaves.

The tiny label in the little red rectangle says the Knudsen ingredients are "juice from ripe whole apples." Only that. Nothing added. Nothing taken away. And it is good to know, for those of us who have no apple orchards outside our back doors, that we can still purchase pure unadulterated apple juice!

But here is the crucial instruction: "The First Remedy: Drink one glass of apple juice. You must drink it so carefully that you can almost taste the very apple tree that made the apples that made the juice."

It was my thought as I wrote The Secret Remedy Book that I must find a way to slow the child reader down. The steps cannot be done quickly, without thought, without introspection, without savoring the moment. I had to add words that would require something more than just physical action. That is why every remedy has a kind of caveat attached to it.

Here are the apples that have been picked, the stems, the leaves, the metal pail. These are the apples from which the juice is made.

I tried to imagine myself traveling from the seed to the tree to the apple to the juice: Could I really taste my way all through the process?

"I felt I could almost taste the one sweet seed that made the tree
that made the apples that made the sweet apple juice."

And could I take a whole class of children, ask them to close their eyes, and imagine this one tiny seed, the moment of its breaking open into life, the little roots reaching down into earth, the branches reaching up into the sky, seeking the sun, the blossoming of its flowers? Could I imagine it myself?

It takes a poetic leap to find out that, yes, we can imagine the whole of it. It may be "only" in some mystical way, but does it matter if it means we reach a little deeper into the world that lies at our fingertips? I know we can't live in poetry all the time, but when we slip into its clutches every now and then, the whole world becomes enlightened.

I don't know where I found this little tree picture above, and I am not 100% sure that it is an apple tree. It is the thinest little piece of paper, pasted into my scrapbook. I've been studying it all day, trying to see the original, if only I could. It looks to me to be woven, as opposed to being a watercolor or a painting in oils or acrylics. If I could touch it, I feel as if it would have a felted feel about it, a rough wool depth to it. I love how it makes me think of a family tree, and of all the generations of people that go into making up each person's very own family tree.

Well, Dear Reader, if I have not lost you in the plunges into this, that, and everything that my mind seems to be making nowadays, do please come with me as I travel through this old secret remedy scrapbook of mine, and partake of this, the first remedy, the drinking of apple juice.

But while you are sipping away and contemplating the apple tree and the seeds and the roots, don't forget the owl. For, remember, the remedies will not work if they are not all performed before the first hoot of the owl!

And do please join me tomorrow for The Second Remedy!!

Closing their eyes, they felt almost as if they were in the very orchard where the tree grew.
"What about the owl?" asked Lolly. 
"Oh, we have hours before the owl hoots," said Auntie Zep.           

Scrapbook: Before the Owl Hoots

The first page of my scrapbook is the owl page. It is a preface, or a prologue, or perhaps it is more along the lines of a premonition.

For the secret remedy is a kind of magic spell. It works the way a magician keeps your eyes upon his left hand while his right hand is making the magic take place. In my children's picture book story, The Secret Remedy Book, it is the owl who diverts the little girl's attention from her loneliness. She cannot spend one minute thinking about feeling lonely or sad, for she must try to do all the remedies before the first hoot of that owl.

If you should open up my secret remedy scrapbook, the first thing you will find will be the warning about the hoot of the owl.

It's always something like that, isn't it?

In fairy tales, you must complete the task before the moon rises or the sun sets, or perhaps you have to spell the word "eternity" before you can be given the whole world and a pair of ice skates, besides.

It's exactly the same in The Secret Remedy Book. Only here it's the hoot of an owl. In my secret remedy scrapbook, I cut the owl out of black Canson paper and added the beam and the brown stem with its green leaves. I wanted the owl to loom very large and to be very fierce, for he comes with a grave warning. His hoot will break the spell and all will be lost.

The photo of the baby owls came from a book jacket, one of those wonderful books whose cover illustration is imprinted upon the hard cover, so you can remove the jacket and still have the artwork on the book itself ~ I do love that so very much! And so, I must confess to you, I sacrificed the jacket in order to make my scrapbook ~ oh, it is incredible the things we find ourselves justifying in order to give children the very best of something.

Yes, the book jacket seemed a small thing to give up if I could get my first page about the owl to really catch a child's eyes. For this is the page that sets up the fairytale warning:

Warning! You must finish all the remedies
before the first hoot of an owl.

