"Puzzled"

My dad and I went across the street and hauled many loads of rocks from the river to make stone paths around our house. It was a fun puzzle we did together, and I liked our earnest consultations as we matched up mismatched stone. I suppose these pleasant memories are why I like to paint rocks in my quiet time.

I painted “My Turtle Floor” quite a few years ago to hide the fact that the wood floor was in dire need of refinishing. I stretched canvas over the floor, painted it with acrylics, and finished it with varnish on top. Years of dog toes scratched it, so once in a while I’d retouch and revise the painting, with polyurethane over the top of that. I’m still unsure if it would’ve been better to stick with varnish, or maybe I should’ve used polyurethane from the beginning, but it is what it is. It stayed on the floor until my horrible plumbing disaster a couple years ago. I had to take up the canvas in order to dry out the wood floor, and it seemed like a good time to retire the canvas to my storage room upstairs. I miss it though. I’m thinking about painting a new floor covering.

In the meantime, I thought maybe I’d do an easier project to lighten up the dining room and painted a new table covering this week. I also thought I’d actually try to show it in progress since I made fun of my own layout last week, and yes, that is another fine layout on a paper plate.

I painted the solid colors first, and painted white swirls and stars in the yellow center field. Then I went out to my mulberry tree which has always given me great leaves for prints. Oops! I forgot that it isn’t summer yet, so no mulberry leaves. I wandered around the yard for a while, but daffodil leaves weren’t going to do it.

I abandoned ship and went to the river instead where I found this leaf. I don’t know what it’s called, so don’t ask me. There are always a lot of them though, and they have heavy veins, which is necessary for good prints. I went back home and did the following steps: 1. Painted the back of the leaf 2. Pressed the wet side down on the canvas 3. Pulled the leaf off. I kept doing that until the leaf fell apart and I wanted smaller leaves. Back in the yard to find wild cherry and strawberry leaves. You can’t say I don’t suffer for my art. I’m allergic to strawberry leaves.

So, after a lot of painting and pressing and very messy hands, I had a pleasant leaf border, and tidied up the edges by painting the borders. Voila! Done! Except I have a glass cover for the table, and it seems like a bad idea to let the glass sit directly on the canvas. Besides, I recently found a bag of silk flowers upstairs, and thought those would be pretty in the border. The flowers didn’t really hold the glass off the canvas though, so I stuck them in spare plumbing washers I had in the basement.

And since I’m thinking about rocks and puzzles and spending time at the river, I thought I’d add this just for fun. When Dad and I got done making stone walks all over the place, I still had some energy for rock moving. Dad suggested I dam the river. Okay. Obviously I was easily suggestible or had absolutely nothing else to do, but I’ve got proof that I dammed it. I actually got the water to rise about 3 or 4 inches upstream until the spring floods washed it away. So I dammed it again. Did I mention I had absolutely nothing else to do? I even took it apart and redammed it with mud reinforcements the third and last time.

Revision
My friend Phil read my post and suggested using coins to lift the glass off of the canvas. I liked his idea, so I made a ring of quarters around the table. I figure this reminds me about making money, plus regular quarters have eagles on the backs, and eagles are always a good thing. I alternated the eagles with the commemorative quarters that celebrate the different states in the US. I figure that reminds me that I have traveled, and need to do more of it. A happy solution all the way around. Thanks Phil!

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"Vocal"

When I was a child, girls wore dresses and knee socks in blizzards. Since we lived in the sticks, we had to wait for a bus to pick us up for school, and had to wait 30 minutes before we were allowed to give it up and go home. We didn’t get curb service either. We had to walk to the bus stop at the end of the street where there wasn’t any shelter so we could fully appreciate the various stages of frost bite. I resented and envied boys’ sensible shoes and pants, but I wasn’t supposed to talk about that. This is the way life is. Be quiet. Quit asking questions about why that’s the way life is.

If I raised my hand in Sunday school, the teacher barely contained her exasperation, but “that’s the way it is” and “be quiet” didn’t answer my spiritual questions, the same way those kinds of answers in regular school didn’t advance my education. My evil, skinny grandmother punished me for beating my cousin in checkers. I suppose it didn’t help that he was several years older than me, or that it was 5 or 6 games in a row, but why shouldn’t I win the game if I could? “Let boys win!” “But why?” “That’s the way it is!”

