Writing Up A Storm

Peace

Of all the cards that I made for my mother, this one from about ten years ago is very much one of my favorites. The letters, the doves, and the moon are from Canson art paper and the background is a piece of starry calico. I made four of these, and on this particular one, there just happened to be a star on the fabric between the beaks of the top two doves. It almost looks as if the doves are trying to carrying that star between them!

I will be gone from this little blog until January 2010. Many thanks to all of you who have stopped by to leave all your lovely comments for me to find ~ each one has warmed my heart and brightened my days! I will be trying to get a little Etsy shop up and running, and if I don't quite make it by New Year's, it will be my first New Year's Resolution.

I always find the end of the old year and the beginning of the new year to be a very powerful time. I go into deep contemplation of the universe, of cabbages and kings, of lost things, and newly-found things, and a million other things! And I wish I may, I wish I might, find deep quiet, too, and the peace that passeth all understanding.

And so I offer this peace card to you today with wishes for peace in your life, wherever you may be, and peace on earth, goodwill to all.

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Baboushka and the Three Kings

One day when I was about nineteen years old and a student at The University of Texas at Austin, I found myself in the children's section of one of the campus libraries. There was a display of some of the Caldecott Medal winners, and first and foremost was Baboushka and The Three Kings by Ruth Robbins, illustrated by Nicolas Sidjakov, and adapted from a Russian folktale. A very tiny book, a booklet, really, not much larger than six inches squared.

It caught my eye and and I stood before the display and read it and then I checked it out and carried it around for a couple of weeks as if it were a magic charm.

I had not known that children's picture books could receive such prestigious awards. I had not fully realized that the art in children's picture books could be extraordinary, breathtaking, enchanting, holy. This one little book stopped me in my tracks and made me look at the world of children's books in a different light. I was already very interested in writing folktales, I was fascinated by the long reach of the old fairy tales, and here, in my hands, was a kind of vindication of all my instincts.

There was something important about children's literature!

The art in Baboushka and The Three Kings is ethereal. I'm not sure if I have ever seen anything else quite like it. I have seen these illustrations described as looking like stained glass, but I see them more as if they are beneath glass. Beneath layers and layers of glass. Or beneath water. Nicolas Sidjakov's art feels a little out of reach, giving it a timeless quality. We seem to be looking through a prism into the very heart of a deeply religious experience. 

The story begins in the time-honored fashion of all the olden stories:

"Long ago and far away, on a winter's evening, the wind blew hard and cold around a small hut."

Three kings knock on Baboushka's door, asking her to come with them to find the Child who has just been born. Baboushka chooses to finish her chores and go in the morning. In the morning, she puts "a few poor but precious gifts" into a sack and goes in search of the Child, but the snow has covered the path and she cannot find the way. She goes from village to village, searching, but no one can tell her where the Child is. Every year at the same time, she goes out into the world again, looking for the Child she cannot find, and giving her gifts to the children she meets along the way.

Some reviewers have found the story sad, saying its message is if opportunity knocks and you procrastinate, you will regret it for the rest of your life.

But I don't see this story that way at all.

Baboushka is an old woman, living alone. Three strangers come to her door wanting her to help them find a child in the middle of the night, in the middle of a snowstorm. She invites them in to take shelter with her. She does not go with them. She is a good, hard-working woman. She finishes all her chores and goes first thing in the morning. Then she spends the rest of her life searching and giving.

Is this not the essence of a deeply-lived religious life?

She does not find the one child she is looking for, but she finds many children, and as the years go by, they begin to look for her.

"And it is said that every year little children await the coming of Baboushka. They find joy in the poor but precious gifts she leaves behind her in the silent night."

She becomes, in fact, a very folkloric version of our Santa Claus, an old peasant woman carrying a sack of gifts from village to village in deep winter. I find this very wonderful, as in "full of wonder."

Holding this little book is like holding an illuminated manuscript, or a kind of mirror, perhaps, in which we might find ourselves, for most of us spend our lives searching for whatever it is that we are looking for, and giving of ourselves along the way.

As I was writing this post this morning, I did a double-take at the opening words of this beautiful little book: "long ago and far away," and I was deeply humbled when I took down my own children's picture book, A Far-Fetched Story, and saw that I, too, had used these same words to begin my own folktale. Well, I don't suppose anyone can lay claim to "long ago and far away."

And it is in the great long ago and far away that we so very often find what we are looking for!

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Peace & Antique Maps

This is one of the last holiday cards that I made for my mother. It is pieced together from brown polka-dotted calico, a brown paper bag, and a calendar of antique maps of the world. I love these old maps. They are often surrounded by scenes of chariot races, cherubs lolling in clouds, a wind god blowing ships out to sea, and the gods of Ignis, Aer, Aqua, and Terra, all standing guard over the earth. Today's mapmakers don't seem to go in for extra frills like this around the edges of continents and oceans.

