A slippery slope

A cold snap had us in scarves and warm socks this morning, but Angie and I are set to go garden shopping anyway.  First an early lunch at Prego, then we hit the nurseries, our enthusiasm undimmed by the traitorous wind.  It's too sunny and too full of hopeful yard dreams not to.

Angie will have her list of annuals and perennials to consider for her pretty (and pretty spectacular) garden around her house at the farm; I, on the other hand, have a major landscaping project this year...revamping my long front slope.  Things I've organized across it in the past few years have mostly died or are looking sadly like even a fine spring won't raise their mettle.  So I'm pulling it all out and starting again.

To give you an idea of what's involved, here are some photos I've taken to bring with me to the nurseries, so I can beg for help.  (Technological wizard as I am, I can't get the photos to line up horizontally, but you are looking at Left, Center, Right...what passersby see from the street...if that helps.)

The thing you should know before you send me miraculous solutions that grew in your fertile, aerated garden (or worse, to Pinterest, where really impossible solutions glimmer before me, gloating) is that our soil is hard clay, rocks and tree roots embedded and entangled in it.  Hah. 

In each of the seasons I've lived here, I've put down a few levels of good dirt, leaves and triple-shredded mulch, trying to build up a decent growing layer; that's why the surface looks deceivingly reasonable.  But beneath it is the slippery slope clay brings, and the labyrinth of roots that call a halt to most attempts to dig in.

Hence, I'm going to be bringing in a lot more soil, mixing it with leaf-mulch and a soil aerator our friend and magic gardener Nancy recommended, and some helpers to dig out deep pockets where I can terrace here and there.  Making, I hope, the space more manageable.

Not that I'm discouraging recommendations!  Send any you have. As long as you realize the parameters of earthly possibility, and my own tendency to plant, water, pray and then leave things to their own fates.

Tomorrow, I'll let you know what I learn, find, and/or bring home.  Warm weather had better be ready when I am.

Inspirations

Like breathing in the first whiff of the new season, one by one they draw me to them, and I open to their enticements.

First, there was the birthday card from my friend Pam, from which cover a whole shaft of ideas occurred to me.  I was ready to be awakened, I admit.  My workroom table was crowded with piles of possibilities and plans that were, as they say, long past their sell-by date, as far as my motivation was concerned.  They were good ideas once, and probably still are, but they and I needed new energy.  I don't run out of ideas, to be sure, but sometimes I need a nudge in a new direction to see them through.  So, though I am not the precise student of origami and Japanese arts that Pam is, that image  aroused me.  And that was the beginning of this season's inspiration.

Pam Bencke, Bird

Not long after, Sharron and I took a ride to Artspace, where the Triangle Book Arts exhibit Re(f)use was in play. Each of us were already familiar with a few of the artists and their work, and were excited to see what they'd shown.   It wasn't difficult to be impressed.  Technique and skill were exemplary in much of the work, something to admire in each.  But what inspired me seemed to come forth in invisible, soul-centered ways.  I couldn't point to this intricate binding (even Lisa Gilbert's imaginative work) or that unusual use of material (see my favorites below) and say that those eye-openers were what I was taking home with me.  Instead, inspiration seemed a needle and thread that reached out from somewhere in the artist's creation and sewed me firmly to it.

Martha Petty, The Arc of the Moral Universe

First, front and center, was Martha Petty's The Arc of the Moral Universe, a searing found slice of tulip poplar, very tall and studded closely with folded bits of book paper.  The first thing I thought when I saw it was, oh, that leaves no doubt of the backbone that makes a moral being.  I stared and stared, walking around it, taking in yes, the technique too, but mostly the way that idea must have sprung into Martha, when she spied that wood in the castaway shop, and how long she, too, must have walked round and round it, while its meaning grew in her.  I could not possibly have come to that myself, and yet from it I inherited something very important and impossible to lose.