The book whose jacket I used is Owls: A Portrait of the Animal World by Paul Sterry, published by Todtri Productions Limited. It has some truly fantastic photos of owls, with many baby owls featured, too. The owl above is showcased on a two-page spread, showing its fierce face peering out of the bark-framed doorway to its nest hole.

I cut the word "OWLS" out of the front of the jacket and framed the word on a long rectangular piece of green art paper. The photo of the baby owls came from the back of the jacket.

They are screech owl chicks, just two weeks away from being completely on their own in the world. Hard to believe for they look so tiny here, all crowded together for company on that little twig, not much more than a mere ruffle of feathers.

I often hear owls in the wee hours of the morning when I am up and about. And, really, it does not seem as if the hoot of the owl could possibly be a very scary warning, for it is such a wonderful, soft, trembly little reverberation in the still of the night. Unless you are a mouse, of course, and then you must scurry into your hidey-hole.

But as you follow me through my secret remedy scrapbook (and I hope that you will!) you must always keep the warning about the hooting of owls in the back of your mind . . .

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The Secret Remedy Scrapbook

I published The Secret Remedy Book in 2003, but I wrote the story in the 1990's. Sometime in 1995 I decided to try to make a replica of the book that Lolly and Auntie Zep found in the attic, the very book that contained the secret remedy. I wanted this replica have an olden look, to be the kind of book that might be found in a trunk, not just any trunk, but a trunk that was also very old and had "both a watery smell like the ocean and a sun-dried smell like the desert," the very trunk that I had written about in my story.

This was long before Wendy Anderson Halperin illustrated my book with her exceptionally wonderful art. If I were to make this scrapbook today, I would try very hard to echo her version of the secret remedy book. But in 1995, I did not know that I was going to be blessed with Wendy Anderson Halperin as the illustrator.

So I proceeded with my own version.

In order to make a book that might be found in a much-weathered old trunk, I decided I needed to use some very special kind of crumpled brown paper, with torn edges, and with a feel to it that was somehow both water-logged and sun-drenched.

So I chose the lowly grocery sack for my source of brown paper. I cut 16 grocery sacks in order to make my pages, and tore each edge by hand to further make the paper look olden and handmade, rough and primitive. I was able to get two page spreads out of each sack.

Here is a single page spread. Each page spread was folded into two, to make two pages, and these folds of pages were glue together until a book had been created. A couple of weeks from now, I will try to make a tutorial for you to show you how I did it, although I am really quite sure there is an easier way, if only I had known it! But I am the kind of person who gets the tiniest fingerhold on an idea and then just plows ahead, I'm afraid.

For now, I want to share with you what came of my plowing ahead.

This is the cover of my "ancient" book. It is made of brown corrugated-box cardboard cut to size and covered with flowered flannel. I chose this particular flannel because, although it was new, it looked very vintage. And I also chose this flannel because my grandmother had a set of elderly books, some long-lost volumes of a history of the world, whose hardback covers had deteriorated, and over which she had sewn a very similar flowered flannel cloth, so it seemed like the thing that a lady in the early 1900s might use in creating her very own secret remedy book.

Here is a side view, so you can see how thick a book it is. It won't close properly, it is so full of scrapbooking odds and ends. The bulky pages make the depth of the book a good 4 inches tall, taller than a clothespin.

Here is the title page.

And, right after the title page, I put photos of myself and my husband when we were about nine years old, for I planned to use this scrapbook with classes of children as a special prop when reading aloud The Secret Remedy Book. I could pull it out of, oh, say a grocery sack, and surprise them with what would appear to be a real relic of the past, complete with photos of myself and L as we were when we were their age.

Oh my! The intricate thought processes that take place when children gaze at the adult in person to the same adult as a child in a photo ~ you can see their little minds teeter-tottering on the edges of total disbelief and awe and downright suspiciousness. They are like little computers into which an unsolvable mathematical problem has just been entered, their little minds whirring away into eternity, trying to spit out an impossible answer. Some of them appear to be in shock. You reach into your pocket for your trusty vial of smelling salts only to realize this is the year 1995 (or 2009 as the case may be) and no one carries smelling-salts anymore. . .

But back to the secret remedy scrapbook.

Over the next ten days or so, I would like to take you through this scrapbook. If you have read The Secret Remedy Book, you will recognize all the steps, and if you have not, you will have a better idea of what my children's picture book is all about.