When I cut out each letter of the word PEACE, I tried to capture a different part of the world, so that the one word could represent the whole world. Luckily, I wrote down each letter's domain.

P ~  Africa, Red Sea, Middle East
E ~ Indochina and China
A ~ North America, Atlantic Ocean, Central America
C ~ Ireland, United Kingdom, Southern Europe, Africa
E ~ Southern Tip of South America

Not quite the whole world, but then these old maps do not show the whole world, either. Even so, it amazes me how much was known of our land masses before we were able to fly over our planet to see for ourselves the lay of the land. 

Many antique maps show the ships in the seas. These ships make me think of the families that set off from England and other points European to find the New World. When I was in my twenties, I might well have done such a thing, for I was braver back then, but today I barely like to set a toe outside my front door, I have become such a homebody.

I'd be afraid, today, to travel on the high seas. There might be pirates.

Still, each one of us sets off on our own journey, or journeys, and every journey has its own dangers. I might, someday, want to make a new card out of all the pieces of antique maps that I have saved from this old calendar. I might want to carve out the word JOURNEY from the continents and oceans of the world.

I am in a deep-winter state of mind these days, and I am loving every cold wintery morning here where I live. I love putting on two pairs of socks, two jogging pants, two flannel shirts, just to "brave the elements." I think it makes me feel I am getting ready to embark upon my deep-winter journey, and a journey always takes us from here to . . . there.

These antique maps often show the dangers that lie await in the deeps of the ocean. As I set off on my morning walk, with two jackets on and two hoods over my head, I feel a little bit like a walking sleeping bag, so bundled up that danger would not be able to get within shouting distance of me. Never mind that I am stripping off layers on my return home, or that I pass University of Texas joggers wearing shorts.

For a half-hour or so, I am trudging through deep-winter, lost, perhaps, in some frozen hinterland, puffing clouds with every breath, deep in the arms of both journey and peace. For now that I think of it, isn't peace the ultimate destination of all our journeys?

And so I am back full circle to PEACE.

It seems to me that people of good will all around the world can make peace on earth come true. I just know that we can someday.

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Tree of Life

"Tree of Life" is another of the holiday cards that I made for my mother some years ago. I started at the bottom with the very sturdy foot of a swan-duck and worked my way up the tree with a hippopotamus, a lion, a rabbit kissing a pig's ear, a sheep, a diving porpoise, rooster and eagle, a mouse, and finally a dove at the very top.

This was done as a line drawing in black ink, then I made a reverse-negative photo, turning all the black lines into white lines, and the white background into black. Then I printed the card in royal blue ink.

This is one of the drawings I did that made me want to cut everything out of paper instead of using pen and ink. I longed to lift that little rabbit up with my fingertips and move it around to see where it might best fit into this puzzle of animals. I had already done a little paper cutting of angels and doves, as you  will see below, but it would still be about ten more years before I was routinely cutting rabbits and pigs and doves and angels out of both fabric and paper.

And now I am longing, in this new year coming up, to delve into fabric and paper in a different way, but I'm just not sure yet what form this will take. I only know that whatever I do, it will be a part of the great "tree of life" that walks, or swims, or flies with us upon this planet!

My "Lion and Lamb" is the very first card I designed for my mother. I sold this design, and the three shown below, to Recycled Paper Products in the 1980s. I sold each design for $125, and felt really terrible that they were no longer "mine" anymore. I'm not 100% sure if I have the right to show them here, but since I am the one who designed them, it seems as if it might be okay.

The next year I sent Recycled Paper Products my "Tree of Life" design, plus several other designs, only this time I asked for a royalty instead of a flat payment, but (sigh) they said my designs were no longer the style they were looking for (or words to that effect). 

The "Lion and Lamb" is the one I most wished I had not sold.

This one is the next. I did love these little angels! Later I took this angel and made her into the "Angel of the Falling Stars," and so that way I felt that I had "rescued" her for myself.

The reason I feel such a loss in having sold these designs is that, if I no longer own the copyright to them, I cannot duplicate them myself in any way. Actually, I'm not sure what my having sold these designs means. I really should write to Recycled Paper Products and try to find out if I can cut the lion and lamb out of fabric, for example, or cut these angels out of paper, and create new artwork out of these designs.

These angels came about when I learned about making the background into a figure in a piece of art. I loved turning the white background into an interior angel in between the two blue angels.

This piece of art was made by actually cutting the angels out of paper ~ one of my first experiments with paper cutting! When I had arranged, and arranged, and arranged, two blue and one white angel until I was satisfied with the way they looked together, I used my old light table (a dishdrainer filled with nightlight bulbs and covered with a clear plastic cutting board) to make a tracing and then did the final piece with pen and ink.

These doves were also designed by using cut-paper doves, three blue and two white. The eyes were made with a hole punch.

The "Dove Christmas Tree" was made by using many sheets of tracing paper and my light table until I had a pencil version that I liked, and then I made a line drawing in ink. I didn't know about reverse-negative photos when I made this design, or I think I would have flipped the colors here, and made this a white tree against a blue background.

