pomegranatesandpaper

What an awesome day! We were graced with blue skies, puffy clouds, and a breeze that swept away the humidity and gloom that's hovered over the region for all of May. I'm still under the weather but Stan got me up and moving and we went to the nursery and bought a huge planter filled with cascading magenta petunias. I put it on my birdbath, the one with the big crack that won't hold water anymore. It was a gift from the garden club in Memphis and I'd never part with it - even if it is almost in two.  We also bought a big rosemary plant, some wild strawberries, bronze fennel, and nasturtiums. I'm putting a ton of pots (not a ton of pot)  around my porch and just stuffing them with all the plants I used to have room for in gardens elsewhere. This way I'll have a riot of color and texture to look out from my summer perch.

Speaking of which, I haven't moved from my big rocker and ottoman in the corner of the porch since we came home. Various sisters have dropped by and Stan has provided a steady stream of grilled food - we began with barbecue chicken and wings with roasted corn, followed later by grilled t-bones and sauteed mushrooms. I love a man who grills when he's bored! We're looking for a recipe for him to make a layer cake on the grill, but so far no luck.

Other than that, it's been an uneventful weekend filled with Zantac and Prevacid. I'm grateful that today I was able to eat a few chicken wings and a baked potato. And I'm playing with my new watercolor palette, discovering that I don't have a clue about mixing colors or about watercoloring if I'm not just filling in the lines. But that's what playing with paint is all about - time to learn with no rules.

Enjoy Memorial Day everyone!

Sense of Place

I got  up today and was bewildered by the weird state of my bedroom. What was that strange light? The sun! After probably 10 days of cold rain, the sun is out. It's breezy and cool and showers expected later today but right now The Sun Is Out! We've had more rain in May than any that April showers brought. It's pretty typical northeast weather. I can recall many Memorial Days spent with the heat on and rainslickers to run outside.

This is a photo of a waterfall a block from our church. One of the wonders of living back in the east is the presence of so many rocks, erratics, and natural outcroppings that occur everywhere. I had no idea how many parts of the country were rock-deficient until I moved to Memphis and Fresno where People Go To The Store And Buy Rocks. You have no idea how weird that is unless you have tried to dig out a garden or a lawn in the northeast. You couldn't give the rocks away for free! 

I was really bothered by the flatness of the San Joaquin Valley. I found it hard to live in an area where there was no landscape except houses and the occasional eucalyptus tree. I can't tell you the number of times I was driving in Fresno for a half hour only to find I was going in the opposite direction of where I was supposed to be. Each street is laid out in a grid, each strip mall looked identical, and there were no natural landmarks by which to orient myself. That is, until I got close enough to the mountains to finally see them through the pollution and say dammit! I've gone the wrong way again.

On the three days a year that the pollution lifted, the Sierra Nevadas sprang into view like postcard inserted into a viewer. My husband would call from work to say he could see the mountains and I'd throw Julia in a stroller and walk the kids to the corner so we could see those magnificent snow-topped mountains appearing as though they were down the street and we could walk to them.  Friends told me about growing up in the valley when they could see the coastal range, which I never saw from Fresno the two years we lived there.  It was exotica to us New Yorkers,  whose only mountain views were the borscht belt of the Catskills, those geriatric, worn out hills filled with trees, ski slopes, and power lines.

On the weekends in Fresno, we'd drive up into the foothills and buy honey and pistachios from the truck camp on a corner. Sometimes we'd venture north to see what lay up the valley, and we'd drive for hours on the highway, passing dizzyingly symmetrical rows of orchards. Every exit was punctuated with a "Nut House", a gas station, and a 7-11. We'd drive to tiny towns with odd names like Chico, only to arrive to find nothing more there than....a gas station....and a 7/11. But up in the foothills, there were roads that clung tenaciously to switchbacks, and groves of almonds in bloom,  and one time, a paradise of horses and streams and a lost bull that suddenly appeared next to us on a narrow dead-end road.

In my memory, it is always springtime there, and the aroma of strawberries hangs low over the fields being picked by the Hmongs. The poppies and mustard fill the plains with Van Gogh colors and we spotted a little crop of rocks that appear to be shaped like the Madonna, and we call her the Madonna Rock, and direct the start of all rides to go by her for good luck.  I got used to the smell of roses coming in the window while I cooked the Thanksgiving turkey, and  grew rosemary and thyme that towered up to my waist along the paths. Tomatoes that were hastily planted into a little strip of yard by the driveway fed us for months. The kids got used to leaving bikes and toys out, never having to fear rust from rain. My mother in law spent her days sweeping up the eucalyptus leaves where they scented and stained the front driveway. We stopped waiting for the peaches to ripen on the backyard tree when a visitor explained that they were white peaches and were  ripe.  Each week, the kids picked one orange off our little tree and we took a picture to send the folks back home. We swam in March, sat under a pergola laden with purple wisteria in April, and found the boards that the prior owners left that were for propping up the harvest heavy limbs of the persimmon tree.  Just in our own backyard, the abundance of the fertile valley dazed us. Stan used to come home for lunch and we'd sit by the pool and  stare at what we had acquired.

