Walla Walla Vineyards (Original Art)

 Walla Walla, WA

20" X 24" 1.5" 

Oil Pastel on Acrylic

Hands

It's 3am and I am listening to you.

I am a curvy kind of female.  Flat tummy, strong legs for skiing down mountains, a bit short on height and regular features.  Will you love snow? Will you be little like I was, when you are little?  Will you have his dark hair and grey blue eyes or my green ones?

In the beginning weeks, I reached for you and found nothing there.  Then around ten weeks I felt something, awakening maybe?  I am not sure of the word.   It was a feeling like watching a seed first crack open.  At twelve I felt colors... I dreamed colors.  Reds, yellow, blues and lavender.

When I sit up, stand up, there isn't anything to show.  There is nothing that yet gives away your hiding place.  It's only here, now, when it is dark and quiet, when I can feel my tummy's slightly rounded firmness, where I cloak your world.  It is only in this quiet hour when sometimes, deep inside, I wake up because you fluttered.

My fingers flutter back to you and I think about your hands.  How they are developing, your nerves connecting, sensitivity building, the essence of you, which will choose who you become, solidifying.

I confess I am vain about my own hands. I like watching them.  They are loveliest when I am holding a bit of chalk and my nail polish is coated in a dusting of purples and greens and a bit of fire red. They are the anchor of my essence, the extension and sum of all I am.

I have a thing for hands in general, so many people do extraordinary things with their's. I watch my best friend working on a broken sprinkler head, kiting up his wing or fixing my computer.... his fingers dancing across the key board to repair whatever I broke, again, with the elegance of a concert pianist.  I think about his hands holding your hands.

What will you do with your hands?

Little Luna and our Tantrums

My best friend and I had a good day yesterday.  Pretty sure it has to do with the tangle the morning came in.

Sometimes, when we are unable to sleep we  migrate to the second bedroom.  This peaceful room has walls painted a calming adobe brown.  In the dead of night, I woke up for a moment.  Just for a moment.  I was unable to move in the mess of our arms, pillows and hands and I thought about puzzle boxes before heavy sleep returned again.  Are you familiar with puzzle boxes? The ones where different pieces slid about around until they at last open the middle?

We are a puzzle box.

For today's morning we both raged with terrifying thunder claps and fiery fury.  He escalated to a winding tornado and my response was to turn into bitter frost.

I think this is why we work.   I have no fear in the face of a heat that would melt most.  Antarctica does not look at the Sudan and see a mortal enemy.

Darling heeled boots and my precious swirling skirt added to my grandeur as I ended our battle by closing the bedroom door softly, deafeningly, behind me.

Poor little Luna.  She had been snuggled deeply into her quilt and pillow on her king sized foam bed when startled awake by our snarling, she ran for cover from the fall out of our vocals to hide in her kennel downstairs.

She graduated from being kept in her kennel when home alone months ago but she really likes her space so I removed the door and hid it between the wall and couch.  Naps in it on her other foam bed are another of her favorites.

I went down and sat on the floor a few feet away and whispered soothingly until the little creature peaked out to survey my face and see if the storm had cleared.

We never yell at Luna.  Never.  A sharp word breaks her heart.

I smiled at her and held my hands open and coaxed her forward until at last she cautiously crept out and into my arms for a cuddle.

To convince that the fight had nothing to do with her, I sat on the floor next to her while she ate breakfast and drank my coffee.  This gave me a little time to cool down too and grin ruefully at the remembering the verbal boxing match.

And then I went to work.

The Old Moon

12" X 24" 

The Old Moon

 (Gels, Acrylic, mixed medias) 

Inspired by...

Using mixed media and an abstract direction, this piece is an interpretation of the children's poem "Wynken, Blynken, and Nod" and related to my post "Hands"

(**I love and welcome the compliment of a purchase request.  Depending on the piece, I charge $.75 to $1.00 per square inch)

Hey there seventeen going on eighteen. It's me, thirty five going on thirty six.

I was thirty five this last year.  Quickly coming up on thirty six.  I love certain numbers for no particular reason and thirty six is one of those numbers.

I don't like odd numbers as much. Odd years, etc.  Ek.

I may be a bit superstitious.  You are too.

This year is going to be awesome.  In celebration of it's arrival, I went digging around through the two bins that contain EVERYTHING about me pre-twenty four and found the below piece of work (photos below).  I am grinning holding it and under my breath I mumbled,

'Hey there seventeen going on eighteen.  It's me, thirty five going on thirty six'.

I swear I could feel my younger self glancing up as I drew it back then in that tiny bedroom I rented from that older older lady that summer.

I remember wondering a lot, back then, if I would ever start writing songs again, or when I would again play the flute or pick up poetry. My 'voice' had been silenced for over a year at that time.

No, I didn't. I haven't written a song since it was extinguished. I am so sorry seventeen almost eighteen, I never could find that voice again.

But I found a new voice.

And I really really wish that some how I could reach back and touch your hand and tell you it's going to be a hell of a lot better than all right.

Thank you for this little piece of the past I forgot I had kept.  I burned, literally, so much  I forget what photos and pieces survived the purge of twenty two.  I remember why I saved this one, it was the quote on one side and the poem on the other.

I have thought about that quote every single time I made a friend who turned out to be a kindred spirit. And it has always, for nearly twenty years, been absolutely true.

"For true partnership is achieved only by separate and whole persons who retain their separateness even as they unite."

And then that poem... I was a mess at this time but in a moment of clarity that night I wrote it as a declaration, as a promise.

I believe that words have weight.  I believe that by putting emotions, promises, premonitions; into words, into shapes, colors - I believe that act binds one to them.  So maybe this battered piece of cardboard, the only canvas I could have afforded at the time, sketched with a sharpie and watered down nail polish, bound me to the future I live in now.

And that is awesome.

 

Walla Walla Vineyards (Original Art)

20" X 24" 1.5" 

Oil Pastel on Acrylic

New work in progress. Time to pay a little homage to gorgeous Walla Walla, WA

Softened Sandpaper

I was old and you were old and the world so different we didn’t recognize it.  I dreamed your hand felt like warm softened sand paper and my bones felt light and fragile as a bird’s.

We were smiling, with our exhausted faces.

And then I woke up in this dry desert of a state with the smell of rain and green things in my inhale. 

My body is still strong, albeit a few pounds over ideal, and I thought about that quote I always seem to think about, “What makes life so bitter sweet that it will never come again”.  I am para-phasing, it’s an Eleanor Roosevelt one.

Remember when you worried aloud, early on, that we had so little in common? I, the day dreamer, the artist, the wanderer.  You, the thinker, the problem solver, the adventurer.

And I laughed and said I gloried in it.  The gorgeous, strange kaleidoscope of you and I.  And a little skeptical, a little bemused, you have held my hand and haven’t let go any more than I ever could of yours.

Ah our manic battles, our compromises, the raging tantrums, the astounding grace of the story that is this of you and I.