Here is one of my favorite "Tree of Life" cards. I used this as my holiday card a year or so after my mother died and I was no longer making holiday cards for her. I found some packages of these cards in a secondhand store. The artist is Thomas L. Cathey, and the card company is Portal Publications. Cathey has been more realistic in his approach than I tend to be, for his deer and rabbit are safely on the ground, and there are only birds in the branches of his tree.

I love the way he has framed his tree with branches entwined with vines and leaves and berries. Birds are even sitting on little twigs jutting out of the frame!

My life has been a little bit "on hold" of late. I have been in deep hibernation! Even the lack of snow where I live has not prevented me from digging in, burrowing in, and ruminating on this, that, and the other. Winter is much more than a season, it is a journey, too. Sometimes a very deep and dark and cold journey. But soon we will all be coming out of our own personal winters, finding spring again, and our own trees of life, whatever they may be.

If I were to create the tree of life that sustains me, there would not only be my loved ones and friends and all the animal kingdom on its branches, but books and kettles, quilts and armchairs, fabric and paper, too! I wonder what you would put on the branches of your tree?

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Winter Solstice

The winter solstice in the northern hemisphere is the shortest day, the longest night, of the year. It is a day that is also commonly called "midwinter." But it is curious that, instead of marking this day as the midpoint of winter, we say that it marks the beginning of winter.

To me it marks the one-third point of winter, for I always feel that winter begins on December first. Where does that notion come from, I wonder??

I made the card above years ago for a friend who was having a "Winter Solstice Party" and wanted a card for his invitations. This card was made by copying a photo of the night sky and using three different sizes of lift-off stars to mark the positions of all the stars. Then I made a frame and wrote the title "The Northern Sky on a Winter Night." All of this was done with black stars and black ink, so I had a reverse negative photograph made which turned everything black into white. Then I printed the card in royal blue ink and got the image above.

The only constellation I am any good at finding by myself is the Big Dipper, and if you look closely, you will find it in the middle. Uh-oh! Now that I look at it myself, I see that the stars in the dipper of the Big Dipper are not positioned correctly. Hmmmmm. You are supposed to be able to find the North Star by using the stars in the Big Dipper, and I think I have made that impossible to do.

My northern sky contains a false clue, leading wayfarers in the wrong direction! 

This 1860 painting by Régis François Gignoux is titled "Mid-Winter Moonlight." A perfect title for the day of the winter solstice! I wonder if he was thinking of that when he painted this folkloric scene, children skating on a frozen pond in the middle of a frozen world, the air itself so cold it is cloudy, the way warm breath clouds on a winter day. But the "moonlight" seems more like some kind of surreal midnight sunlight, doesn't it?

I especially like the girl or woman just at the edge of the bridge. Like the frozen waterfall, she, too, seems to be captured in a moment of absolute stillness, neither stepping forward nor turning backward.  She is in a state of eternal contemplation. I find that I tend to be very contemplative in this time of year myself. And I seem to be looking inside my heart and soul more than usual this year.

Gignoux was a French painter who lived in the United States from 1840 to 1870, so this is probably a scene from a little town on our eastern coast, somewhere in New York or New Jersey, perhaps.

Here is a glimpse of real mid-winter, a deeper snow, a more inclement landscape. This painting is by Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) and is titled "Poor Woman of the Village." It is a reminder to me that mid-winter comes with danger, and that those of us who are the most poor are most at risk in deep winter. The mother carries a load of kindling that is as large as herself, and she is bent beneath its weight.

I love the thought that when this mother and her child and her high-stepping goat get to their destination, they will be warmed by this load of kindling, if only for a little bit.  And I love their shoes, which look like wooden Dutch shoes turned up in a peak at the toes.

We do not experience this kind of winter where I live. For the most part, our winter is really the cold of the tail end of autumn.

Wherever you are, I hope you are warm on this winter solstice. I hope you have enough kindling to keep you cozy, and a fireplace or an electric heater, a gas stove, a campfire. I hope you have a little space in your life where you can come to a full stop and contemplate the universe.

And I hope you will find the North Star in spite of would-be artists like myself who sometimes scatter stars about in a very willy-nilly fashion!

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Prayer for a Child

I grew up with Prayer for a Child by Rachel Field, illustrated by Elizabeth Orton Jones. This lovely children's picture book, published in 1941, won the Caldecott Medal, and it has stood the test of time, for it is still in print.

This little book, as its title says, is a prayer for a child. It is a Christian prayer, for its last three words are "for Jesus' sake." My father was Lutheran and my mother was Episcopalian, but in reality, my father did not go to church at all and my mother went to many churches. And she took us with her.

We went to a Greek Orthodox church, a Black Baptist church,and a Jewish synagogue. When we were not going to places of worship, we went to talks on reincarnation and extrasensory perception, or we listened to my mother reading from The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran, for my mother cast her spiritual nets far and wide.