It was a lovely fantasy dispelled only by a venture into the rest of the city. My disorientation seemed to grow instead of settle down as I ventured further and further from our neighborhood. Our frequent trips out of the valley only instilled a greater dread of returning to the hot, shadeless, noisy streets and the hard, flat landscape where identical roofs of houses filled the horizon strung together with power lines. I never made my place there, a result of so much change, beginning with a hysterectomy within six months of our move, my mother in law's complete maladjustment to her retirement and displacement, and my husband's demands at a new job.  There was no time that I felt comfortable there until I found the quilting guild and joined a newcomer group that met once a week.  Over cups of coffee, needles, and threads, some friendships began to take form and I found out about the fabric store halfway to Yosemite, where to buy fish, and who was a good dentist. Still, our time there was  nothing more than an extended vacation, and we remained tourists in the land of giant box malls and tri tip barbecues, and Christmas in our shorts.  There was a hard, lonely feeling to the house that I could not  vanquish, despite my pine furniture and quilts on the wall, and Schumacker wallpaper. 

But I did grow to love the mountains. We used any excuse to drive away on a weekend and I conquered my fear of heights and took the car myself when visitors came and showed them the Madonna Rock and the trucks with bags of pistachios and the dizzyingly disorientation of being in a snowstorm an hour from home where you'd been swimming that morning. When we found out that we were being transferred again within two years, we were not ready to  leave. We had too much of California left to explore and the smell of eucalyptus and roses were beginning to smell like home.  However, I must admit that when we first flew to Memphis to look at neighborhoods, I fell like I was home again, and fell in love with the tree shaded lots and the gracious curves of the streets, houses that were a hundred years old and neighborhoods layered with magnolias and Bradford pears.  We found our time in Memphis to be short on natural wonder, but so much fuller in people and spirit.

And now we are back home, in a place long on shoreline and sailboats and huge shade trees, but crowded and expensive, yet  infused with culture and ethnicity. Where would I rather be today? I'd like to combine the graciousness of our Memphis home and friendly neighborhood with the natural wonders of California and the family, culture, and opportunities of New York.

Bloom where you are planted, but spread a little pollen for the bees to travel on.

It's dark enough this morning that I have to turn on the lights in order to read. The Little One got up and ran around lowering all the windows because as she says, "It's free-jeezing in here!" This Spring is evolving very much into a reprise of last year: cold, rainy, dark. I think the weather was warmer in mid-April when I was home on leave.

I go back to work today. When I left on Thursday in the middle of the day with a  stomach ache, I never thought it would be Tuesday before I went back!  I seem to be on the right track now that the doctor switched my antibiotic. I hope so since tomorrow I have a hearing at the DMV at 8:30 with a client.

The college kids are settling into their groove of being up all night and sleeping all day. Yesterday The Princess and I butted heads because she felt that being asked to get out of bed at 1:30 was unfair and unjust. Mystery Man has been helpful and is into all his usual summer stuff like being in a band and going to the batting cages. We hope that he'll be motivated to unpack the back half of his car sometime soon.

The Little One went to Great Adventures/Six Flags yesterday on a class trip. She has anticipated this trip for months and has been online memorizing the layout of the park so she can ride the most roller coasters. To keep it educational, they have a 40-page packet about physics to complete while there. We spent a lot of time Sunday discussing gravitational forces and researching physics and roller coasters on the Internet. She had a great time, but the ride she most wanted to go on, Kingda Ka, was closed until they got on the bus to leave because it was raining. She was disappointed but admitted that at that point she was exhausted and her stomach in knots from riding seven roller coasters.

Enjoy the photo of Rock Harbor on Cape Cod. Hopefully, warmer days are coming!

Some Tips On Drawing - revised with clearer "tips"

I was feeling better each day and yesterday my appetite came back and I didn't have to take a nap. This morning I got up and even went out to breakfast with my husband, even if it only consisted of eating a few mouthfuls of food. But around noontime, I got a pain in my stomach and my back began to hurt and the day has gone downhill from there. The doctor said I may be passing small kidney stones so tomorrow I have to go to a urologist or to the ER for a cat scan. I was so sure I'd be at work tomorrow that I almost told my boss to make sure she scheduled me for court. Good thing I kept my mouth shut. My new boss must think I'm a real goldbrick. I have to make sure to tell him that before he became my team leader, I had only called in sick twice in two years!