In 1995 I chose this little angel for my title page. She has been cut out of the face of a greeting card, so I no longer have any information about her, the artist or the greeting card company. But I love this little sprite, with her butterfly wings and her crown of holly leaves.

I especially like how she has been superimposed on top of a background of text that seems to be both typed and handwritten, as if she herself has been painted onto someone else's scrapbook page, someone else's journal page, someone else's words of wisdom.

It feels like looking into a mirror into a mirror into a mirror, forever.

And now that I think about it, scrapbooking is like a looking-glass that tries to keep the onward-rushing future from losing sight of the fast-receding and oh-so-precious past . . .

I do hope you will join me tomorrow for the first page (The Warning!) of The Secret Remedy Scrapbook!

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A Guardian Bag Lady

I have added a guardian bag lady to the Hundred Somethings Project started by Tollipop. Every time I see what I call a "bag lady" out and about in the world, my heart comes to a stop. We see these ladies everywhere, laden with their multitude of bags and sacks and baskets and shopping carts, and their multitudinous layers of clothing, and I wonder if they are not special angels sent here to teach us something precious.

I loved picking out the fabrics in which to enfold my guardian bag lady, the flowered dress, the starry apron, the coarsely-woven vest with its flecks of gold, the bright scarf, the plaid wool hat, the plumped-up bags, and of course, a wand.

The scarf is a ribbon, and it feels very Scandinavian to me. I love that cornflower blue against the red, and it made me very happy to find the same blues and reds in the cotton calico that I used for her dress. And I love stars, hence the starry apron and the bag with the gold stars.

The fabric I used for her vest is akin to something in between homespun and burlap. I don't know what it is called. It is a little like gauze only very stiff and loosely woven with gold threads in among the brown threads, the way a bird will weave a golden ribbon into its nest. Or golden hairs! Look here to find how TinyHappy's golden hair became part of a bird's nest!

I have used this wonderful fabric for vests, hats, boots, and even housetops ~ it lends itself to so many things.

In writing this post, however, I wanted to go deeper into who the bag lady is, where does she come from, how did she end up on the street with all her possessions flocked around her like so many children. We had just such a lady in our neighborhood for years. She went by a name that might have been short for Katrikki or Katyenka or Kirochka or Kuwanlelenta, a name that began with K, for she was simply called K.

I never knew anything about K's life, and she has long disappeared from our neighborhood. But, I don't know why, thinking of her made me suddenly think of Dorothea Lange and all her photographs of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl migrants and the pea-pickers. For it seems to me that there was a time when K was at the same crossroads in her life as this woman, below.

I found, to my great surprise, that this Dorothea Lange photo, so famous in its black and white form, has been colorized. I hesitated to put it here, for it seems not right for the original photo to have been changed, and yet I think these gentle pastels somehow bring this woman closer. I love black and white photography, but I always feel that it comes with a kind of distance, a remote silence. This photo in color seems to speak, however softly. It taps very quietly upon the heart, doesn't it?

The Wikipedia photo information says this woman had seven children in all. Here, two of her children with tousled bowl-haircuts are looking away, and you can only just barely see the baby's little smudge of a face on the far right.

This woman in Dorothea Lange's photo might be the precursor to all the bag ladies we find in our world. For are they not all of them this one good woman who has fallen on hard times?

Really, I bow my head before her and her children, knowing how closely bound together we all really are upon this earth.

When I made my guardian bag lady, some ten years ago now, I tried to write what she would teach me, if only she could. I might write different words today, but ten years ago this is what I wrote:

Your guardian bag lady knows
all the secrets of the world.
She will show you how to smell the roses.
She will share with you all that she has
of bread and poetry,
of sorrow and joy.
She will surround you with simplicity
and the art of contemplation.
She will teach you
how to travel by the sun and the stars.
She will send you on your way filled with
her wisdom and mystery.

May she stand guard over us as we wend our way through our own lives!

.

Thunder Cake

Thunder Cake by Patricia Polacco is one of my favorite children's picture books. For one thing, nobody does babushkas in kerchiefs better than Patricia Polacco! If you have read any of her children's picture books, you know the wonderful way in which she dresses her characters, especially her grandmotherly ones, in halos of scarves and billowing layers of patterned clothing, with little details like that lace petticoat peeking out.

And I adore her animals. Look at that goat with its fantastically floppy ears!! 