I have followed in my mother's footsteps, and I, too, cast a very wide net. I sometimes envy people who were raised in one church or one temple or one mosque, and have never strayed outside of one particular way of looking at the world, for it must be very comforting. It must feel very safe and certain.

But I am only able to see the world through my own experience, and curiously, this one little book, Prayer for a Child, opened up the whole world to me, for there is an illustration in this book that is crowded with all the faces of the world's children. I would come to a full stop at this illustration and look and touch and think and look some more. It was here for the first time that I learned that the world was full of children of many races besides my own.

The copy of Prayer for a Child that I grew up with did not survive my childhood. But I found one in a secondhand store about 15 years ago, in perfect condition. In order to protect the cover, I ran it through the laminating machine at my school and, to my great dismay, watched the beautiful cover wrinkle as it passed through the machine. You can see the wrinkles above. This is from the inside flap and gives you an idea of all the many children who are illustrated inside this beautiful book.

The part of the prayer that goes with the illustration of all the children is this:

"Bless other children, far and near,
And keep them safe and free from fear."

Such a sweet and simple and kind little prayer. Such a timeless little prayer.

I don't know if the times we live in now are any more dangerous than the world of 1941 or 1929 or 1492 or 1100 or 800, or 4000 BC and beyond. Here at the end of 2009, we may well have reached a tipping point in terms of the health and the safety of our planet, but each of us can only live within the hopes and fears of our own little worldview, for the world is very large, and we are not that much older, really, than the children we used to be.

"Through the darkness, through the night
Let no danger come to fright."

If you want a prayer for yourself and for the children in your life, you might want to consider getting Prayer for a Child, if you don't already have it, for it is a lovely and gentle prayer with golden and gentle illustrations that invoke the very best of what childhood should be.

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A Guardian Angel

My guardian angel card was the hardest for me to design of all the guardians. I wanted the angel to have the same look as all my other guardians, which you can find here: the guardian babushka, bag lady, scarecrow, and gypsy, but I found it almost impossible to find the right fabric for her dress, her apron, her star, her wings, her halo. I tried dozens, maybe hundreds, of combinations before I chanced upon this one above and decided it was the best one ~ so far. For I am still looking for my angel.

It may be that finding one's own angel is a lifetime pursuit!

My childhood image of an angel is of an overwhelmingly kind spirit who comes like a light in the dark and says, "Fear not."  And as I have grown older, I'm not sure that my idea of an angel is really any different. In writing this, I thought first that my idea of God had become a much larger and more complicated idea from my childhood idea of God, but then I had to admit to myself that in a crisis I become so quickly a child again, and my prayer is almost always, "Dear God, please help me." Our childhood ideas about God and angels are probably more powerful than we sometimes realize.

"The angels keep their ancient places ~ ~
Turn but a stone and start a wing!"

I have always loved these lines of poetry by Francis Thompson. I often think of them when I am out and about, walking in the world, and yet I am quite sure that I can start a wing by lifting a cup just as easily, by drawing a curtain or stirring a pot or turning a page.

The fabric that I used for my angel is cotton with a whimsical, childlike pattern of bright stars. I have only five small pieces left, each piece about the size of a sheet of typing paper.

I bought most of my fabric about ten years ago when I was first making handmade greeting cards. I cut all of the fabric into pieces that fit into file folders, and sorted everything by color into blue, red, green, yellow, orange, purple, maroon, and black folders. And then I have a few boxes of mixed scraps, a box of burlap, and a box of felt.

 

The apron came from one of my scrap boxes, and these were scraps that my mother-in-law Oleta donated to me for my cards, from a dress of hers, I think. These pieces are a see-through organdy fabric, very angelic indeed. I really need to make an angel out of these pieces alone someday, for I love the translucent apron that came from this one little piece of flowered gauze or gossamer. It is diaphanous, a word I sometimes see in print but tend to never use myself.

I love how the colors of the apron are deepened by the starry blue cotton underneath. It makes me think of how rich the layered-look really is, when colors from one layer seep into another.

 

I would like to add my guardian angel to Tollipop's Hundred Dresses project. And here is my wish that we will all find our very own angels, if we haven't already, for I understand that all we need to do is but turn and start a wing!

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Angels at Large

I found two paintings of angels I had never seen before when I searched for angels on WikiCommons. This one is by Orazio Gentileschi, an Italian Baroque painter who lived from 1563 - 1639. The title is "Saint Cecilia with an Angel." I love the idea of a personal angel sitting right beside me while I create, or wash dishes, or write a letter, or whatever.

This angel looks so much as if she cares about Saint Cecilia. She holds the sheet of music closer for her to see, but without, so it seems, once taking her gaze off of Cecilia's face. And her wings are weighty, indeed, as silvery as those silver pipes, and as heavy-duty. The artist makes you feel that her wings really could lift her up in flight.

Here we have a multitude of angels hovering over mother and child. This painting is "Song of the Angels" by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905). (He did the "Young Gypsies" painting that I loved so much in this post here.)