Last night I had a great art experience. I'm working in a journal in the round robin I'm in and the owner of the journal set the theme as "Grandmother's Kitchen", which is right up my alley. My sister, Marietta, found the poem I needed, "Communion of Saints", and I wanted to draw a picture of the family seated around the dining table. I tried it straight from memory and that did not work. At all. After an hour of hunting, I unearthed a small snapshot of my father's family crowded around their huge, ornately carved table in the dining room of his family home. After several false starts in pencil, I finally got the hang of drawing seated people flanked around a table. The perspective was difficult because it was at a different angle from each side of the table. I figured out to use a pencil and hold it out from the table along the top of the heads of each person, then transfer that angle to the paper. I also ignored all details and just went for the outline of each person's shape against the person next to them in order to keep each figure in perspective. I'd scan it in but that wouldn't be fair to the person whose journal it is. She won't get to see it for another twelve months, so I have to keep it under wraps till then.

I thought it was cool that I figured this out and wondered aloud to my sister how much I'd like to take more drawing classes where I could be taught this stuff. She countered that she'd never taken a drawing class that was a workshop and you pretty much had to pick these things up yourself. I thought back to the one drawing class I took about 8 years ago and remembered that I learned more when the teacher came round for individual critique. At the time I was having a terrible time with foreshortening of a shoe, but had never even heard the word foreshortening and when she pointed it out, I didn't have a clue what she meant. Then she showed me how I was abbreviating the front of the shoe, thus foreshortening it.  That's all I remember being taught in the class, other than the tedious exercise of drawing ten boxes and shading them from white to dark, a task I could not muster.  To this day I prefer to draw in pen, maybe in a subconscious reaction to coloring in all those squares.

However, I discovered last night that I love drawing these family scenes from photos. My likenesses are pretty horrid as I am abominable at drawing facial characteristics, but I'll be happy to draw and smudge and even the label the name of the person if it helps others identify who it is. At the same time, the more I draw, the better I may get and some day I may be rewarded when someone in my family picks up a drawing and says "Oh, Aunt Betty and Daddy!

Here's a trick I learned somewhere along the way that will help when you are trying to draw a complex subject, group photo, anything where you have to consider a lot of lines and perspectives.  Below is a photo that I've scanned in. It has a lot of angles and different perspectives to consider and it would be difficult for me to draw well.  Now, import the photo in Photoshop. I only have Photoshop Elements, so you may have to adapt these directions slightly if you have other versions.
1. enlarge the photo about 30 % so you can see the detail clearly;
2. convert the color to all grays, which in PE is under ENHANCE, COLOR, REMOVE COLOR;
3. Go to FILTERS, ARTISTIC, POSTER EDGES (other versions have posterize, cut out, coloring book, etc. )

You end up with an outline of your subject, with the values gradated, and it is very easy to draw it from there. You can even print it out and try to trace it if  you are in a hurry or want to cheat.  I like to do it because it teaches my eyes how to see shapes and shadow and not be hung up on Drawing An Arm and A Leg, and you know what I mean if you draw. Note how certain lines disappear and others become thicker and thus the shapes are simplified for drawing. 

I'll try to get to drawing from this manipulated image today, after I get back from the urologist. It keeps my mind off everything else! I'll scan it in if I get it done today. In the meantime, try it yourself .

The Infirmary

It seems ridiculous that I was back at work for less than two weeks and had to call in sick. I'd been feeling ill all week, not sure what was going on, and left after lunch yesterday. By the time I got home, my stomach was raging and I had all sorts of weird symptoms that were getting worse. My doctor never called me back so we went to the ER at 9:00 pm and they diagnosed a kidney infection. I ended up there until 2:00 a.m., asleep on a gurney, my arm hooked up to a bag of IV antibiotics, which made me feel better within a half hour.  I'm very relieved to find out what I had because the constant nausea and stomach pains were inexplicable since I just had all the plumbing checked out and my office mates think I'm turning into a hypochondriac. It was good to be given a definite diagnosis, to be hooked up to a bag of meds, and pass out knowing I'd feel better in a few days.  Today I am in bed, sleeping, awake, sleeping, awake, doing a little reading, some blog-surfing, until my energy crashes and I pass out on a pillow again. And it's cold and raining, so I don't feel like I am missing any spring.