I could come up with more moments of suppression, but I think you get the point. I’ll skip over the lingering resentments about being the oh-damn-it’s-another-girl in the family, just before the golden penis was born. Besides, most girls my age or older know the story anyway. A lot of women didn’t drive, work, or have the ability to do anything without the permission of men. If we really wanted some independence, we could be a teacher, secretary, or nurse. Otherwise, plan on getting married and using your body as a baby factory. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a good husband who won’t hit you and gives you trinkets every now and then.

The world changed as I was growing up. People started getting divorced. Women started working. People quit wearing hats to church. Life got psychedelic, then punk. Girls were now supposed to get a job, but some things hadn’t changed much. Some men felt threatened and took out their insecurities on women in their domain. I was told to “be quiet” by my female coworkers when I was upset a man kept sneaking behind me and grabbing me. “He’ll get tired of harassing you and start picking on someone else eventually.” The big boss wouldn’t reprimand the guy and I ended up threatening the offender with an X-Acto knife because I couldn’t concentrate on anything anymore. I felt betrayed by the women. Where was the solidarity? But women are often the hardest on other women. Get in line because that’s the way life is. Why? It just is.

Now, the world expects me to forget all of that stuff as ancient history. “Be quiet” isn’t acceptable anymore. “Get out there and sell yourself!” But sometimes that’s hard to do with decades of “be quiet” and “let boys win” programming, and the really annoying part of that piece of advice is that the boys didn’t even know we were letting them win. They actually thought they were better than the girls, which gave men the right to pay us less and pass us over for promotions, and since we were passed over, they can use our previous lowly positions as justification to pass us over again.

Don’t get me wrong, I like men, at least a lot of them. I just don’t like the chauvinism in society and sometimes struggle with my place in it. Sometimes I feel like I’ve lost my voice because I was told “be quiet” once, or maybe a thousand times too often. Besides, a lot of the people telling me to shut up were women: teachers, grandma, co-workers, etc. I felt furious with myself when I debated about whether or not to take a dive in Trivial Pursuits with a boyfriend. I was winning, but worried about his ego. He finally won fair and square, but I thought, what about my ego? I told him about my internal struggle, and he was upset I’d considered losing on purpose. Even though we’re the same age, by gender, we’ve lived in very separate universes. I compensated for my mental lapse by beating him at checkers. He didn’t like that either, but the world didn’t collapse. Sometimes I have to remind myself that I have a right to my own voice and it’s okay to win.


BTW, I really like looking at other artists’ layouts and works in progress, but I thought I’d show why I don’t show too many of them myself. Yeah, that’s fine art on a paper plate :) I thought about Cat Stevens’ “Father and Son” idea first, which might’ve been a happier post? In any case, you can listen to it here. I think it’s interesting that he remade the song as the father. You can see that here.

"Return"

The people who owned the lot behind my childhood home kept bees. A row of white boxes were lined up just on the other side of our property line, and the bees, who don’t understand property lines, came over and pollinated our apple trees and garden, climbed all over the deadfalls in autumn, and generally thought they lived at our place. It seems like the neighbors should’ve given us some honey in exchange for our pollen, but I don’t remember any honey gifts. I used to watch as the old guy came out in his white space suit and with a smoker to get the honey. It looked like a good job to me, especially since the bees were doing all the hard work. Sometimes I think about keeping bees too.

There’s an ancient apple tree in our backyard. It doesn’t make very good apples, unless you’re a boy who likes to use apples as weapons. Our hard, knobbly, green apples made excellent bruising projectiles for unsuspecting little girls. The boys knocked birds out of the trees with apples too. Boys can be mean. They got even meaner when they realized that hitting hard apples with badminton racquets was the equivalent of a nuclear missile assault, and tennis racquets were even better. Maybe thinking about boys reminds me of why I like the bees, because the bees took their revenge on those barefoot boys.

I have a great deal of affection for the apple tree too, despite the misuse of its fruit. I climbed the tree with my sketchbook or a novel and whiled away my afternoons in a secluded bower of blossoms with buzzing bees for company. One of my brothers lives at the old homestead now, and thought he’d take the tree down since he didn’t like mowing over the mess of hard green apples. The tree took revenge too because someone had spiked it with metal. It wasn’t me, but I can only applaud the effort. I’m very glad Pete wasn’t hurt by the chainsaw, and I’m very glad that the tree is still there, still making inedible fruit, and still feeding the bees.