The mother and child in the painting above may well be the Madonna and Christ Child, but there are no halos to say for sure. By the time Bouguereau was painting, the use of halos in art had diminished. And, anyway, I love the idea that we all have halos of light around us.

And I also love the idea that each one of us, at any given time, might find ourselves surrounded by a multitude of angels. I went to a reunion this past weekend of ladies I had worked with years ago at The University of Texas, and being with them was like being surrounded by a multitude of caring angels. There must have been a great invisible intermingling of aureolas and wings in that cozy home with its red-painted cupboards and comfy sofas as five of us gathered round to visit.

When three or more are gathered together, just think of the light and feathers that are flying every which way! And when only one is gathered together, all alone, with bowed head, perhaps, that one is never really alone. Truly, I have sometimes found a feather on the floor when I have been quite utterly alone.

But this 1875 painting might be even closer to the essence of angel upon earth: the loving mother figure who watches over us while we sleep.

The English translation of the title is "Young mother contemplating her sleeping child in candlelight". The painter is Albert Anker (1831–1910). Here all of the light is candlelight, but the glow is very much from the heart of this mother.

I don't think we ever reach a point where we do not long for the safety of falling asleep in the arms of such loving watchfulness.

Perhaps an angel is someone who makes us feel safe in spite of whatever we might be facing, or the stranger who smiles at us or simply holds a door open for us.

I think I'll go looking for angels today. I could just follow the trail of feathers that angels must surely leave behind. And there must be feathers everywhere!

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Angel of the Falling Stars

The "Angel of the Falling Stars" is one of the greeting cards I made for my mother years ago. I think this one dates back to 1987, but my system of keeping track of the dates of my artwork is so esoteric that I often cannot figure it out. I do remember that this particular design came to me all at once, full-grown, as if it already existed and all I was doing was putting it down on paper.

The falling stars are the kind of stars that you make wishes upon, for it had occurred to me that there might be an angel who specifically watched over, not the wishes, but the stars that fell. Perhaps she scattered the stars herself, or perhaps the stars fell from her own wings and her own garments, leaving empty star-shaped spaces behind.

I drew my angel and the stars in black ink on a white background, and then I had a "reverse negative" made, making the black angel white and the white background black. And then I printed the card in royal blue ink, which turned everything black into blue.

In 1987 I was in my first year of teaching, in first grade, in an inner city school whose test scores from the year before were the second lowest in the city. We were a school full of falling stars. The fragile fingertip-hold upon the universe that both my students and myself had was probably very much upon my mind when I drew this angel.

When I was twelve years old, I had received gifts of money for my birthday that added up to $25. I took my birthday money to a bookstore in downtown Dallas and spent it all on one book: Look Homeward Angel, by Thomas Wolfe. I bought the book because of the title, and perhaps because the author's last name was Wolfe, so close to my father's last name of Wulf. I read the book but did not understand it. Still, I was not the least bit upset that the book was way over my head for I was sure that someday I would be able to appreciate it. Later on, I would learn more about Thomas Wolfe and his place in literature, but I never tried to read Look Homeward Angel again. It remains a deep and abiding mystery of my childhood. The actual book itself has always been a kind of guardian to me. A guardian angel in the shape of a book, with pages for wings.

An open book is very much like a pair of angel wings, now that I think about it.

Well, I think I might spend this week delving into angels. We can never have too many angels in our lives. And perhaps the angel who is in charge of the falling stars is among the most important of all the angels.

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Happy Birthday to Oleta! from Emma!

It is my mother-in-law's birthday today! I thought I would wish her a happy birthday by way of Emma. Emma is wonderful little children's picture book written by Wendy Kesselman and illustrated by Barbara Cooney. This book was both written and illustrated in honor of real-life artist Emma Stern. I think Emma Stern may have been a German artist who lived from 1878-1970, but I am not sure.

This sweet little book is no longer in print. Sigh.

I thought a book about an artist who painted all the way through her golden years would be the perfect picture book to say Happy Birthday to Oleta, who has painted all her life as well as all through her very golden years. I cannot remember a single time when Oleta has not had her easel up in her house with a painting-in-progress upon it. To view some of Oleta's fine art paintings, click on Art by Oleta (on my sidebar).

Oleta, you are my inspiration to keep on keeping on! Happy Birthday!!

I should tell you a little bit about Barbara Cooney, the illustrator of Emma. She is a wonderful "Grandma Moses" artist who won the Caldecott Medal twice, for Chanticleer and the Fox and Ox-Cart Man, but I also love another book of hers titled Miss Rumphius.

Ms. Cooney said of her school days: "My favorite days were when I had a cold and could stay home from school and draw all day long."

Her art is considered folk art, and maybe that is why I love her illustrations so much. They are colorful, whimsical, full of heart and soul, hearth and home, and yes, very, very folksy.