Ever since I'd learned the rudiments of encaustic (wax) art from her, I've followed her book arts on her website (marthapetty.com) and shows.  And though my workshop doesn't have the space it once did for the permanent spread of tools and materials encaustic requires, I still try out simple versions in projects of all sorts.  I am always excited by the way materials take on alternate selves and conjugate new forms with one another in her pieces.  Her other entry in the Re(f)use show, the poignant but severely cast The Cost of Childhood, drew me into the years that cost us lifelong conversion; once again, those materials...the pod into which old bank receipts are sewn one by one...bring that whole memory into play.  You can see it for yourself on the Artspace website.

Kathy Steinsberger, East:West

Hung against the back wall of the Gallery was another light, Kathy Steinsberger's ladders of branches hung with stained tea bags, perfectly poised.  East:West she calls it, a meditation through the I Ching on our parochial perceptions of wrong and right.

 I think it's interesting, don't you?  that so many artists are taking to their workbenches to bring us visions of what we so immediately and importantly need to remember.  I think back to ages in the history of art when that happens more forcefully, and realize that there is a lot of emotion behind the way we work these days...not only intellectual and creative emotion, but also the strong sense that something has got to change minds, and we hold in our brushes and pliers a means to impel it.  I'm not sure we even realize the fervor behind what our hands create.  For her part, here, as she has in her work on peace, Kathy uses the simplest of found materials to evoke the perceived differences between hemispheres that, for better or worse, are really just mirrors of one another...an antidote to the divisiveness of the narcissism and violence of  our times, its baroque falsehoods and half-truths. Those are my impressions, of course; but as artist Kathy, like all of us, may have begun with simply a pile of tea bags she'd saved for something someday...

Kathy (you've seen me go on about her classes before) is a teacher whose inventions I follow as often as I can (follow, of course, is always an arbitrary word for the way I learn art...or anything else...but so far she's been really patient...).  Her workshops bring me new and welcome perspectives on both art and the ways art fulfills our need to communicate what words entangle more than reveal.  It's like turning the pages of a new chapter to work in her studio.

We found Kathy at a demonstration table, showing visitors how to do small, triangular books, and we tried one or two with her.  She soon had a stream of would-be students, but in between I asked her about her exhibit, and she told me it had been some years since she'd made it. "I just couldn't set my mind to a piece for the show just now," she confided.  "But then I pulled out this one and realized how perfect it was for the times and the Re(f)use theme."

I was glad she did.  Here were sturdy ladders of wood supporting the lightest of leaves. What struck me was its simplicity and the depth provided by those rudimentary elements.

Dana Palmer, Self Help

As for the rudimentary making a deep impression, it was Kathy who nudged us toward her favorite of the entries:  "Did you see Dana Palmer's Self Help?  It  overpowered me."  Curled into a fetal position (recovering position, the medical texts call it) was the shape of a person (why we all thought instantly of woman I cannot tell you, even now...human is the way Palmer phrases it) made from wadded and rolled pages of self-help books among others, untinted so that its whiteness almost camouflages it in the midst of all the other work.  We think of how we get back to the elemental in such positions, both physical and spiritual.

Inspiration can bring negative influences, too...or perhaps just other lessons.  A rusted book in one installation warned me against the sort of binding I'd been lazily leaving on one of my books, so tight that it couldn't open out;  I went home and unbound mine, freeing it from its constraints.

Copper Book, unbound

Another, a series of colorful blocks in a row, reminded me to push myself far enough to wrestle with and accept (if not tame) the vital Jacob's conflict which enlivens art.

It occurs to me that in trying to explain what these works have brought to me, I've missed the point entirely.  Inspiration isn't really a matter of the explainable or the platitudinal.  It infuses one with the desire and the creative impulse to go further than one would have, but the connection is as elusive to word as it is strongly felt.  (Even that is not what I mean.  Sorry.)

It was such a wonderful show, quite literally...I'm still wondering.