Last weekend I tore apart my files looking for a poem I'd written about six years ago. I didn't find it yet. Sigh. My files are a mess. I need someone to organize it all for  me, since I don't have the energy or a file cabinet anymore. All the mags and books I've been published in are scattered everywhere.  My family will never be properly able to honor my posterity. (As if!)
I have one place left to look: on the ancient desktop in the studio. If it's not there, all I have is a very first draft and I'll never be able to recreate it as well as the original. One sister thinks she might have a copy, but it's been a week and I haven't heard back.  So my need goal is to get my writings and artwork properly organized and archived in some archival boxes that won't let the paper turn yellow, etc. In short, be a grown up about it.

In the tearing apart of the drawers, I found a folder full of foolscap, (love that word) with my draft of my very first novel, the one I began in Memphis when I finally had time to write, the one that is so autobiographical that I laugh at when I read it now. In between the laughs, however, is a funny story and I found myself being absorbed into the writing, most of which I did not remember. So I've decided it's worth a heavy pruning and editing and evolvement into series of short stories. So it was worth digging through the drawers even if I didn't find "Communion of Saints". I'll turn the desktop on tomorrow and search through the folders. I'm putting it off cause if it's not there, I'm going to be really sad and pissed off at myself.

And now I shall crash on a pillow, thankful that I am ont on the verge of puking for the first time in seven days. Life is good.

I'm here, just getting reabsorbed into work life, which always threatens to pull me under when I return from a time away. It will take me awhile to get my balance back, to return to some art making and writing, but I'm just taking it slow and letting the natural ebb and flow on my energy works its way out. I'm still doing depositions in the office, so the wear and tear on the knee is not too bad. I've felt like an outsider, but it's not from anything overt, just subtle changes in the power structure while I was gone, a result of my absence in a very pressured unit. It's been good for my associate because she's had to run with it and has done quite well.

Early this morning I had a wild dream of buying a summer house somewhere far away and needing someone to watch our dog, the one who's been gone for ten years.  We met neighbors whose son agreed to walk the dog while we were away, but while we were showing them the house, a strong storm began, with thunder and lightening and very high winds. The noise was incredible, the rain was lashing the windows like a fire hose had been aimed at them,  and we were in the basement and couldn't see what was going on. Water was coming in across the ceiling and the wind made the doors fly open. And then as suddenly as it began, it stopped and I ran upstairs to find everything in order except a dripping chimney. When we looked outside, the edge of the storm was clearly visible and highlighted by a sunny, blue sky.

I am interpreting it as a sign that the troubles that plummet us to our depths are survivable and that we are about to come out of the problems that have gripped us and threatened to shake us down for the last few years. Particularly symbolic for me was the house, because I dream of houses often and usually they are sad dreams where I love the house but suffer the loss of my family thousands of miles away. This time, I felt none of that loss and was more concerned about finding friends and adjusting to the new area we were living in. Even the return of our long-dead dog was comforting. I think  the cycle we've been in for so long is about to break.

Survivor

Yeah, I watched it but being the prissy snobby pseudo-intellectual type I am, I only watch it when Stan watches it. So we watched the end last night. Could someone tell Jeff Probst and the dude that produces all these reality shows that nothing is more excruciatingly boring and non-empathetic than watching three people hang from poles like overly large storks sitting on a nest? Reminded me of Horton the Elephant incubating the egg.  I did think it was pretty unfair that the next-to-final challenge involved all sort of physical feats that firemen are trained to do: climbing, untying knots, using a grappling hook. What chance did the two bikini bimbos have?? But I'm happy as long as the string bean dude caught in the pathos of his own deceptions did not cry one more swiveling time.

But actually, I'm talking about the weekend and whether the DH can get up and go to work. The Beast is back and DH  is exhausted from the fight. Why can't someone find a fucking cure for chronic pain, some alternative besides dragging yourself through your daily obligations, then coming home to pass out, then getting up to do it all over again?

This weekend I worked in the round-robin journal. The first page came out exactly as I wanted. I got cocky and decided to do a painting on the second spread. Several hours later I remembered this: I can't freaking paint from my imagination!   I panicked, but then remembered the old trick of gluing a piece of paper over the page. Whew. Otherwise I was going to have to rip it out and hope no one notices that my section is one page long.  Why do I insist on playing with real artists?

The news on Today is that 25% of women in the workplace make more than their spouses. That's it? 25% ? Are we supposed to get excited about this? Then again, the  only attorneys I know from my class who are making more than their husbands are those that went directly to Wall Street and sold their souls early on. The women who are judges are more likely to have husbands who are investment bankers/lawyers in order to maintain the country club/private schools/Ivy League college profile than the other way around. The ones that are in private practice are struggling to pull a penny out of it. Right now, the show is  interviewing a couple with 6 kids where the wife is a lawyer and the husband is a parochial school teacher/coach, and asking the husband if it "bothers him". Can I tell you that my husband would be THRILLED to have me earn the bigger bucks so he can be a house husband and manage the pain in his back?