The story of Emma begins when Emma is seventy-two years old. Although she has a large family, she is lonely. Her family gives her a painting of her little village across the mountains. The painting is the springboard for a whole new life for Emma, for this painting of her old village is not how Emma remembers her home.

Emma decides to paint her village as she remembers it.

This begins her career as an artist, very much a Grandma Moses story. But I love the other information that we are given about Emma, too. For example, when her cat Pumpkinseed gets trapped in the top of a tree, Emma climbs the tree herself to rescue him. In bare feet, no less.

This is exactly what my mother-in-law Oleta would do, too! 

The painting of the barefooted Emma reaching for the pumpkin-orange cat in the flowering tree is my favorite illustration in the book. I love knowing that as I grow older there is nothing to keep me from climbing trees, writing stories, making fabric art, and hey! maybe taking up painting, too!

And I love knowing that I can conquer loneliness or illness or old age itself by following my heart's desire. When we are very young, our heart's desire is often a romantic one, but as we grow older, it becomes something deeper and larger.

I am still trying to find what it is that I'm supposed to be doing with my own life. But I feel myself getting closer and closer to it. Something to do with writing and cut paper and torn fabric, with words and colors, with poetry and art, and most definitely with things that are olden and frayed around the edges. I feel myself almost pouncing upon it in the middle of the dark of the night!

And I absolutely love knowing that when I am 72, or 89, or 102, I may very well find myself hurrying down to the store to buy paints and brushes and an easel.

Thank you, Oleta and Emma, for showing the way . . .

And Happy Birthday to Oleta: Mother, Grandmother, Great-Grandmother-To-Be, Cook, Gardener, Reader, Genealogist, Computer Whiz, and Fine Art Artist!!!

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A Sneak Peek

This is a sneak peek at a children's picture book that, for a very particular reason, I am going to talk about tomorrow instead of today.

All will be explained ~ so please come back tomorrow!

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Into the Wild Woods

This colder time of year always reminds me of a little piece of woodland that my father bought in East Texas when I was a teenager. These photos today are not of my father's trees, but of trees very nearby the place my father bought, so that you can see what this little woodland was like. I remember that a road had to be cut through the trees to get from the gate to the interior of the property, where my father built a small dam and so created a very small pond.

But he left the rest wild, just like this photo.

We had this little piece of wild woods for only two, maybe three years. Then my father sold it for a more "rolling hills" type of property. And I have missed this little woodland ever since. Our summer trips here were very hot and we spent most of the time swimming in the pond.

But in the winter, we explored the woods.

Exploring meant setting off into a snarl of roots and vines and brambles. We kids pushed branches aside and made our way into the tangled wilderness. Our property, which I think was about 50 acres of woods, was bounded on all sides by fences, so we could not really get lost as long as we did not cross over a fence, but the feeling of being lost was large.

And thrilling.

We pretended we were lost, of course, and there is something in myself that longs for that feeling of being lost in the big wild world. I loved books like Robinson Crusoe and Huckleberry Finn too much for my own good, perhaps.

The roots of trees, like these roots, were a fairyland to me. There were small gullies, or ditches, in the woods, where flash flood waters had washed the soil away from tree roots, leaving many trees almost airborne, or so it seemed. In cold winter winds, we could hide in these little ditches and halfway keep warm amongst the accumulation of leaves and brush.

Looking into a root system like this one in the photo is like looking into a little underground world.

I find I have saved these memories in some place in my mind where I keep all things ragged and rough, scraggly and snaggled, gnarled and knobbly, thistled and bristled, tangled and torn. I collect treasures like these.

I can remember sitting in the middle of this woods and thinking that I could hardly bear its wild beauty.

The feet of great trees were everywhere around us. In places on the earth like this, Tolkien's walking trees are alive and well. And in the dead of winter, amongst fallen leaves and bare branches, this wild woods was more alive than any other place on earth, for it was rampant with spirits.

The forest primeval, indeed.

This was the last of my childhood. I was about thirteen or fourteen when my father bought this woods, much too old to "play" in the woods behind our city house. But when we drove into East Texas into this little woods, some kind of permission was granted, not just to be a child again, but to be a wild child.

Or perhaps simply to be.

There is one tiny place in my own backyard, beneath the fig trees, where I can sit cross-legged on the earth and shut out everything except for the leaves, the brambles, and the fig trees. I must really go out my backdoor to this spot more often and close my eyes . . .

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Where Have All the Chickens Gone?

On Saturday, when all the leaves were falling, I went looking for chickens. If I can't have snow, I was thinking, then I can at least enjoy chickens. Or perhaps I should say hens. But I couldn't find any.

I found this painting by a French artist, Alexandre DeFaux (1826–1900). I love these little girls with the hens and the hay. I think that is a second girl crouched down behind the first one, but I'm not entirely sure. The indistinct quality of this impressionistic painting makes everything a little dreamy. I love how the white chickens and the white kerchiefs and the white aprons are all aglow with the same light. It made me try to compose a little haiku:

Hens and aprons
Flapping in the barnyard light,
Dappled white.