But to illustrate how words can't really explain how inspiration takes hold of me, try to make sense of this:  a few days ago, I sat in the doctor's office waiting for his arrival.  It was quiet, and I took the time to meditate a minute or 30.  When I looked up, there on a shelf was a tangle of cable...the ordinary kind you hook up electronic equipment to...and I thought, oh! look how perfectly that means!   I took the picture to remember it.  By chance, when I got home, Cathy and Steve called me to his workshop to give me something he'd pulled out of an old broken rocking chair I'd passed on to them:  four thick sturdy springs.  "We thought of you when we saw them," they grinned.  So, my cable inspiration acquired its materials.  Maybe it's true:  when inspiration strikes, the universe brings what you need in view.

You will probably be hard pressed to recognize any connection between my doings and the art that so brilliantly cast its glow on them, but never mind.  Or rather do mind... for the mind collects and redistributes its visions in lots of ways unfathomable to anyone except ourselves.

Intimations of Spring

And just in time.  Winter has been a wild ride, three days of nearly freezing temperatures, and then 60 or 70 degrees with clouds, rain, or sun for a few more, the pattern repeated month by month.  Today is one of those reaching for high warmth, so it's a pleasure to shed one's coat by mid-morning.  It's also a pleasure to tread carefully over the ground looking for shoots of daffodils and the first returning herbs.

This morning before lunch, my uncle and I took a short walk around the neighborhood, eyeing enviously the blooms in the sunnier yards.

On such a warm day, it made each turn we took a discovery, good for the morale as well as the winter-stiff legs.   Although in a few days it threatens to be chillier again (we hope not enough to freeze these beauties' futures), we have this week to imagine what the promise of spring means in so many more ways.

For instance, behind my yard, they're renovating extensively the house and studio that faces the main street, these days tearing out everything from cabinets to insulation; I suspect soon the roof and floors will go, too.  That building frenzy also seems a sign of the season, the urge to fix up, revamp, make new, and grow.

In this house where we've been just keeping ourselves afloat for so long, the fixit bug infected me last week, taking me sort of by surprise.  All year has been a renovation of sorts, but just now I'm looking more critically at the latent repairs that I have lived with too familiarly and too obliviously...the enamel wearing on the kitchen sink, the royal mess on my workroom floor, and the cardboard panel the heating and air installers left over a hole they had to cut out in the bedroom wall.   I am beginning to square my shoulders toward recovering some dignity in those and other neglected areas.

I am delighted to say that I've had some windfalls in a few of those tasks.  My nice neighbor Steve left me a plywood panel, perfectly cut, and some insulation I can use to replace the cardboard covering the furnace.  (He also left me a wheelbarrow full of the rich mulch he makes from his leaves, so I could entice my young dogwood and other skittishly growing plants to some vitality.)

 And after looking at every plumbing supply place and site for a new kitchen sink, I came home one day and realized that I already had a perfectly useful one sitting behind the house, one I had harvested from the children's own kitchen renovation two years ago.  I've been using it as a potting and painting bin all this time, but the other day I shined my critical eye on it and decided that with a little elbow grease it would do just fine for the kitchen.  These intimations of spring have given me the energy to get it done.

Those of you shuddering at the idea of using a potting sink in the kitchen will just have to trust me that it's a sturdy and well-fitting appliance which will serve the purpose more than adequately.  Like most found things, its repurpose takes a little imagination to overcome its shortcomings, but its advantages shine.

It also takes some changes of mind and vision.  When I thought about a new sink, my preferences were quite different...a deeper, wider, single-bowled ceramic tub with four holes for the faucet I already have and liked.  On the contrary, my backyard sink is double-bowled, heavy black, and single-fauceted.  It has the same depth as the one I am replacing.  In fact, it has the same shape, practically.  It erases all my preferences for a new one, but they pale in the face of the fact that one, it's free and two, installation is a cinch...pull out the old one, drop in the new. No need to replumb the drains or reroute the lines.  Expediency can be a rush.

Just now you are no doubt wondering, as I am: what is this shaggy story all about, a sink I didn't want turning into the one I'm eager to install?

