Time for Sarcastic Mom’s Weekly Winners again. Where’d the week go? This we we had Valentine’s Day and very cold weather so the photos reflect those things (I barely went out of the house). Plus a portrait of one of the dogs.
Catching Flakes
focused on the snowflakes, not the trees!
Yellow Rose of Nova Scotia
Frosty Landscape
Wintree
Winter’s Edge
Summer in winter
Look for more great Weekly Winner photos from this week here.
I’ve got nothin’. It’s been a long day. I’ve written, talked and altogether used up too many words. Instead of words, I offer this odd, rather mysterious photograph.
But just before I quit using words for the day, I’d like to make a toast:
Here’s to the inexpressible. The tangle of feelings that has no neat label. The overwhelming moment that leaves us not only wordless but breathless as well. The times words will not do. Here’s to tears, screams, moans, dancing, making love, wrestling, climbing trees, falling down, skipping, running for the joy of it. To laughter. To music. To drumming. To throwing paint and pounding clay. To all the non-verbal languages giving voice to that which we would otherwise be unable to express.
G’night sweet bodies out there.
I don’t want to write about writing today, so I picked out this photo from my flickr site to inspire me.
Maybe the title spoke to me more than the photo itself. A “soft landing” implies what went on before. If I’m landing, that means that something somehow got me up high enough that I needed to get back to earth.
What possibilities does that bring up?
An airplane
A hang glider
A parachute
A para-sail
A strong gust of wind
A huge kite out of control
A very big and friendly (or unfriendly and hungry) bird
Other than the airplane which is scary enough—but a necessary and therefore acceptable risk—I’m not likely, given my personality, to leave the earth by any of those means. I do have wonderful dreams of leaving the ground, but it is never exactly flying. It’s more a sudden ability, a defiance of gravity (what a great phrase, eh?) that catches me by surprise. Suddenly I am like a man on the moon. I jump just a little and instead of coming back down, I begin to float. If I do it ‘right’ I can stay aloft and guide myself through whatever setting I’m in. It’s a controlled, suddenly simple feat and that seems to be the best part of it: I find am capable of gliding through the air. No problem with the landing, either. I just lose altitude and settle down on my own two feet as gently as can be!
Of course, the need for a landing could be from being in a tree. THAT idea I really like. As a child, I used to climb trees whenever I could find one big enough. It was the 50’s. Most of the neighborhoods were new and the trees put in by the developers were saplings. But I had one friend who lived in an older house, and out back was a huge live oak tree. Those are the ones with the low, spreading thick branches. We’d climb up easily, taking up our paper and pencils and paper dolls and nestle into the crooks of sturdy limbs. I remember it as such a lush hideaway and other-worldly time-apart.
Getting our feet off the ground, especially if we can do it without scaring ourselves more than we like, is a treat for sure. But what we’re really after is the soft landing, the relief and sense of connectedness of coming back to earth. With our feet firmly on sand, grass, dirt we know that we’re where we were meant to be, gravity and all.
Did you feel it? It hit me last night.
September.
The weather turned windy and cool. All the little needle-y things I didn’t get done this summer suddenly seem vitally important—even though last week the thought of them caused no sparks in the nerve endings of my brain. Suddenly it wasn’t summer anymore.
{{ Sigh }}
It was an excellent summer. We stayed home and worked. 
How’s that for a good time? But, it was both what I wanted and needed.
My husband relaxed with me into joint projects on our house that had been neglected all last summer. We did mortaring and carpentry and painting and poured concrete and dug up rocks and dirt and then filled the holes back in. Now that Labour Day’s over, we have a new deck that is brilliantly blue (see above) and already well-loved.
Next summer will be for putting a roof over it and railings and so on (and on and on), but I’m already so pleased to be able to step out my front door onto what is completed. Barry’s reaction is also gratifying. I knew I missed and would love the porch, but he’s at least as happy with it as I am and can’t wait to get out there. Somehow being up on a porch (rather than down on the grass where our patio table and chairs used to be) is more relaxing—almost hypnotizing. It’s given us what my sister calls the ‘rag-doll effect.’
In addition to that outside work, I was able to complete our charity’s website (see EPIC at epiccharity.com) and I finished a short story. See my progress bars! Whoo! So what if I didn’t get much done on the quilt or the novel….that’s what September is for? 
Not likely. I have all those needling things, plus a webzine that was sorely neglected all summer, and two trips upcoming. I go to Maine to see my lovely son and granddaughter for the last half of September and to Houston for most of October. November is National Novel Writing Month and then Christmas. Well. No wonder I love summer so much.
I always thought that life would slow down as I got older. Not sure where I got that idea but it’s completely the opposite. Days, weeks, months fly by with increasing speed.
However, there’s nothing like a good stay-at-home summer with lots of completed goals to set up the rest of the year.
NEEDLING THINGS TO-DO LIST:
EPIC Minutes
New EPIC Business Cards, Letterhead and Mailing Labels
New Darvintyne Business Cards
Book Club on Saturday night: Reading, Cleaning, Cooking
New Posts to PCQ
Letter to PCQ Subscribers
Now. That’s not so bad, is it?
I have a great new camera. I’ve always dreamed of one day getting a really good camera but put it off and off even when digital made photography immediate and playful and when the internet made it possible to share and get comments from people all over the world. I put it off because I have a superstition about getting good/expensive equipment. It sometimes signals the death of a creative era.