We have had hen roosts in our neighborhood ever since I have lived here, going on some thirty years now. Just last summer someone wrote in our neighborhood newsletter that they had found a stray hen in their yard and they wondered where it belonged.

But I couldn't find the chickens, or the hens, or one single rooster on Saturday. I couldn't even find one of the roosts. All traces of the keeping of chickens seem to have vanished.

The only thing left in one of the yards where there used to be chickens was this metal rooster. A fine fellow, indeed, in a yard scattered with the flotsam and jetsam of children's things, toys, and a trampoline. But the roost that used to stand here is gone now.

I love living in a neighborhood where both children and chickens are welcome. We have more and more young families living here now. Are we losing our chickens because we are getting more children, I wonder? Surely not.

I do feel bad, in writing this lament, because what I want is for someone else to keep chickens in their yard so I can admire them as I walk past, but I really really don't want to keep chickens myself. It does seem a little lazy of me.

Still, it might well be that the standard by which a neighborhood should be measured lies in how many of both children and chickens it is keeping in its midst.

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The Snow That Never Came

They said we would get one to six inches of snow last Friday here in Austin, but I never saw a single snowflake. It did snow all around my neighborhood, but just not in the avenues where I live. And, to tell the truth, some of the photos of "snow" that I saw on the evening news were a bit of a stretch. A beautiful tabby cat sprinkled with about twenty snowflakes. They sparkled like little sequins all over her fur, and you could tell that, if the photo had been taken one second later, those snowflakes would have been drops of water vapor instead. That is snow in Austin.

It's been years and years since we had a real snowfall here. We all keep wishing for just one snow every year. When I was getting my teaching certificate, I did a lesson in front of some fifth-graders in which I mentioned "snow," and my supervisor gave me minus points. I asked her why. She said it was inappropriate of me to reference something that my students had never experienced. I was so taken aback that I didn't say anything, but I began to make a mental list of all the things this would mean I could never mention: dinosaurs, for sure, and maybe whales, boa constrictors, corsets, covered wagons, buffalo, space ships, meteors?  Leprechauns? Zeppelins? Pyramids?

But back to snow!  

I made the snow dove (above) from blue and white construction paper, using a hole punch for all the dots. If you look closely, you can see the hole punch left a little bit of a fuzzy edge. For about twenty years, I made a greeting card for my mother to use for her holiday cards, and this was one of them. The dots at the top and bottom are uniform (see first image at very top of post) because, as I remember, the dove was harder to see if all the dots were random, although I might want to make the snow dove harder to see if I were doing this today.

Especially since snow is so very hard to catch a glimpse of where I live.

Friday morning early I hurried to the window to see if it was snowing. I watched and waited all day, and no snow came. The next morning, it was quite cold and not a breath of wind, but all over the avenues, something very light, fragile, feathery, was falling, falling, falling.

Not snow, but leaves. Hundreds of leaves, thousands of leaves, were wafting down from the trees in the quiet cold morning. It was as magical as snowfall. We don't always get what we wish for, but we always get something, and sometimes it's just as wonderful. Sometimes, it's even more wonderful, if you can let go of wanting something else.

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Frederick

Frederick by Leo Lionni is, I am happy to say, still in print! This is a Caldecott Honor Book and a classic children's picture book with a message for the world that is eternal. The art is made of torn and cut paper, and each piece of paper looks to have been prepared by hand, with watercolors, perhaps.

The story begins in the autumn with a family of mice. Four little mice are very busy gathering food for the long cold winter to come. The fifth little mouse, however, is not gathering food. Frederick is always a little separate from all the others, going the other way, looking the other way. 

Instead of food, Frederick is gathering sun rays, colors, and words. He sits in quiet contemplation of the world, observing everything, while all around him his family is busy, busy, busy, gathering corn and nuts, wheat and straw. The other mice want to know why Frederick doesn't work, too.

"I do work," said Frederick.
"I gather sun rays for the cold dark winter days."

The winter days come, and the first snow comes, and the mice all scurry into their winter hideout. At first there is plenty of food, but soon the deep dark and hungry part of winter is upon the little family. No more food, just the cold and the dark.

Now Frederick brings forth what he has gathered. He warms the dark with sun rays, and brightens the dark with colors, and enlightens the dark with words. And now his family understands his true value.

"But Frederick," they said, "you are a poet!"

What a powerful story this is! I have found in my own life that when you reach a point where you are beyond the help of worldly goods, of nutrition or medicine, when you have to fall back on something else, it is very often in the words that someone wrote down that comfort can be found. And the older I get, the more I turn to poetry and to the poet to show me the way.

Long live Frederick!

Speaking of poetry, here is a little poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning to bring the story of Frederick to a close:

"Earth's crammed with heaven,                
And every common bush afire with God:
But only he who sees takes off his shoes."

