Writing Up A Storm

Spring Break

Someone once told me the name of these trees but I don't remember now. They flower very early every spring, beautiful pink lotus-like blossoms, and if I am not careful, I will miss this great extravagance.

There are three of these trees along the curb in front of this brick home, and there are only a handful of days when this glory of pink sits among the bare branches. Soon green leaves will mix with pink petals, and then the petals will all fall. They are already falling, as you can see.

But on the years when I am lucky, I will turn down this street rather than another street, and there will be this great burst of pink Spring to greet me!

I find it mind-boggling beyond words that while we are entering spring, the southern hemisphere is entering autumn. I would probably love spring as much as I love autumn if spring did not mean the long hot summer was drawing way too close. But I may have found a way to have both spring and autumn together, by peeking as often as possible into a lovely New Zealand blog:

Songs of Light

Kerri of Songs of Light will entrance you with her exquisite photography, her beautiful bird silhouettes, and all the lovely bits and pieces of poetry that she puts here and there in her posts. And, sometimes, she lets us have a glimpse of the fantastical layers of clothing that she wears out and about in the world. She is a walking poem in her twirly skirts and lacy petticoats and wonderful leggings and boots.

As for all things pink, if you are ever in need of pink, or if you ever need a hug, you should really hurry yourself right over to:

Pom Pom's Ponderings

Pom Pom makes me almost wish I were back in junior high again so I could be in her class. Almost, for I fear all the king's horses and all the king's men could not drag me back to junior high, but if I were to ever find myself there again, I would want Pom Pom for my teacher. The next best thing is to curl up inside her blog as if it were a cozy armchair.

I think I started thinking about Songs of Light when I left the lotus-tree house and headed for home and saw this lovely chair art, for Kerri does wonderful things both photographically and artistically with chairs. And because she loves birds so much, there is definitely a lot of taking off into flight in her blog.

And here is a chair lifting off ~ on a wall.

This little scene above is typical of The Avenues where I live. I love to walk up and down these streets, for I never know what I will find next.

Not far from the chair, a window has appeared with a little bit of the "music of the spheres" sprouting from it. There is something about a window that hangs where a window should not really be that jump-starts my imagination into all kinds of flights of fancy.

I love the unexpected, especially when it makes me laugh.

And then as I was turning home with spring so very much surrounding me, I remembered the sad state of my spring-cleaning. Wasn't it just a very few weeks ago I took a whole week off to do my income tax and spring clean? The terrible truth is that not much has gotten done.

As a matter of fact we have plunged to a new low with regard to housekeeping. If we have a visitor, for example, either myself or my husband will hurry, hurry, throughout the house to make sure that all the ceiling fans are ON, because the terrible grime along the edges of the blades will not show if the blades are whirling. Yes, yes, it's that bad. 

And the venetian blinds! Each and every single one needs to be scrubbed within an inch of its little life. I sit here with a properly bowed head, doing nothing about it.

Oh my! I want to be outside all of a sudden. Kneeling before spring. This little beauty is a volunteer peach tree that took root from the ancient peach tree by our back gate, and just this year for the very first time has bloomed. 

(At least, we think it's a peach tree!)

All of this is to say that there might be more Sparks than posts here for just a little bit, while I bounce back and forth between spring outside and the fan blades inside.

Truly, I'm not one for ever putting Housework before Art, Writing, Reading, Weather, or Seasons, but there comes a time when . . .

Here is one of the first good photos we have ever managed to get of our cat Boo. Normally, he is a streak of black lightning, as he rushes inside to outside, outside to in, and from hiding place to hiding place.

The only reason we were able to capture him for this photo is because a new girl-kitty, a little seven-month-old named Peppers, has just moved into the neighborhood. She has fallen in love with Boo and is trying to make friends with him. She bounces. She cavorts. She beseeches. He is thirteen years old, he is three times as big as she is, and he is terrified of her.

He is sitting at our front door above, petrified, with a tiny glazed-over look in his eyes, trying to decide if it is safe to go outside. But how sweetly he has his front two paws together! Such a kingly pose . . .

Spring love!

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Edited to add: I think I misspoke when I wrote that our volunteer peach tree "took root from the ancient peach tree," for probably new trees come from pits rather than roots, but, alas, my education is sadly lacking in all such things!
xo Kari

Edited to add: The trees in the top photo are magnolias. Thank you to all the readers who dropped in to let me know!