It may be a superstition, but it may also be learning. Years ago, not long after purchasing a huge roll of canvas and being given a fancy wooden easel, I stopped painting.
The problem is: you get the fancy equipment and suddenly there are expectations of producing something excellent. Suddenly it’s changed from: see what nice results I can pull off with my simple digital camera? to: if I can’t get fabulous results with this camera, I’ve wasted the money and let myself down. Suddenly the playfulness leaves and Things Get Serious.
I’m not letting that happen with this camera. It’s just the reason I put off getting one. The only way I could truly let myself down with my new camera is if I fail to use it. If the last week is any indication of future use, it seems I’m likely to be at the opposite end of that extreme. I’ve taken hundreds and hundreds of shots and the word “obsession” has been used several times.
But this all is a reminder of the kind of mental distortion that can happen around creative endeavors.
Anyway, as it happens, I am drawn to visual distortion. The photograph I used today is one taken with the new camera. It’s a view of my office area reflected in an old, cheaply-made mirror—thus the funky distortion. It’s my reminder that even if I’m still getting quite a few out of focus shots (it’s only been a week AND I don’t have a tripod yet!) that my photographs will always reflect my own vision of the world, distorted or otherwise.
After hours and hours of work over the last two and a half weeks, I have only one page left to finish (and—oh well, yeah—thousands of tiny adjustments and corrections)
Three books in the works (Galveston, Causeway and Nova) and none of them are thrilling me.
Just heard about this technique from a friend; I decided to try it on my mysterious leg pain since “western” medicine isn’t offering a cure. whatthehell…
the ins and outs of the Nikon D80 AND a computer drawing tablet and pen!
Lilacs.
Lilacs were not a part of my life until I moved north in my thirties. When I discovered them the first spring, it was as if I had dreamed them. They felt that important and that personal. And yet, I never remember a conscious thought of lilacs before then. Growing up in southern Texas, lilac wasn’t a flower, or a smell—lilac was a color.
In my fifties, I moved even farther north and now I have lilacs in my yard. They are white.
I have to re-dream lilac.
The lilacs in my yard are old; some so tall that we don’t bother to even try to prune them. I can see them from the second story. I imagine they were first planted by Florence Forbes around the turn of the last century when the house was built. She married George Forbes, an engineer and—by reputation—a sweet man, after the death of her first husband. Her daughter by the first husband was named Ava and Ava’s daughter was named Flora.
George and Florence’s house, though large, was a smaller version of his brother’s house nearby. That house was gone by the late 20’s, first abandoned, then vandalized, then burned. The brothers’ family was from Scotland. In fact, George, the elder, was born there. They named their homes after castles in Scotland. The brother’s large house was named Craigevar. George’s more sensible house was named Moneymusk.
George and Florence had no children of their own and when they died in the 1920’s within a few years of each other, the house they built was left to their granddaughter, Flora. But Flora wasn’t the only grandchild. There was another offspring of Ava’s named Billy and Billy, in the vernacular of the times, was a ne’r-do-well. He was a gambler, a drinker (in the times of prohibition) and incidentally, a cripple.
The house was inhabited by Flora and Billy, and soon all of Billy’s nefarious friends. Flora loved the house as she had loved her grandparents. She had lived with them off and on in her later childhood. By that time, Craigevar was no more and her relatives all lived far away in Glace Bay and Baddeck. Some lived in the States. She saw the house she had inherited being turned into a house of ill-repute.
There was a family nearby who had worked for George and Florence. The father did caretaker’s duties and the wife came in to clean. They had four children. In an act of desperation —trying to regain control of Moneymusk from her half-brother, Billy, and his friends—Flora invited the family to come and live in the house.
One can only imagine the sobering effect it had on the ruffians to have a poor, working family with children living in the house. Perhaps there were scenes. Perhaps the friends—who were, after all, only drunks and gamblers, not evil persons—simply left one sunny morning when they realized there were decent people, a family, in residence.
No one knows what happened to Billy.
Flora lived with the family for some months and then, for reasons lost to time, decided to go to the States.
The family stayed and took care of the house. Flora never returned and they stayed and stayed until the mother and father died. The house was left to the oldest son, John R., who stayed and stayed—for many years with his sister, Georgie, who did all the cleaning and caretaking. In his older years, John R. married and he and his Dutch wife continued to care for the house until they grew too old. Georgie and the widow of John R. still live nearby and have told some of these stories but have been careful not to tell other parts of it.
Some of this is fact, and some the stuff of dreams.
But this is true: all this time, white lilacs came back fresh and new every June, becoming thicker and taller with each passing year and if lilacs are white, any of it is possible.
FINISHED: I Have a Bed Made of Buttermilk Pancakes
by Jaclyn Moriarity
BEADED CURTAIN RATING: 
READING: Causeway by Linden MacIntyre
EDITING: Big Enough, a short story
WRITING: NetWorld, a short story
SMELLING: Oh yeah, lilacs
GROWING: Looks like mostly varieties of peas and squash
HOPING FOR: Some beans, too
MOOD: Dreamy
 Learning Our Colours - a grandmother story - |
words: 50,030 / 50,000 (100%)
words: 2,962 / 3,000 (99%)
rows: 3 / 15 (20%)
words: 40,000 / 80,000 (50%)