Well, I'd have to begin by letting out that I am a gleaner at heart. Nothing makes me happier than to find an old, toss-off item that winks at me from a thrift store, curbside, or someone else's discard pile...take me home, it says, you'll see what I can still do!   In fact, knowing about my sink replacement efforts, a friend texted me excitedly that she'd found a perfectly good double ceramic Kohler sink for $50 in Habitat's ReStore.  Did I want it?  At the time, I was still holding out for the single bowl.  You can always dream.  So I turned it down.  Silly me.  You can also always make do.

You can understand now that perfection hasn't been working overtime in my vocabulary.  More often than not, my intentions, and my dreams, take a back seat to spontaneous improvisation. But often enough, both I and those findings are the richer for it.

I'm not a particularly thrifty person; you don't want to know what I spend on sturdy shoes or indulgences when I am traveling.  I do like the idea of recycling, so you can give me an environmental star for that.  But mostly, I love the adventure in the search and rescue of tossed-away subjects that still might find life in their own or a new career.  A leather clutch purse becomes a handmade book cover; a Turkish platter a birdbath; a broken piece of crockery sits happily in the garden disguised as the eye of a fish.  And don't get me started on kitchen gear, like my backyard-become-kitchen sink.

As many times as I am looking for things, things I'm not looking for find me.  Friends who know my proclivity for the worn and tired bring boxes of stuff to my door.  The two photos above beg the question, Is it art yet??  They sit on my worktable in the studio daring me to find them a place in a piece that has little to do with their origins.  Such creations evolve most of the time without plan, though with plenty of intention.  I begin with the materials at hand, look around for what might incorporate them, and then set to work, letting the piece show me what it can become. Along the way, I pick up other foundlings that seem deliberately put in my path, meant to be incorporated.  Here's one that came straight out of that box of street-things.

If I think about it, it seems that the way I live has also been mostly whatever comes my way and whatever works.  It doesn't always result in a perfect scenario (but then...).  Still, seeing potential in whatever shows up has its own rewards.

There is a lot to be learned in the humbled, the damaged, the thrown-aside, that can be worth quite a lot, both in their material makeup and in the state of our minds...open to other ways of thinking, to acceptance, to understanding of the way things work, especially beneath the surface. Or so I persuade myself to believe.

 Anyway, here is Spring, come along to show us the potential that's been hiding underground all winter.

Have you felt your growth spurt yet?

Gifts for winter doldrums

The other day Joseph came for breakfast and brought these flowers, just what we needed to remedy a patch of the winter blues.

We've had the flu, and being inside has not improved our mood, even on nice days like today, chilly in the morning but sunny and warmer by afternoon...so warm that the sun coming around the porch windows is nearly hot.  Even though I'm finally past the infection, my uncle is still dealing with its nether effects, his age making it more difficult to summon the energy to recover, and opening him up to all sorts of weird complications.  It's tiresome to be sick and to be slow shaking it off.  We think we are sturdier than such illnesses, that it's impossible for anything that ugly to happen to us that we can't beat.  It leaves us feeling vulnerable, and seeming as if the world outside our windows is a different life than our inside cooped-up world, with no bridge between.

Except these flowers, in wonderful shades of purple, violet, scarlet and orange, which come in the door to remind us that after winter is spring, and with it the early blossoms we so look forward to in February...winter jasmine, quince, early bulbs, forsythia.  Across the street, Cathy and Steve have planted a tree with bright orange tips; though small, its potential for cheering up the winter landscape is obvious.

A gift of flowers, whether the hothouse kind or the braver inhabitants of our yards, is the most welcome just now.  They are as important to making our days healthier as were the many neighborly gifts of soups, fresh juice, and citrus (and just today a plush neck and body warmer, from my sister Ann, to ease end-of-the-day aches).  Not only the gifts themselves, but also the many kind acts of giving warm us.  Like Joseph's flowers, they are the symbol of regeneration we so crave.