Okay, so neither of us married the other for the money. But I have told my husband that if he can hook up with a really rich ( and I mean billionaire rich) woman, he can divorce me and then send me lavish alimony and child support, then we'll get back together in five years. What's so bad about that? Think of it like  a marriage investment. Yeah, that's the ticket.

They're Back

Stan and I found ourselves sitting on the porch in the middle of Saturday afternoon, alone, reading, drinking a beer. Once again, we looked at each other, feeling guilty that somehow this shouldn't be happening. Why are we alone? Why are we relaxed? Why is no one asking us to drive them, buy them, take them, help them?

The children were not home.

And then a chill came over us like the sun briefly going behind a cloud. I shivered and he pulled his sweatshirt hood over his head. We didn't speak. We both knew what the other was thinking.

The party's o-vah.

Sometime in May,  professors grow very tired, administrators grow very cranky, dorms groan under the accumulation of ten months of garbage, dining halls run out of food, and student bank accounts run out of cash. And then these expensive, institutions of higher learning do the most selfish, heinous act of the year: they let the students come home.

No really, we're very happy that our darlings are on their way home. We missed them. Really. They're adorable, sweet, kind, clean, happy, grateful, loving - at least for the first night . This year we had two kids coming home and it did take on a feeling of a homecoming. The family came over for ribs, although we didn't know the ETA of either child. The Princess was waiting for the mail and a rent check, which is a long story that the father is involved in, not me, not me! for a change. Mystery Man, well his name says it all so he was expected some time Sunday or even Monday if he couldn't jam the giant speakers and amplifier plus six months of dirty clothes into his car. But who knew?  Go with the flow, Mom.

So after dinner, when all the grown ups were nodding off at 8:15 and the cousins were running rampant  fueled on cupcakes and candy (hey, it was party!). the Princess's Honda pulled up and The Little One went screaming out the door to greet her. We got her a plate of food, put her feet up, and watched her adorably pick at her plate while fielding phone calls from The Boyfriend who was ten minutes behind her on the parkway. Where are you? Twenty minutes away. Where are you? Fifteen minutes away. Where are you....need I go on?

And then my sister gasped and I swizzled in my chair to see a figure in the doorway - Mystery Man! He surprised us all and drove home after the big alumni frat barbecue because he missed us so much the dorms closed Saturday at noon and he had no idea and had planned to clean and pack Sunday but his RA threw them out.

More food, drink, excited cousins, teary-eyed grandmother, and The Princess a little miffed he stole her thunder. All hands employed to lug The Princess' s stuff to the third floor while the men settled in for a Yankee game.

I stole upstairs to bed, exhausted but happy to have all my birds in the nest. I read for awhile,  while plaster dust gently settled on me like snow from the throbbing bass above my head. Excited cousins ran up and down the stairs to do The Princess's bidding. The doorbell rang, deep male voices were rumbling through the house. I smelled food being cooked and the back door slamming several times.

I just shut my light and went to sleep. No sense in yelling at everyone to quiet down.  The baby  mother has to get used to  trying to sleeping through thenight

Is it Thursday Already??

We've weathered a hard week. My sister, Alicia, had a tragic and sudden death in her husband's family this weekend, hours after we were all together with them for a celebration of her daughter's confirmation and birthday. We are all reeling from the shock and spent Mother's Day just dumbfounded and quietly sitting with each other trying to make sense of it. If you are a praying sort, please remember Alicia's family in your prayers, especially her husband and children who were so close to their uncle. We will miss you so much, Frank, with your smile, jokes, teasings, and hugs and the vibrancy you brought to every aspect of your life.

My office has been very nice about keeping me in or sending me off to short depositions locally. So far I've haven't gone to the Bronx, which is very, very nice.  The knee is recalcitrant; it still wants to stiffen up and complains loudly at too much movement.  The other knee is making noises too, annoyed at doing the bulk of the work. I made it to Thursday before I had to ice it during the day, though the physical therapist says I'm foolish and should be icing it during the day whether I need to or not. Why would I rather feel in pain than do ice and take anti-inflammatories? Something Puritanical in my nature.

There's been a collapse of a huge retaining wall in Manhattan, north of the George Washington Bridge. This is a stone retaining wall, about three stories high and probably a 100 years old. It's blocked the northbound lanes of traffic on a highway out of the city and it is a MESS! I'm very happy to be home and watching it on TV and grateful that my sister, who also commutes from the Bronx was not at work today.

The Lusty Month of May

It's hard not to write about the weather when it is May. I'm awestruck as I drive to the bank and pass a stand of 12 foot lilacs swaying like ladies singing at church. The pink dogwoods are Oriental visions and the double blossom cherries are just purely over-the-top bursts of confetti at a sweet sixteen party. Too many metaphors? I can't help it, it's spring.