Thunder Cake is a wonderful story for helping a child through a thunderstorm. I can remember the crash of thunder in the middle of the night when I was very young, and the lovely sound of my mother's footsteps padding down the long hallway to check on each one of us. The eternal maternal guardian watching over her little ones.

Here is the full cover of Thunder Cake, front and back. I was much influenced by this story when I wrote The Secret Remedy Book, for my book is a step by step remedy for feeling better, and Thunder Cake is a recipe for being brave during a thunderstorm. And there is an actual cake recipe included on the very last page: "My Grandma's Thunder Cake." Such a very nice touch in this children's picture book.

The illustrations are a glory of colorful fabrics, quilts, rocking chairs, painted chairs, tablecloths, bowls and churns, and all her wonderful animals. Oh, and a teapot and teacups, too. Not to mention the precious little girl and the storybook grandmother . . .

Patricia Polacco invokes this wonderful grandmother in many of her stories. I have a definite fixation on grandmothers and thunderstorms. And teapots, too. That might have led to this greeting card of mine below:

The old-fashioned, very grandmotherly saying ("A tempest in a teapot") gave me such an ideal excuse for making a little storm and putting it in a teapot.

Hmmmmm. I've hardly ever sent this card to anyone because I find it very hard to judge just which tempest, exactly, in someone's life would this card be appropriate for? By the time I've worried myself over wondering (should I or shouldn't I send this card), the tempest is long gone, whatever it may have been, or it has turned into a hurricane and needs a very different kind of card. Still, I do like this little "cloud and lightning" storm in a teapot.

I understand that the English say "storm in a teacup." Wikipedia says here that there are other versions, too: "storm in a cream bowl" and "storm in a wash-hand basin." And I found one article here that says the Netherlands version is "storm in a glass of water." This same article also says the idea may go all the way back to Cicero, who is said to have written, in perhaps a loose translation, that someone was "stirring up billows in a ladle."

Well, if you have a tempest or a storm or any kind of thunder threatening you in any way, I do suggest running out and getting a copy of Thunder Cake, and maybe even making "My Grandma's Thunder Cake" recipe and sitting down and eating cake. Instead of worrying, as I am prone to do.

Or maybe we could all try standing in the middle of the world and pointing!

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Sunflowers in Hallowed Ground

We have had our first sunflowers this year. They sprang up unexpectedly out of hallowed ground. This piece of ground is an oval of brown grass that lies between our garage and our would-be kitchen garden.

Just behind this barren oval, to the west, are the wild roses that grow, wildly, all along our back fence.

First there was this bare brown spot, an oval just the size of the shadow of a VW beetle. And then, out of bare earth, we got a this "Jack and the Beanstalk" plant with one great green flower head.

The green flower turned into this gigantic lovely, standing so straight and tall, looking right into the sun with its flamboyant bonnet of yellow petals.

By the time the one giant sunflower departed, a whole stand of middle-sized sunflowers had grown up out of this sacred place. How did they know to flower in this particular spot? A spot so large with the absence of something that is no longer there . . .

Here is what is no longer there: my little black VW beetle (1974-2008). My faithful friend. Here is where she sat, so patiently and trustingly, for the last year of her life with me, casting her shadow. And then I let her go. If you have ever lost a car that you loved, you will understand my heartbreak.

This spot where my little car last sat was a barren place all last summer and all last winter and into the spring.

Then, suddenly, sunflowers! Out of nowhere!

Or maybe not out of nowhere after all. Maybe these sunflowers are one last gift of love from this wonderful little car to me. In remembrance of our life together.

Sunflowers large enough and wild enough to fill up such a huge black hole.

Here is Van Gogh's iconic painting, and I wonder if his sunflowers filled up some dark place in his own heart and soul, if only for one brief bright flash of time. He made many versions of these sunflowers, but this is the one I love the best because it is the painting I grew up with. It was in a gigantic and very heavy book titled World Famous Paintings, edited by Rockwell Kent.

I know all the paintings in this book by heart. As a child, I often dragged this book out onto the floor and turned every page, looking and looking.

The middle-sized sunflowers came inside to brighten up our house. Here is one bedazzling bunch in a clear glass vase, looking very Van Gogh-ish, indeed.

Soon all of the middle-sized sunflowers were gone, and these smaller ones in a little jelly jar had taken their place.

From small, we went to tiny sunflowers, like these.

This was the very tiniest of all the sunflowers,
no bigger than the tip of a crayon.