This is old art. It’s a 20” x 30” poster that was used for interpretive programs and for sale in the parks’ gift shops. It went over so well that I had it blown up and printed onto backlit Plexiglas for a honeybee display in the nature center. Bees could come in and out of the building through clear tubes, and the honeycombs were visible through clear windows. Now that I think about it, I didn’t get any of that honey either. I see a continuing flaw in my compatibility with beekeepers, but no problem at all with the bees. I was very happy to see a honeybee in my house this week. Well, not happy that it was in the house, just happy that the bees have returned. I gently caught the lost bee and asked it to get busy pollinating my fruit trees.

The crows are back in my yard too. I had singing crows last year, and I’m really hoping they come back this year. I wouldn’t have believed they were actually singing if I didn’t actually see them standing on either side of my road and watching their beaks moving. It wasn’t CAW, CAW, CAW, but rather a really beautiful, melodic duet between the two of them. Crows often come back to nest where they nested the year before, so I’m hopeful they’ll be back. I was really nice to their babies and reassuring to the parents, so I hope they know this is a good place to live. And since I’m talking about crows, I have an EVENT that happens every evening, shortly before twilight. Crows from everywhere come to my house to discuss their day before flying to their individual homes. We aren’t talking about 10 or 20 or even 100 crows. There are thousands of them, all talking at the same time. It’s impressive, and very noisy. I feel happy to be included.

"Swamp"

I walked barefoot in my back yard this week. Splg, splg, splg, as I kicked wet mud up my legs. Climate change is making NE Ohio a swamp, but I really enjoyed walking barefoot in March. It’s important to seize moments like that, especially since it’s supposed to rain all weekend. The overly wet outside made me think about my plumbing.

I studied the issue from a distance. You have to sneak up on plumbing, and since my plumbing is ancient, it has experience sensing new assaults. I worked up a game plan, hauled miscellaneous pieces parts and tools from the basement, flopped myself on the floor, and deeply breathed resolve before picking up the wrench.

The garbage disposal wasn’t working, so I figured it had to be the main culprit for the faulty drain. I remembered to turn off the electricity, and even read instructions online. Other than about an hour of searching for a mysterious ring holding the thing together, disposal removal went as well as such things can go. I just skinned the knuckles on one hand and only dumped about a pint of wet sludge on my clean floor. After rummaging through my pile of plumbing parts, a trip to the super mega hardware store for more parts, a gushing waterfall when I sampled my connections, another trip to the super mega hardware store, more parts, and a mild concussion when I bashed my head on the sink, the drain held water again; literally held water, because it sure wasn’t going anywhere.

Disassembly, snaking, assembly, snaking, assembly, plunging, time out, more online searches, more plunging, more time outs. I have now achieved a system that slooooowwwly lets water seep into the great beyond.

In times past, I would’ve called the hardware store for help. Not that mega super store. The store with old guys who actually know stuff. Alas! They closed my plumbing sanctuary last fall. I used to go there with my bag of corroded parts and a look of utter helplessness. I was whisked to the back with a gruff old guy who dumped my parts on the work bench while muttering admonitions about my lack of upkeep, instructions about future maintenance, matter of fact comments about the impossibility of ordering parts… while he rummaged around in countless little drawers for something that might be converted into the necessary configuration. Sometimes I got the sweet old guy who called me “honey” and “sweetie” and invited me to sit on a stool to watch.

I dressed up for the hardware store. The goal of “dressing up” was a delicate balance of competence and naivety. Undetectable makeup was required. Old guys don’t trust females who look too fussy to get dirty. Since my plumbing problems usually required multiple trips to the store as each succeeding part broke in reassembly, it was important to look more undone as the day went on. They really loved that. It showed effort and made them feel needed. I was lavish in expressing my gratitude each time they accomplished the impossible.

Now what? Impersonal trips to the mega extraordinary superstore? Lazy punks point limply to a far distant aisle when I ask them questions. I don’t feel the warm hug of being called “sweetie” or amusement when the gruff guy chastises me for negligence. And who is going to custom make parts for my decrepit plumbing?! I might as well start digging an outhouse because there isn’t much hope for the future.

I had a major plumbing disaster a couple of years ago (see here) , and my brother sculpted me a plumbing god to keep an eye on things. He sits on top of my refrigerator, but I guess I haven’t offered enough sacrifices in recent times. I guess it would help if I knew what I’m supposed to offer to a plumbing god?

In better news, my tomato seeds have sprouted, and my pear tree is in bloom. If the world ever dries up outside, maybe I’ll have lots of fruit this year!

"Shades"

Everybody is at least a little Irish this week, even though I don’t think I have any actual Irish ancestors. It seems strange to me that there has been so much violence in the old country when the Irish are such a happy, all-inclusive bunch over here. I wore orange to the bar one year, but nobody understood orange in Ohio. I think that’s better, and shame on me for the provocation. Let’s just blow that off for youthful stupidity and celebrate in shades of green.