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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Cracked Sidewalk

Many of the sidewalks where I live are cracked like this one, which has the lovely crackle effect of an old painting. These sidewalks, some upheaved over the years by tree roots, others shattered by winter freezes and by the weight of passing feet, are the reason people tend to walk in the streets instead. I wonder if we skirt these delicate stretches of concrete because of a reverence for them? I myself find them to be worthy of hanging beside the most beautiful works of art. Even the Mona Lisa cannot boast of having had children's bare feet and their bicycles, too, running across her as these sidewalks can.

One summer a number of years ago I took a train from Austin to the little town in northern Illinois where I was born. While I was there, I made a pilgrimage to my grandmother's old house and paced up and down her sidewalk and even ventured down the old driveway, the very same driveway that I played upon as a child. It was as cracked into jigsaw puzzle pieces as the above photo.

So I knelt down and captured two small pieces and hid them in my pocket and brought them back to Texas with me. I can hold them in the cup of my hand like worry stones. Or more like memory stones.

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Pumpkins, Pumpkins

Within walking distance from my house, there is an organic foods supermarket called Central Market. These orange pumpkins in a very large bin by the front door caught my eye on account of the name: Wolf Pumpkin.

Because my father was Hans Hermann Karl Wulf, I have always been drawn to wolves or wülves of any kind, seeking clues about my heritage in the same way that other people search for their ancestors in genealogical charts.

These wolf pumpkins look very much like the pumpkins I remember as a child, with ribbed sides and sturdy handles and that very solid Halloween-orange color.

Since my childhood, however, a huge variety of pumpkins have come upon the market with names like Phat Jack, Conestoga, Hannibal, Warlock, Gargoyle, and Knucklehead.

The first ones I remember seeing a number of years ago that weren't the typical round orange pumpkins were the Cinderella and the Fairytale varieties.

The Cinderella pumpkin is a vivid red-orange with mottled dark spots that make it seem all aglow, like a magnificent fiery ember. It is a large pumpkin with a much flatter shape than the wolf pumpkin above. I find it quite easy to imagine it as the resplendent carriage that takes Cinderella to the ball.

This pumpkin was apparently cultivated in France and is a French heirloom pumpkin called a "Rouge Vif d'Etampes." One source says this particular variety was brought to the United States in 1883. Perhaps "returned" would be the better word, however, since the origin of the pumpkin itself is believed to be North America. 

The ancestry of all the many pumpkins available today might make for interesting reading ~I picture seed packets crossing back and forth across the oceans and being delivered to greenhouses at midnight for cross-pollination behind closed doors. Spies and secret agents included. Very top secret and hush-hush!

The Fairytale pumpkin is harder for me understand how it came by its name. It is a pale brown, almost mushroom-colored. Perhaps that is the fairy tale connection: mushrooms, toadstools, fairies-in-the-woods. A couple of websites called the color "buckskin," and one used the word "mahogany," but I see it more as a mother-of-pearl brown.

Perhaps its burnished-brown color seems more coach-like, and therefore more likely to be the pumpkin chosen for Cinderella's coach.

(My photo picks up too much orange. These pumpkins really are not orange.)

This is my pumpkin for this year. It is about the size of a grapefruit and very smooth. I bought it because of the handle, which looks curiously equine to me. I'm calling this a Horse-Handle pumpkin.

I love this season ~ it is my very favorite time of the year. And the pumpkin seems to be a very big part of what we all tend to love about October and November: jack-o'-lanterns and pumpkin pies!

There is something wonderful about the labyrinthine tangle of vines that makes the pumpkin. I have tried to grow pumpkins myself and have not ~ yet ~ been successful, but I would love someday for our whole side yard to be a pumpkin patch. It's on my great-pie-in-the-sky-to-do-list!

(I want the side yard to be a woods, too, so I will have to figure out I can have both the woods and the pumpkin patch.)

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Halloween Houses

My little neighborhood is dressing up for Halloween. Every year the Halloween decorations multiply and become larger and more daring. This is one of my favorite houses at any time of the year, a lovely painted lady, but this year for Halloween she is particularly colorful.

The house itself is a deep turquoise with bands of red shingles and painted porch railings.

During this month of October, brightly-colored pumpkin lanterns and skeleton heads hang over the porch, like faces in a crowd.

I took this photo in the rain. I was sure my camera would catch the raindrops coming down, but they are invisible here, although you can see the damp concrete.

It is early morning and the porch light is still on, adding to the festivity of the scene. I love the orange glow of the pumpkins on the steps, the skeleton on the far left, the painted flowerpots, and the metal turkey sculpture with its fan of metal "feathers" behind the table on the far right.