And then from petals to pods.

Just before there was really nothing left but the pods, I used the very last of the tiny sunflowers and seed pods to create a diorama. If you look closely, you can see a miniature of my little VW hidden in this garden of what appear to be giant sunflowers. Little clumps of green clay are holding the flower stalks in place.

Thank you to the maker of these miniature cars!

I do feel as if this toy car is my real car, shrunk by magic into this sweet little talisman. During the lifetime of my car, I often dreamed that I had run out of gas or the battery had died. In my dreams I would simply pick my little car up, tuck her under an arm, and continue on foot, for she seemed that small to me, a treasure I could put in my pocket. And now she has left flowers in her wake.

Thank you, sunflowers, for coming to me!

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Long Live the Mystery!

"The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery." This is my very favorite quote.

It is from Francis Bacon, and it is a mystery as to where I found this quote. I don't remember ever reading anything by Francis Bacon, although I am sure that I did in some long-forgotten university class. I know the name, but I had to google him to find out who he was (an English philosopher, lawyer, statesman, scientist, 1561-1626). However, a number of years ago I began to see this little quote of his in various books that I was reading, usually in the sidebars of books like The Artist's Way, for example. And so I wrote it down in a little notebook of mine where I keep quotations.

But these words did not get tucked very far away, for they had made a great impression upon me, as I love anything in which I feel that a sense of mystery is being deepened or heightened or made much of.

Soon I was thinking about how to make a card to honor mystery. In searching for an image to use, I thought almost immediately of Stonehenge.

This is the very iconic photo of Stonehenge that I used to make my own fabric picture. I found this photo on Wikipedia. It was taken by Matthew Brennan on October 31, 2007 and released into the public domain.

I love how photographers are giving images like this to the world ~ it is a very lovely gift!

But, in order to make use of Matthew's gift, I needed to make a copy of it.

So I put a piece of tracing paper over my computer screen and very very very gently traced the photo.

(Uh-oh. My husband has been reading my blog so I guess I am in trouble now, for he will know that I have been tracing things on the computer screen! On the other hand, this might be a test to see if he really is reading my blog . . .)

Here is the tracing. Using this as my pattern, I made each fabric stone to recreate Stonehenge for my greeting card.

I use tracing paper a lot in my art. But I always make a photocopy before I cut into the tracing, to make sure that I have a back-up. And, actually, often the paper copy is easier to use for the pattern, especially when cutting something out of fabric.

Alas, I have not yet experimented with "heat-and-bond" materials, although I have something called "Wonder-Under" that I do plan on trying out. Soon. I'm just so used to my old way of using tracing paper and photocopies, stapling, cutting, and then adhering my cut-outs with double-stick tape.

And here are the fabric stones. In retrospect, I think the one white stone with the pretty red flower stands out too much from all the others. But I hate to change her, somehow . . . She is like the flaw that makes the whole perfect!

I was a little worried that people might not recognize Stonehenge from this collection of fabric pieces. But I have yet to come upon someone who doesn't, at the very least, tap, tap, tap on my picture and say "It's on the tip of my tongue. It's that place somewhere in England." Yes, yes, it is.

Stonehenge is in southern England in the county of Wiltshire. The complete array of stones making up Stonehenge actually forms a circle, but I did not quite feel up to showing the whole circle. I opted for simplicity, I guess.

This is a 1649 depiction of Stonehenge, "author unknown" according to the photo information on Wikipedia. Although I am not sure how accurate this illustration is, it does give us an idea of the ring of stones that is Stonehenge.

I do know that there are modern photos showing the circle, it's just that I love old works of art. And I love it that scientists from many fields of study are trying to solve the mystery of Stonehenge. Still, I can't help but hope that the more they discover, the more they will deepen the mystery.

But how did a 17th century illustrator get this bird's-eye view, I wonder? Is there a high hill in Wiltshire (or Wilshire) from which an artist might see this view?  Or is this yet another mystery?

And finally, I added the moon. I don't know why exactly. Perhaps because of what Clarissa Pinkola Estés wrote in Women Who Run With the Wolves:

". . . Whenever a fairy tale is told, it becomes night. No matter where the dwelling, no matter the time, no matter the season, the telling of tales causes a starry sky and a white moon to creep from the eaves and hover over the heads of the listeners."

Long live the mystery, then, and the night and the moon and the telling of tales!