I think my dad always regretted that we weren’t Irish. He would’ve fit right in as an Irish bard, roaming the countryside, singing beautiful songs, and telling funny stories. He made me listen to a lot of John Gary when I was growing up, and this was one of his favorite songs to sing in the garden. I guess Dad gave up on being Irish after a while because he started telling people we were direct descendants of Eric the Red instead. The really aggravating thing about that little fantasy is that some of my relatives started believing it and repeating it. It’s not like Dad would lie about such a thing, is it? Yes! Dad would lie! Anything for a better story.

There was a time when he and I were sitting at Bukovnic’s Pond. The fish were strung together on the line and swimming in ignorance of their final fate while Dad explained the universe. I listened with rapt attention, glowing with the knowledge that my dad knew more than everyone else’s dad put together, and… wait a sec… something didn’t quite sound right there. I interrupted Dad’s flow of narrative to have him explain what he had just said about the moon being influenced fairies, or was it fire flies, or huh? Wait a minute! “You’re making all this up, aren’t you?!!”

Instead of a normal sense of shame for lying to a little girl, my dad roared with laughter.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Eric the Red? Yeah, right. I’m not falling for that one. I suppose this gets to root of why nothing enrages me more than when people lie to me. I suppose Dad taught me something in that moment, which is trust no one, and fact check. Don’t send me emails of urban legends without running it past Snopes.com unless you want me to send it back to your entire mailing list with the actual facts.

Lest you think that I have a puritanical attitude about stories, let me insert here that I love fiction. Love the fanciful things that Andrew Finnie writes, and Harry Potter, and Mary Stewart’s Merlin. I used to have a bumper sticker saying “reality is for people without imaginations”, and the really funny thing is that I gave the truck with that bumper sticker to my most gravity-bound brother, who drove around with that saying for a couple years. I love getting carried away into a different reality, just so long as everybody’s clear that now is story time, which is not to be confused with reality. I swear life would be so much better if politicians and reporters understood that difference, but I suppose Dad wouldn’t have been Dad if he’d been too bound up with reality. We had Mom for that kind of thing.

Woo hoo! A prize! Thanks very much to Otto Munchow for this honor. Visit his site for gorgeous photography and pearls of wisdom. Otto’s gotten quite a few awards lately, and very much deserved too. The problem with receiving awards is how to choose just one worthy blogger to pass it on to? Since I just mentioned Andrew Finnie, and he seems to have recently ended his painfully long blogging sabbatical, he wins. I suspect he might even go with my Irish theme this week too. Andrew gives me the same kind of “Oh yay it’s story time!” feeling that I had with Dad, plus very cool visuals.

Thanks to Debbie this week too. I won her drawing for etegami book plates and had a thrill of opening mail from Japan. (See me beaming with happiness?) Look at her lovely art and help her fundraising efforts for Japanese earthquake/tsunami victims here.

"Yield"

It’s time to plant tomatoes. I saved seeds from my perfect little yellow pear-shaped gems last fall, and it’s time to start them again on the windowsill. This will be the second year I’ve managed success from tomato seeds, and I feel the joy of accomplishment. Hopefully they’ll be as sweet and plentiful as they were last year.

Cherry tomatoes make me think of Mr. Lutsch, who summer gardened on several acres next door when I was growing up. He was a horrible man, and I was glad he only lived there in the summers. My sister said he was from Transylvania, but I’m pretty sure he was an ex-SS German officer, or maybe Mengela’s evil twin – but he did grow very good tomatoes. He put baskets of his excess bounty on a small table flaking lead white paint by the road with a box for people to put money in in exchange for the produce. When the weather was still nice, I passed that flaking table every school day on the way to the bus stop.

I coveted the tomatoes. I burned inside for them. I think the main reasons I wanted them so badly is because they were verboten and because I hated the man so much. Before you think of me as simply a hateful child, you’ve got to realize that Lutsch was the type to get girls to climb trees so he could look up their skirts and tried to touch them when offering candy. Bad man. He deserved to get his tomatoes stolen, but I lacked courage to swipe them when he strategically placed that peeling table in view of his house across the street. My sister and I would discuss taking them, but it took Melanie to accomplish the deed.