There's a house in my old neighborhood that I drive by every spring. It's a low slung house, tucked behind a wide bank of azaleas that have been allowed to grow wild as the true woodland species it is. The azaleas sprawl and throw out branches that nestle with each other in a riot of pink, salmon, magenta, and white.  A few blocks away is a Tudor house on a hilly lot on a curve in the road.  The front yard has a curving slate walkway and the rest of it is filled with ledges of azaleas that completely fill the yard. My mother thinks it is untidy; I think I'd like to find a little hidden spot where I can crawl in and make tea cups from the blossoms and spend spring sheltered by the blossoms from the gentle rains.

When we grew up, our yard ended in a rounded point down by a stop sign. There was a group of  trees growing in a tight circle, with small boulders in between, and a circle of lilies of the valley planted all around them. We used to play for hours on the rocks, pretending the lilies of the valley were the ocean and we were shipwrecked on a desert island. When we grew tired of that, we'd hide between a huge  huge crimson azalea and the pricker hedge and spy on the kids walking home from the college down the street.  We didn't have a huge piece of property by any means, but it seemed to contain little spots to nestle in, to play out fantasies of woodsmen and shipwrecks, and camping and jungles. 

We knew the yards in the rest of the neighborhood like our own. We could cut through the pachysandra and across the Kingsley's yard, through the hole cut in their privet hedge, down the hill of the next yard, and out through more privets onto the dead end street behind ours. I had a friend who lived on that street and although our yards met at the corner, I had to cut through three yards to get to hers unless I dared to climb the forbidden fence. Her street was carved through a ledge of rock and the house across from hers was an Asian-inspired dwelling that sat high in the air. I remember being invited in once with my friend, and sitting on a screened porch that seemed to dangle off the rocks. They had wind chimes that played softly in the breezes and I expected to see toucans and  parrots and other exotic creatures fly past the house.

The yard I envied the most was right next door. The Kingsleys lived there, with their son and daughter, who probably were about ten years older than I. Their backyard was flat and manicured to a Wimbledon neatness each week by a gardener who drove up in a ramshackle truck and let out a band of men who cut, mowed, trimmed, and raked leaves in an hour-long orgy of maintenance. That wasn't the part I envied,however. It was the huge, garage-sized erratic boulders that took up a quarter of their backyard. Ancient humps of stone that looked like the backs of giant elephants, gouged out of the earth and deposited in a glacier's icy grip.  Saplings sprouted out of the cracks that had cleaved the enormous monoliths and created little valleys and seats where you could rest your back, read a book, and eat a novel  while your back kept warm against the sun-kissed rock.  Many days I sat on my screened porch and watched their teen age girl spend an afternoon reading on the rock like she was on her private mountain.  I would have loved to spend the afternoon with my own book, but although they didn't mind us cutting through the yard, they never invited us to climb up for a perch. I had to be content to hide behind my window curtains and fantasize about spending the night in a sleeping bag in the crook of the boulders.

I wish I could say that I grew up to be a great hiker or mountain climber and slept in lean-to's or tackle off the side of a mountain.  Oh, I've  done my share of camping, but my love of woodland places and hidden rocks and bowers of flowering bushes made me of a domestic partner with the land than an adventurer. I've channeled my desire for hidden bowers into secret gardens and screened porches lit by flames of a hundred candles on an August night.
Instead of hiding under the azaleas, I paint pictures dripping with the flamboyance of spring and match my crayons to the fifty shades of pink I can see out my bedroom window.

Something's in the Air

I was pumping gas today, on the way home from the office. I stopped at the local giant service station with a mini-mart. The station was pretty full. Cars were streaming by on the road in rush hour traffic. The smell of petroleum by-products was strong as everyone around me pumped  gas. It was warm today and the sun was hitting the oil stains all over the concrete  and the air was acrid with the smell of grease and oil.

And then I smelled it. A peculiar aroma wafted over the petroleum fuels.  I looked up, my nose sniffing the air like a hunting dog on the scent of a (rac)coon. It was the undeniable smell of sugar and yeast.  My head swiveled all around like Linda Blair in The Exorcist. The smell came at me on a breeze again and I followed it to the door of the mini-mart. Ah, a sign for Krispy Kremes hung in the window. Of course, I thought, they sell doughnuts.

On the way home, I got to wondering: in that crowded service station, with the fumes of engines and gas being pumped all around me, how did those little sugar molecules find my olfactory senses so easily? Was it merely my finely-trained scenting skills, honed to a fiddle, able  to pick up  even the most delitescent odor of sugar and grease? Am I that sensitive to sugar that I could smell it 25 yards away emanating from the door of a minimart filled with corn chips, beef jerky, sodas, and left over bags of ice melter - even when the donuts were contained within a closed glass case?