PORCH, or who I am

Last December I offered to take the place of a vacationing friend who collects and helps sort food donations from our neighborhood for PORCH, an entirely volunteer-run local organization begun seven years ago by three local women to help relieve hunger.  I liked it so much, I promised myself that come the new year, I would continue volunteering there...not just intending to, but actually putting it on the calendar, and showing up.  

I’d been thinking about doing more for PORCH for some time, anyway. Aside from leaving grocery bags of cans, boxes, jars and sacs outside my kitchen door for the monthly pick-up, I hadn’t really put my hand to anything helpful in a community way since I’d moved house four years ago.  It was, in fact, the first time in…let’s see…forty-some years that I wasn’t active somewhere as a volunteer, beginning with my children’s preschool. 

From the first, I’ve been impressed by the way PORCH could do all it does without any levels of bureaucracy…indeed without any paid staff or lease.  Founders Susan Romaine, Debbie Horwitz, and Christine Cotton were neighbors who worried over the hunger they saw in their separate volunteer work, especially among school children.

PORCH works on the simplest principle possible:  one is the basic number.  One family puts one sac of food (even one can is acceptable) on its porch and one neighborhood driver, in her/his own car, volunteers to pick it and others up to bring to one common site.  At the site, (also generously donated by a local church) volunteers, one by one, gather to unpack and rebag the donations, then one by one, drivers, each in their own cars, redistribute the bags to people and agencies who need it.  The power of one means that all those many ones make one morning a month's work into a substantial impact on hunger.  Besides the many generous households who leave bags of food or checks on their porches for their neighborhood coordinator, an increasing number of businesses—especially, but not only food-related companies—give goods, money, time and advertising, often on word-of-mouth recommendations.  Thanks to all of them, PORCH has provided our community with nearly $2 million of hunger relief; add in the other PORCH sites which have sprung up on this model, and it sounds more like $3.5 million.

Lately, the PORCH  emails had been asking for not only more hot cereals, hearty soups, and snacks for the winter, but more help as well.  So this month, I returned to join the other deliverers, gatherers, unpackers, sorters, repackers and re-deliverers, and over the next few hours floated from task to task in the large space, learning the routines more firmly.  It’s a well-run group with people who don’t mind doing what they’re asked, and who pick up pretty quickly on the next thing needed or the next thing to be figured out.  Everyone is there to help.  As many volunteer organizations as I’ve belonged to over the decades, from grass-roots to multi-national, I admired this group’s energy...dedicated, efficient, cheerful...and amazingly ego-less.

Naturally, as I worked, I learned more than simply how to get food from my kitchen to someone else’s in need.  Watching people moving around me, and moving me around, I began to listen for where the volunteers had come from and why.  From “We started this because…” to “It’s such a wonderful  group of people” to “My wife brought me along” to “I’m doing a month of community service for a traffic violation” to “I work for a food pantry in a shelter…”  They included two of the local police who lent a hand sorting, carrying, pushing tables and chairs around, staying til the very end—it’s part of the task to clean up and return the space to its original use when the party’s over. 

As I did last month, after the sorting I offered to drive a few dozen bags to one of the places that distribute goods, last time a mission, this time the county social services.  PORCH isn’t the only organization donating food to schools and food pantries. But it provides a hefty amount of basic nutrition where it’s needed, including fresh foods bought with cash donations or given by grocers.  Most impressively, they offer help to  nearly 400 hundred individual families through school counselors and other community need-watchers.    My deliveries afforded me the chance to look into those spaces, too, watching how they worked, who they worked for, how much they needed.  It's never just a job for a few hours; it's education into increasingly wide circles of society.

