A new year

Alexander in his first suit

This one's one of those odd-numbered years, hard, if you are a numerologist, to make anything out of it.  Normally, we think of resolution, but this year, I can't think of any.  I'm oddly out of myself this time, and I think that has to do with the larger state of the world...so much uncertainty here, there, everywhere...or maybe that, as my friend Kathy recently reminded me, it's 60 years since we first showed up at college.  Aha.

 So that photo above seems iconic for this year:  a new suit ready to be grown into.

In a week or so, Alexander and I will be celebrating, one day apart, our new years...68 of them between us.  Being 10, a decade old, is exciting.  He rides his new bike into the streets and around the yards, practicing for rougher trails.

My rougher trails...cobblestones in London, crunchy sandstone in Paris parks, not to mention the hills and narrow, uneven sidewalks my own town is known for...remind me of how far I've come.  Once (or twice) I had a bike, too, but now it's my own feet that carry me everywhere.  

I'm satisfied with that; going about by foot, instead of speeding by with the fickle wind in your hair, allows keener observations, thoughts, ideas.  Things one hadn't noticed before suddenly spotlight themselves.  

Likewise, I seem to work harder at smaller and less noticable things.  When that begins to irk me, I think about getting away...travel, visits, garden tours.  Or nearer to home, exhibits (a second look at Elizabeth Matheson's Uncommon, which buoyed me the other night), coffee or lunch in other towns, with people I've been meaning to get together with and just...well, you know.

Even this blog...it occurred to me the other day that I might be feeling a little stale about it.  I should, in fact, be posting the three nearly ready drafts of blogs I have about my fall weeks in Scotland and Paris, but I'm still struggling through transferring photographs.  First of all, there are so many photographs; then, there is the usual technological tangle.  And it was, certainly, an enormously complex trip to put any order to. I filled all the pages of a journal along the way, writing.

Maybe, it suddenly occurs to me, I should let the photos lead the story, and not the other way 'round, as I usually do.  Aha, again.

Let me be clear:  I want you to read through these wanderings, I really do. I want you to see what I saw, the art and food and music and street scenes.

I want you to know, especially, the people I met and liked, the ones I observed from my park benches and garden wanderings, the ones whose brilliant hotel I stayed in and would return at any chance, all the wonders I found by chance more than intention.   

Though at the moment they seem part of the past...an unforgettable part, to be sure... I need to find a way to bring them manageably into this new year...probably by following my own advice:  start with one image, write about it, and go on from there.   I will, I promise.  Soon.

Meanwhile, there is this year to begin.  And this is the image pulling myself out of the fog right now.   I've hit on a new art direction to try, inspired by one of the quilt ladies I met this summer, who posted on instagram a photograph of a quilt pieced of small, wooden scraps.  I just about popped when I saw it. (Wooden't you? [sorry, couldn't help myself.])

So, living in the midst of woodworkers of all talents, I began begging for their scraps, and figuring out how to reduce them (the scraps, not the woodworkers) to art materials.  It's clear that first of all I need a new cutting tool, one that, unlike all the odd saws in our possession, actually cuts.

Don't expect to see anything like the wonder above; what ensues will make itself known little by little.  For me, it's something to look forward to...something like a new bike.

I wonder, too...what's new for you?