I think not.

So is there a conspiracy on the part of minimarts to draw in we unsuspecting sugar and carbaholics, a conspiracy fueled by a steady stream of sugarized air being pumped out over the gas station plaza?

You decide.

SKIP LUNCH FIGHT HUNGER DAY

Today is Skip Lunch Fight Hunger Day. City Harvest in NYC is sponsoring this event locally. The idea is to organize your friends and colleagues to go without lunch today and donate the money they would have spent on lunch to City Harvest.  There's also a click-thru where you can donate right now.  So why not brown bag your lunch today and donate the ten bucks to City Harvest?

At our office, lunch is often just a harried grab of an over-priced deli sandwich or a mushy salad. I'll enjoy eating my peanut butter and jelly sandwich and donating the ten bucks to City Harvest. How about you?

Stories to Tell

Looking back on my six weeks of leave, I see myself right before the surgery as wound up like a top that's about to spiral out of control and bang down  those snowy steps where I wracked up my leg on the trip to Buffalo.  I think the fall finally broke through my denial that I could go on with my life with the knee the way it was and somehow it would resolve itself. Five years ago, when an orthopedist told me that surgery wouldn't help me because I was too overweight, I sucked it in and added it to the many layers of sorrow and shame that I had accreted around my body over my inability to keep my weight off.  As my knee problems grew worse and worse my exasperated husband would ask when I was going to go to the doctor and I'd say what for? So I could be told that I was a fat mess and there was nothing he could do and I should live with it? It took me a week before I felt like I could breathe after that appointment. I couldn't go through that again and I took the pain in my  knee as a divine retribution for what I had allowed myself to become.

Thinking back since January, I didn't realize how much of a depression I was in. After years of financial and emotional stress over Stan's back and job problems, our whole family has lived on the edge of disaster as casually as if we were bomb-handlers for El Al.  We took it in stride when bad things happened; they happened to us a lot.  We also knew that we weren't the only people that bad things happened to. We had it all in perspective.

At least that's what you tell yourself when you pat yourself on the back for getting up each day and going to work when your spouse is in terrible pain, or you are in terrible pain,  or your both are on the same day and you look at each other, raise your eyebrows, and then go get the newspaper.  Of course, I kvetch a lot and I'm sure my family would pay me a million dollars never to call them and say these words again: My knee, my stomach, Stan's back. Literally. A million dollars if they had it. Coming back to New York had stabilized the situation by allowing me to go back to work and contribute my income, but it had also intensified the physical stress we both were under.

It's been a very rough six weeks, but I'm a lot calmer now.  I'm going back to work with a knee that may be as screwed up as it was before I left. However, my head is screwed on better and I know that eventually I can get a knee replacement and have my life back again.  My family has been wonderfully indulgent while I've been home, especially my husband who lives with this kind of pain all the time and still manages to get out of bed and wait on me and then go to work.

I'm sure there are other middle aged people who are struggling with medical issues that are impacting their families and their careers. It's a double whammy when you begin to view yourself as damaged goods and see it reflected in the eyes of those around you. It's difficult to extricate yourself from your daily obligations in order to get the help you need. It's also dangerous to stand up and draw attention to your infirmities in a society that values youth and fitness above everything else. I am not being paranoid when I say that I have anxieties about how my office will react to my return and I have no illusions that they will try to accommodate my physical issues while we are so short-staffed and under the gun with a high volume of cases.  On the other hand, I will not allow myself to become so physically beat up as I did over the last six months.

It's healing for me to write this  and hopefully not excruciatingly boring for all of you. You've played a major role in my recovery and without all of you, my family would have bound and gagged me by now! So thank you, and happy mother's day to everyone because we all came from someone's womb and we are all thankful to be here.

View From My Pillow

It's Friday so that means it's time for Blackbird's photo meme. Today's theme is view from your pillow, which dovetails nicely with my post this week about my bedroom. Hmm. Do you think Blackbird is reading my blog and stealing my ideas?? What a beeyotch!

This is the view to my right.  This photo actually illustrates several themes of months past. First, note the curtains, the very same ones that I made a couple of months ago. (Later you'll see the windows that are still bare.) On the wall is some of my artwork and my cross collection. My sister, Maria,  just today gave me a beautiful green ceramic cross she bought at a garage sale and gave me for Mother's Day. She's so sweet! Hanging by my closet door are the scarves I knitted this winter.

To prove that this is an untouched photo, you will note the basket of laundry next to the hamper and a peek at Whiskers, the Cat Who Pees Everywhere But the Litter Basket, or by his nickname, "that f-ing cat". (My kids read this blog, y'know.)