I could write novels about Melanie. She was a colorful child, and let’s just say she had some anger issues she needed to work out. She lacked the normal sense of boundaries or a full understanding of cause and effect. It was probably a good thing that she was my sister’s best friend because otherwise she might’ve been mine, and then who knows how much trouble I would’ve found myself in. As it was, I was sometimes allowed on the periphery of Melanie’s exploits, and sometimes got tomatoes. Melanie was generous. We ran and laughed while German cuss words floated through the air behind us, and we ate stolen fruit at the bus stop.

Ironically, there wasn’t any need to steal tomatoes. We all had gardens with tomatoes in the back yards. We wanted Lutsch’s tomatoes. We wanted to make him hurt for looking up our skirts, or maybe for what he did at Auschwitz. I looked in the money box a couple of times. I was curious to see how much he was earning, but I never took his money. In my convoluted child thinking, I thought taking the money was wrong, but taking his yield was justice.

Lutsch and his codependent wife lived extraordinarily long lives, both living over 100. Maybe we helped by giving him extra exercise running after tomato thieves? I have to admit that I felt renewed irritation with him when the paper printed a celebratory article about the couple's 75th wedding anniversary. Melanie didn’t fare as well. She was killed by her husband a few years ago. She never did seem to get over her anger issues, or learn the value of cause and effect, but who would’ve thought that she’d be murdered?

This is a sad ending, but I like to think of those happy moments when Lutsch was yelling “Ach, ach, ach!!” (plus some words that I suspect were truly colorful in the German language) and the feeling of running effortlessly with Melanie when we were fresh-faced, laughing girls. I remember the best of Melanie when I eat cherry tomatoes, and my saved tomato seeds will ensure that my garden reminds me of her often this summer.

"Intention"

My family used to drive to Fredricksburg, Ohio to visit Great Grandpa. It was a pretty drive through trees and farms, and if Grandpa was driving, sometimes we’d stop for ice cream. Grandma liked to go to the cheese factory, and we got to watch a huge net of cheese curds as it was hoisted into the air, the smelly whey swirling around in the giant stainless steel vat. Grandma always bought a round of baby swiss. She seemed to think I was being somewhat less than genetically pure when I made a face and asked for aged swiss instead. “It’s a waste of money to pay for bigger holes!” Okay, I still don’t like baby swiss very much, but whether I like it or no, I’ve eaten a lot of it. Kind of feels like a family obligation.

I enjoyed looking at the barns on the drive to Great Grandpa’s house. Many of them had hex signs painted on them, and hex signs are the epitome of intention. It is art created for the purpose of bringing good things towards you, and repelling the negative. The art is made in a kind of code. For instance, a distelfink (bird) is good luck. Put 2 of them in your hex, and twice as much good luck. Green is growth, black is protection, and white purity. Many of these principles are also used in quilt designs. I may not have gotten the baby swiss gene, but I definitely got the one for hex painting. I love making them. I put one on the front of my house for extra luck and protection. I can never have too much of that, right? I painted it on slate taken off of Grandpa’s house when he got a new roof.

The area around Great Grandpa’s house was settled by people of mostly German extraction (Pennsylvania Dutch), and apparently those kinds of people like to paint things. There’s a quaint town nearby that has German looking mountain scenes painted all over the fronts of the buildings. Grandma and Grandpa took us there for lunch once.

It’s possible I like hex signs because I associate them with happy drives with my grandparents to see Great Grandpa. I adored him. He was smart and funny and held my hand. He showed me interesting things in and around his house, and gave me this majolica robin. I have treasured it throughout my life, not for the monetary value of it, or even for what it looks like. I value it because he gave it to me in a moment of sensitivity and closeness – and it didn’t hurt that he didn’t give anything to any of my siblings. I felt special.

When he died, my great aunt gave me this little bird at the funeral. It was part of a set of 3. My older sisters got the adult birds, but that was alright; I liked the chick best. Since I was too young at the time to really understand funerals, I thought this was a happy day, especially since it was my birthday. My siblings and cousins and I ran around and played. His coffin was filled with love gifts of flowers, a book, and even my brother’s pre-chewed gum. When the adults said things like he went “away”, I thought he was taking a trip and needed things to take with him. I’ve never quite stopped waiting for him to come back. I wonder if he had any idea how influential he was in my life?

I have to wonder a little about my intention with this post. There was a shooting at a school not too far away from me this week in a quaint little town a lot like Fredricksburg. A place where that kind of thing shouldn’t happen. I have spent a lot of time this week thinking about people who aren’t here any more and the craziness of the world, and thinking that it’s very nearly a year since my friend Geof died. Sometimes, maybe the best intention is not to forget. Whether it’s remembering hex signs or the people who really mattered.