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Bricks

We not only have piles of leaves and piles of kindling in our backyard, we also have piles of bricks. They are waiting to become a part of a path that is being set down in an S-shaped curve from our back door to our back gate. No doubt the path will divide at the woodpile, and then we will have Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" in our own backyard.

I will stand at the point where the bricks diverge and wonder: Shall I take the path to the gate and out to the alley and down the alley into the world? Or shall I take the path past the compost pile and beneath the fig trees to the brush pile where the wild creatures live?

But I won't have to choose, I can do both.

For some reason this makes me remember the part in Lolly Willowes where Lolly finds herself at a crossroads, too. She has missed the train back home. She can walk back and arrive late, or she can sleep out all night.

"Lovely to live at your own sweet will, lovely to sleep out all night! She had quite decided, now, to do so. It was an adventure, she had never done such a thing before, and yet it seemed most natural. She would not sleep here . . . But presently, later on, when she felt inclined to, she would wander off in search of a suitable dry ditch or an accommodatingly loosened haystack; or wading thrown last year's leaves and this year's fern she would penetrate into a wood and burrow herself a bed."

I have never slept out all night in my own backyard, and I really, really feel I should ~ at least once. Children often camp out in their backyards, but adults almost always go to a woods to camp. We hardly ever drag a sleeping bag out our back door and sleep under our very own fig trees.

Here is a peek at a little portion of the brick path, almost hidden beneath the pecan tree leaves. There is something about a path that stirs the imagination. A path makes you want to set your feet upon it and see where it goes. And there's a sense of danger, because, of course, you might get lost. I will have to do a whole post someday on these words of Dante, but for now I'll just set them down here:

"Midway upon the journey of my life I found myself in a dark wood, where the right way was lost."

I am so often myself in this dark wood, trying to find my way back to the right path, or trying to find the path, period. Any kind of path reminds me of how fragile my sense of direction really is. How lovely it is going to be to put my feet upon my own brick path and follow it to wherever it takes me ~ in my own backyard!

And here is a photo of the path that I took at the end of summer, or, rather, a photo of a pair of old gardening gloves that I found on the path. I love the silver duct-tape bandage on one of the fingers.

Goodness! This post started out with a stack of bricks for a brick path, paused to consider Robert Frost, detoured into Lolly Willowes, got lost in the woods with Dante, and ended up with a pair of gloves. This is what happens, I guess, when you start making a path.

You never know exactly where it will take you.

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Kindling

We have a little red wagon. We use it to gather kindling, among other things. I haven't been that much of a kindling-gatherer of late, but I do love pulling this little wagon behind me, picking up sticks in our yard and carrying them to our two brush piles by the back fence. 

If you want your backyard to be a wildscape, a brush pile makes a good home for wild creatures. Our brush piles are fed by our two gigantic pecan trees, as pecan trees have a way of dropping their limbs ~ often. Too often for our liking, for we hate to lose a single branch. The larger limbs are cut up for firewood for neighbors who have fireplaces, and the smaller branches are cut into very small logs and kindling for our chiminea.

(Oleta, is this your red wagon or is it ours? I can't remember now, we have had it for so long.)

Here is one of our woodpiles beneath a boxwood bush. The logs on the bottom are very small, small enough to fit inside our chiminea. There is a piece of tin across the top to protect them from rain, with a couple of larger logs to keep the tin in place. The large metal bucket tilted on the very top is full of kindling.

I love to pass by this little woodpile on my way to the compost bin. It gives me the tiniest hint of what it would be like to be a pioneer living on my own land.

When I wrote my first children's picture book story, A Far-Fetched Story, I loved putting in the opening lines:

"Early one autumn, long ago and far away, the woodpile was higher than the windowsills. But even so, there was not enough firewood to suit Grandmother."

Woodpile! Firewood! I felt that putting these two words in the first two sentences of my story was the same as infusing the story with a magic potion from the very start. For, honestly, if I open any book and see those two words on the first page, I will instantly be enticed into reading more.

Here is Tasha Tudor with an armful of kindling. This is a newspaper clipping I have saved for years. You can see the creases where it was folded inside a box of papers. Later I smoothed it out and put it inside a plastic sheet cover inside a loose-leaf notebook with other clippings that have caught my eye for one reason or another. I have often thought I have lost this clipping, but I keep finding it again and again.

The article that accompanied the photo told about Tasha Tudor's old-fashioned life. This was the first time I knew about her life at all. I had seen her sweet artwork, but I didn't know about the 1800s life that she insisted upon living in the 20th century.

She probably has bare feet, we can't see for sure here. But this photo captures her essence. I love her layered clothing, her aerial kerchief, the soft wools and washed cottons, the cloudy colors. She is like a wild creature in camouflage in an autumnal field with her great armful of kindling.

When I feel that I have lost my footing in the world, I can put my finger on a photo like this one of Tasha Tudor, and feel grounded again. It puts me in touch with something stronger, wilder, more fearless, and, suddenly, I feel a little stronger, wilder, more fearless, too.

Gathering kindling in my own yard has the very same effect!

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