A few blocks away, and things are a little more ghoulish here. Cobwebs and spiders are swarming this house. Caution tape surrounds the crime scene, there is a very grave graveyard on the far left, and a host of life-size figures on the right. Halloween scarecrows!

And here is my sweet little old-fashioned lilac house! Do you remember her from my post about The Lost Blue Riding Hood? Who would ever have thought that she would succumb to Halloween?

Here she is above in her rightful state of mind, as shy and introverted and as modest as they come, wearing a coat of lilac paint so delicately hued that she is almost gray. Really, her lilac is so faint, you can tell that she barely has one little toe out of the gray color band.

But when a house lapses into some tiny little extravagance, like straying into lilac tints, you can be sure that eventually she will lapse into larger and much more dangerous extravagances.

Yes, look at the lilac house now! Talk about Dr. Jekyll turning into Mr. Hyde. . .

I love how some of the houses in my neighborhood are being transformed into Halloween houses, although mine won't be one of them. And that brings to mind something I have long thought about, being very introverted as I am and prone to dwelling upon things in a prolonged kind of way.

Thoughts on Extroverts and Introverts

Some people are very extroverted and love to dress up, especially in costume, and dance upon table tops, and sing from mountain tops, and I love it that they do. I am not one of them, but I treasure such people.

We all know the differences between extroverts and introverts, but there is one difference that mystifies me the most. It is this. Generally speaking, introverts tend to feel that there is nothing wrong in others being extroverted, while extroverts tend to think that there is something wrong with people who are introverted. For example, an extrovert will often say, "What's wrong with you? Why don't you want to go to the party?" On the other hand, an introvert rarely ever says, "What's wrong with you? Why do you want to go to the party?" 

Speaking of parties, we've been invited to a Halloween party, costume optional. My husband and I are both very introverted. Will we go to the party, or not? Will we go in costume, or not?? 

Long Live the Mystery and Halloween, too!!

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Save the Wall

Someone put this sign on the stone wall that runs along the northern side of the grounds of the Elisabet Ney Museum in Austin. It's a very fine stone wall, and has a long history of its own. It is just short enough and broad enough to easily sit upon and muse about the world or have a tête-à-tête with a friend.

And it is now on the endangered species list.

My post from yesterday about the Brouhaha in the Kingdom tells a little about the controversy that is taking place over this particular wall, and whether the wall will be allowed to stand or be taken down.

Elisabet Ney, a famous sculptress, built this castle as her studio in 1892 and lived here until she died in 1907. It has been a museum for decades, housing many of her sculptures. The castle itself is enchanting, with secret staircases inside its turreted tower.

But now it is undergoing a major restoration. The strictest of the historical preservationists want to return both the castle and the grounds around it to the way they were when Elisabet lived here at the turn of the century ~ when the 1800s turned into the 1900s.

[And just out of curiosity, is that the turn of the 19th century or the turn of the 20th century?]

About 50 trees, the front iron gate, and this wall were added on since Elisabet's death. This is the northeast corner of the wall. You can see a ribbon tied around that tree behind the wall. Trees have been marked with ribbons to indicate which ones should be removed or which ones should be saved, but I have no idea what fate this ribbon above foretells.

It's like a fairytale, isn't it?

Do you remember the old fairytale about the gold being buried by a tree with a yellow ribbon tied around the tree to mark it, and then the next day all the trees have yellow ribbons tied around them?

I love this wall! It is such a wonderful place to sit and talk with a friend. I have often done just that, or sat on it by myself with my notebook and my thoughts.

And I love this great ancient tree. It is a wild-looking, mythical tree from some immemorial time. I am sure it is safe. It must have been here before Elisabet was even born. 

It seems like such an obvious decision: Save the Wall! Save the Trees!!

But I find I am able to appreciate the other point of view, too, which I have tried to put into words below. I wonder what Elisabet would think?

Here she is in an 1860 portrait by Friedrich Kaulbach. She was born in Germany and that, perhaps, explains why we have a very European-looking castle right here in the middle of Texas. She stands by one of her busts and holds a carving tool in her hand. And I love her gaze into our own eyes. Does she not look like a woman who would carry on in spite of everything? Does she not look like a woman who would build a castle in the middle of Texas?

The historical preservationists want to make this piece of ground look like the much more barren prairie that it was when Elisabet built her castle here. Back then the castle was not hidden from view by the trees that hide it now. It had a fence made of cedar posts and chicken wire, and I think there was little else. It was a strange, remote, feudal-age, medieval castle looming up out of nowhere. In the middle of nowhere.