While I packed and delivered, I thought about what appealed to me, personally, about such work.  The first appeal came immediately:  philosophically, and for better or worse, I’m one of those people who, as an old friend used to say about herself, feed people.  Hunger is one of the things I’ve, thankfully, rarely suffered, but I imagine it well.  I’m a kitchen person…even while I'm pulling things off the shelf to donate, I’m organizing a bag in terms of protein, fruit, starch, vegetables, milk…

And then there is the appeal of all that sorting and packing.  Like my favorite work with the Friends of the Library, I can’t help bringing order to a pile of thrown-together donations so they make sense for somebody.  You laugh…but it’s true.  (My sister is the same way, so she better not be laughing.)  Categories, sequences, and patterns are me/I.  How I loved diagramming sentences in grade school!  How quickly and avidly I could organize anything from library shelves to syllabi to a committee  agenda!

Too, it’s the accessibility of the volunteer work.  The tasks are simple enough, and yet there is so much need for them, and it is so easy to step in and lend a hand.  Often, they lead to other “jobs” equally as appealing and just as needful.  Busy people, it seems, are often found in the same multiple places, a network of community knowing and doing.

But mostly, and this most selfishly, it’s one of the best ways I know to get myself further out into the world, connecting with what’s going on…really going on…outside the walls of my house and my neighborhood. You learn so much, for one thing, and you can never go back to thinking that you’ve seen or done enough to make things better.

Photographs of PORCH activities thanks to Christine Cotton, Debbie Horwitz, and Mary Sonis; OCIM.

Snow

All day it has been falling.  At seven this morning, it was light rain; by eight, white...drifting down like a Hollywood scene, covering us fast and lovely.  For a while, the children across the street were out, trying to rescue their dad's car, which had slipped sideways at the end of the drive, and some neighbors walking dogs or walking to town, booted and scarved and enjoying the kind of snowfall that feels good...crisp air, wet refreshing flakes, still manageable underfoot.

It kept up long past what we were led to believe...an inch or two, over by early afternoon, said the weather people, like last week's fall more a gesture than a storm.  The plows came and went, but all the tracks were soon covered, as if no one, no car, no sand, had ever passed this way.  All day we'd heard from the north, the west, the south and southwest...chilling cold, bright sun, the precipitation stopped after a few inches, promising better tomorrow.  But it's late afternoon now, and here the snow still falls, lighter, thinner but equally persistent.  Now and then a branch, overloaded, snaps and crashes.  At first we heard them, but now, we see only after the fact the deep impression it has made on the heightening cloud over the ground. 

At noon, I gathered some hazelnuts from the basket we keep for Alexander on the dining table, and threw them outside the front door under the sheltering eaves.  If the chipmunks and squirrels dare to come out of their hiding places, they'll have dinner, of a sort.  The birds haven't shown themselves yet either, but I know, as they do, where their repast will come from:  behind the ivy growth on the bark up the tall trees in the back yard, they'll peck out bugs enough for days.

Tonight, since it's my birthday, and no one else can brave the foot or more accumulated by now, not to mention our town's infamous steep, iced driveways, to help celebrate, my next-door neighbors are wading through from their kitchen door to mine for a winter dinner...a sort of curried rice and shrimp thing, a salad, some apple crisp.  They'll bring wine.  (I wish I had a fire to welcome them, but alas, it's the one thing this house is lacking...a fireplace...and I'm at cross-purposes trying to figure out where to put one, without losing a bank of windows.)

Meanwhile, the snow rises into a silence unmatched, cushioning us from all outdoors.  As I watched a movie to spend the quiet, it seemed as if there were no other world except the rooms of this house, its windows showing only snow broken now and then by the criss-cross of hyphenated tree limbs and high wires.  Snow falling in the air, snow lodged in the elbows of branches, snow piled high on what might be, underneath, rocks or cars or hibernating creatures.  Not eerie at all, just the long black and white emptiness of winter.

It's a sort of gift, I suppose, that bears waiting a while to unwrap.

Ordinary

All I wanted out of this new year were a few ordinary days to begin again.  But opening the drapes this morning, I found out my window the snow the weather people said was coming.  Scorning them, I had disdained all those shoppers I found late yesterday afternoon at the grocery, who were practically looting the milk, egg and cereal shelves.  I was just there because really and truly I had run out of milk, eggs and orange juice, and, happening to be driving right by, thought I'd save myself a trip on the morrow.  Darting through the melee, I managed to snag the last gallon of milk and a carton of jumbo eggs that weren't broken, and the cashier and I made a joke of the panic people get into when the weather threatens to leave them at home too long.

Those of you in northern climes will no doubt roll your eyes at an inch of snow (that's how much we had) causing such hoarding, but here in the land of relatively rare snowfall, one could be holed up inside for a few days until the sand-and-brine trucks get around to one's street.  Even I, who live right off the main road through town, a road already cleared and well-traveled, am not about to risk life and limb dodging the (let's say politely) less experienced drivers who rev an engine jauntily over a patch of ice and don't expect the spin or the slide downhill. I hate driving (or walking, for that matter) on ice anyway, no matter how many of my youthful years were spent spinning on it.

But no one will argue that the sight this morning wasn't beautiful, the landscape shining jewel-like in the brilliant sunlight.  There were already tracks of birds, deer and something else I couldn't recognize across the driveway, and pretty soon I added my own, making up errands to enjoy the air and sun, even the crunch of snow under my feet.  Ordinarily all this white stuff would melt before noon, except that this week the peak temperature will just barely break the freezing point and nights will dip into the teens...not ordinary.  As I mentioned, we might be stuck inside a few days.

Beautiful winter scenes outside put me in the mood to do something warm inside.  Making breakfast, I pulled a package of English muffins from the freezer and discovered too many bags of bread-ends accumulating near the back of the shelf.  Ordinarily, I save them to dry and grind into breadcrumbs, but this morning that seemed too mundane a fate.  Bread pudding...a treat on a cold day, both the aroma as it bakes and the taste thereafter...sounded much more palatable. My copy of Craig Claiborne's classic tome, The New York Times Cookbook, is, after forty-five years, approaching the look and feel of an antique, but its Orange version is still the best recipe for that homey dessert.

As it came to fruition in the oven, I headed to the workroom to made a card for a friend's birthday, and when it was finished I began to play around, pulling stuff together to make a new one, collaged like the first, this time with leftover bits of a page from an arty style magazine, a rag of cotton and a few handmade paper ends.

Somehow, though, shapes of a deeper significance began to appear as I tore and glued, inked and painted and overlay.  The pile of folded rugs seemed now like a temple; the beginning of an ancient invocation occurred to me, and after I'd inscribed it once, twice, ten and more times, I reached under a pile of scraps and out fell a tiny square with the message, This life is a gift.  I suppose the same words had been nesting in my mind unrealized behind every move of my hands.

What I was building with those scraps was a talisman against worry.  My poor grandson has had a fever that has enervated him for several days now.  Those of us who know from experience about fever in children know that with some medicine, some cool cloths, a lot of liquids and rest it's likely to run its course and shake off lethargy soon enough, but we still can't help remembering all the things that could go wrong.  We also can't help feeling sorry for their parents, remembering what it was like when we were first faced with a little one, usually so full of energy, waterfalls of words tumbling minute by minute..."Dad, Mama, Nana!  See this?  I can do...", now way too quiet and droopy and hurting, his favorite blanket comforting him as he curls into a corner of the couch.   We'd do anything to make him himself again. It's only the flu, we think, but it brings with it a vulnerability we don't want to be reminded of.

So here before me is this collage unfolding from distress but insisting on turning into the bigger picture.  I'm thinking it will probably now be the cover of a book instead of simply a card.  Though I'm still pondering the right frame for it, I think I know what it's about, this piece.   It's the way the making of art turns those deep-hidden emotions we are too old or stolid or iron-willed to admit, into images that overcome vulnerability, even though they are born of them.

We busy our hands with work to reinvent anxiety and uncertainty, creating the outward expression rather than eroding the sense within. 

The bread pudding, by the way, my uncle enjoyed for lunch with a little cream, while the sun flooded the dining room and the snow glittered outside.  Comfort made against the cold, usually by hand.