The preservationists want anyone coming upon this castle to be able to have the experience of seeing it in its 1900 landscape.

Neighbors are jumping in on both sides of the wall. We have a neighborhood newsletter, and emails are pouring in. One person wrote that we should tear down the trees and the wall and the gate and the sculptures and the castle and recreate the landscape to look as it did before the Europeans discovered the Americas. Another person said he had had a séance with Elisabet and she had told him personally that she liked the wall and the trees.

It's been wonderful to be momentarily diverted from the greater issues of the day.

Although it did occur to me, speaking of the greater issues of the century, that two reasons for leaving both the trees and the wall in tact are (1) that our planet needs the trees and (2) that we really do not need to be expending energy removing a perfectly good wall when we should be conserving energy instead. 

For now the gate is closed and barred.

I don't know what will come of all of this, but, for some reason, it has made me remember the Victorian haunted house, Grace Hall Episcopal Girls Dormitory, that I lived in as a freshman and a sophomore at The University of Texas. It was a relic then, and it has been long gone for many years.

I can't help but wish that some historical preservationist had saved Grace Hall so that I could wander through it now. I hope there is a heaven for old houses that have been torn down and carted away, and that one day we will be reunited with them and will be able to walk inside them again.

Meanwhile there is a new call to add to Save the Whales and Save the Earth:

 
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A Brouhaha in the Kingdom

This castle was once the home of Elisabet Ney, a famous sculptress. It stands only four blocks from where I live, a fact that always astounds me whenever I stop to think about it.

Elisabet and my husband share the same birthday, and so he honored her birthday one year by putting her in one of his flying machines and letting her soar right out of her own castle grounds, leaving a jet trail behind her, a little wake of unidentified flying lights.

His caption reads: Elisabet takes a ride on her birthday. My husband is a computer artist (among other things) and I never know what is going to happen to reality when he starts composing on the computer. Something is always sure to take off in flight.

Awhile back I told you here about how I could not make myself enter the grounds of Elisabet's castle. Someone was sleeping beneath a tree, and I had crept back out of the gate, without getting the photos I had hoped for.

A couple of weeks after I had failed to get my castle photos, my husband and I went back together, and just in time, too, because now no one can go onto the castle grounds, for a whole different reason.

A great brouhaha is brewing!

(And don't you just love that word? Brouhaha! I have never ever used it before!)

But just before all the commotion began, we were able to get almost the same view from the front as the photo used in Elisabet's birthday ride. The main entrance is to the far left. The castle is made of native limestone, and you can see that it is blackened in many places now and needs to be scrubbed clean again.

I came in closer to the main entrance, for there is something in one of the limestones that I want to show you.

There is a sign with a blue border to the left of the tall brown double-doors. And if you look above this sign, in the second stone just above the top of the blue border, there is a face carved into that stone.

You will have to use almost pure imagination to make it out from here, so I went in even closer.

Here it is, the face of a young girl, with her own hair folded around her head like a cloak. But her cloak of hair has not been able to protect her from all the weather or from all the hands that have touched her for some 100 years. I don't know if Elisabet asked that this sculpted girl be allowed to slowly disappear from too much rain and too much wind and too many loving hands, but I love this little face all the more for its living and dying as we mere mortals do, for braving the elements, for dissolving into some immense invisibility. 

Well, I thought I would be returning to go inside the castle and give you the grand tour. But I haven't been keeping up with neighborhood news.

The castle is now in the throes of a great restoration, both inside and outside. And by outside, not only are the outside walls of the castle being repaired, but all the surrounding grounds are being restored as well.

And herein lies the reason for the brouhaha.

In the interest of historical preservation, how far back in time should you go to restore something to the way it once was?

The plans for this particular historical preservation project have divided the neighborhood into two (possibly warring) camps.

For here is what is at risk. This beautiful iron gate and the stone wall that spans the whole front of the property were not here when Elisabet lived here. Nor were some 50 trees that were planted on the grounds after her death in 1907 in honor of her or that found their way to this site by sprouting on their own.

Do these trees, the gate, and the stone wall have to be torn down or can they stay?

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If You Miss the Train . . .

These railroad tracks lie within walking distance from my house. And my house isn't out in the countryside or even in a small town ~ it's in the very middle of Austin, Texas, just north of The University of Texas. Yet here are these train tracks just a hop, skip, and a jump away from my front door, running in a long narrow pathway between trees.

I can hear the train's whistle from inside my home, and when I do, it stops me in my tracks. Or maybe it stops me in its tracks. For there is no lonesomer sound, is there, than the long, mournful cry of a train on its way from here to there.

And I wonder if this particular lonesome train song isn't a mysterious variation of the old woman under the hill who lives there still if she is not gone:

If you miss the train I'm on, you will know that I am gone,
you can hear that whistle blow one hundred miles . . .

Peter, Paul, and Mary sang this, but I don't know if they wrote it, or if it goes way back to the time when the first trains began their westward-bound journeys.

Just to the left of this track is a little neighborhood of tiny bungalows and cottages and apartment complexes where university students live. And a stone's throw away on the right is I35, all one hundred lanes of it that travel day and night from its starting point in Laredo just shy of Mexico, onward through San Antonio, and then cutting a great swath right through the middle of Austin as it heads north all the way to Minnesota just shy of Canada.

But here there are only the train tracks and the trees.

When I was 24 years old, I took a train from Texas to California. I went alone, leaving from my parents' home with one brown-woven suitcase and one large blue bag with long straps that I carried over my shoulder. I didn't set out to live a vagabond life, but it would be ten long years before I finally found a way to stay in one place again.

Was it that train ride, I wonder now, that set all the rest of my wanderings in motion?

"You can hear that lonesome whistle blow one hundred miles."

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It Takes the Whole Kingdom

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

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

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

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

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

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

So I tiptoed back to the street.

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

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

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

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

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

It takes the whole village.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Lost Blue Riding Hood

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

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

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

So I retraced my steps.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And here is The Big Lesson:

Now you see it.

Now you don't.

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

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

But back to my story:

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

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

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

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

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

The Kissing Fence

There is a fence called The Kissing Fence. It lies along an avenue a few blocks from where I live. You can see it here behind these pink coneflowers, a fence of very dark blue wooden slats.

I live in an older neighborhood, my own little kingdom, as I think of it, where 100-year-old trees tower over 100-year-old Victorian houses, wood-frame bungalows, and fairy-tale cottages. If you walk two blocks down this very street, you will come to our little bungalow, where we have lived for some twenty years.

The streets that lie north/south are all avenues, and so my neighborhood is sometimes referred to as "The Avenues." When I go for a walk, I love the thought that I am walking among the avenues.

One of the places I often pass on my walks is this long blue fence. I didn't know this fence had a name until a few weeks ago when I walked here with a friend. She said when her boys were little they had gone to the school in the bungalow that lies just behind the fence. It is a Montessori school with a very fine reputation. Every morning, she said, the children and parents kissed each other over the fence, not to say goodbye, but to send each other off into the world with love.

And so the fence became "The Kissing Fence."

In order to facilitate the kissing at the fence, a long two-step stairway with railings was built on the children's side. Here is a view of both sides: the children's stairway-side inside the playground and the parents' sidewalk-side along the street.

I have seen children and parents kissing and talking over this fence for years, and so I am amazed, and really quite, I don't know, humbled, I guess, by the power of a name, for ever since my friend told me that this fence is called The Kissing Fence, the fence has become mythic to me. Folkloric, poetic, legendary.

My friend put it best when she said, "It is a sacred place."

The wood slats have been painted the most magical shade of blue, a very deep royal-cornflower blue that has been blackened, either by age or antiquing or both, making it look colorful and vintage at the same time.

I want to make a greeting card in honor of The Kissing Fence, and so I have begun to sketch out an idea. The fence is pretty much straight across, but if you look closely at the boards, you can see that they are very slightly castellated at the top.

This is my first sketch. Initially, I used this exaggerated castellated effect, because the straight-across fence feels ~ um ~ too straight across. My first thought was to make it a picket fence, but right away I tossed that out: all those dagger-like points in a row ~ way too dangerous for kissing across! But this castellated effect feels a little menacing, too, like battlements on a castle tower.

My husband (who is an architect, among other things) suggested the rounded tops, like this. Yes, I think this will work very nicely. Well, then. This is a very very very rough sketch, definitely a work-in-progress, but if I put it here for all the world to see (not that anyone in the world knows how to find me here!) perhaps I will be forced, no, let's say inspired, to carry through.

And I've been wondering about all the other portals in the world where this particular kind of kissing takes place every day. Perhaps you have one in your own home or nearby somewhere. The Kissing Door, The Kissing Gate, The Kissing Bus Stop. They must be everywhere, when you think about it.

Well, wherever they are, they are very sacred places.