This is the view straight ahead, with the abominable desk, Stan's favorite toy - the TV, and more of my artwork, and the stupid shade from Target that won't stay on straight. And the bare windows that reproach me every time I get into bed, but not enough to actually spend a day sewing the curtains. Yes, soon, soon, I"ll do it (i.e. next winter).

And here is the view to my right, The Wall O Wood, or the ugly furniture we want to ditch and the only wall that every thing fits on. On the far left, is the door into my art room, which you all saw a few weeks ago. Remember - the mess?

So now you know what artjournaler sees when she lays her head down at night. All except the husband, whose photo she will not publish because it will drive women made are all over the world and since he's out right now in the cold rain picking up sushi, I'm keeping his sweet heart all to myself.

Today is the last day of my sick leave and I return to work on Monday. To say I am anxious about my ability to perform my job with my wounded knee is the understatement of the year.  Stan's having a bad patch again with the back and has been working from home. I'm glad he has that flexibility, but with his company, it's only  a matter of time before they get pissed off and fire him for the third time. The Princess is having major roommate problems, and one of the girls got pissed off at the rest and moved out. Now they have to find a subtenant and come up with her share of the rent probably until school starts in the fall. So all in all, money issues continue to keep us on tenterhooks and Stan and I are having flare ups over completely inconsequential things.

I spent the last two days painting a piece of furniture in our dining room. It's a turn of the century, oak piece called a "side -by-side". We've had it for over twenty years and the finish was really beat up, so I decided to take the plunge and paint it. So far I'm on my fourth color scheme and I'll post a photo tomorrow after I finish it today.

On my last day off, I'm going to get my hair cut, buy a gift for my niece's confirmation/birthday party, and taking Stan to the hospital for a steroid injection in his spine. Ouch. I have to go now and figure out how to get the paint from under my fingernails so the hair dresser doesn't think I'm a big slob.

I'm going to two doctor appointments this morning, but first I'm enjoying a latte and a muffin and the NY Times.  Only I came back from driving Julia to school, and prepared to sprawl out on the bed, then take a shower.  But someone else was sprawled in my bed - the DH, working at home because HBIKH (his back is killing him). OK cool, thank God, for right now, he is able to work from the bed and bill his hourly rate.  However, right when the Regis live chat comes on, which I do admit to catching occasionally because it's all about NY and you know I'm all about NY, he begins a conference call. Right next to me. On the bed. So now all through the ten minutes, he's having a loud discussion with his boss about pricing and inventory. I can't hear a damn thing. Now I"m getting tensed up as he is.

Why, you ask, don't I get off my ass and go downstairs to the living room or upstairs to the TV room? I don't know. Well, I know I don't go upstairs because 1)huge flight of steep stairs that freaks out when I go down them because I always picture myself in a heap at the bottom; and 2)the kids hang out there, which means I'll probably find a litter of leaking McD's soda cups, saltines on the floor, the computer on, and everything that I've sent up there to be put in the attic eaves sitting all over the room. (This is a true story, and nothing has been changed to protect the innocent).

OK then, go downstairs: there's an empty living room, fireplace, and plenty of places to sit.  But my living room is dark in the morning and there's last night's newspapers, shoes, and bottles of diet Snapple that someone drank and left for someone to pick up. 

Regardless, the truth is that my bedroom is my sanctuary. It is MY room that I left my husband sleep in and watch TV at night with me as long as it is not sports.  The irony is that our bedroom is the ugliest and least decorated room in the house. I still haven't made the curtains for the other two windows, the floors never got refinished, the old area rug has a corner that rolls up and we've nailed it to the floor. There's all the left over furniture and tired and battered brown wood everywhere in the form of "Shaker-style" furniture that we'd love to get rid but can't afford to.

We've made some stabs at warming up the room. We had it painted a light green and the ceiling a light blue. It was lovely to look up at the ceiling and feel like you were looking at the sky on  a June afternoon. That was until we began noticing a large, ominous brown stain spreading over our heads and discovered that the Princess's toilet was leaking.  The leak was fixed, but the brown stain needs to be sanded, plastered, and repainted. That ought to take another five years.

Despite all this, my bedroom is the place in the house that I am most comfortable in. It is my sanctuary, my sacred spot, or in my husband's words "your mother has assumed her position on the bed and won't be moved".  This attachment to the bedroom may be hereditary. I remember my mother going upstairs as soon as dinner was over and my father going into the living room. Mom watched TV upstairs and Dad watched TV down. Mom drank a cup of tea and read, Dad smoked his pipe and ate the peanuts from the jar he hid under his chair (the one we all knew about).

I thought their situation was absurd. I pitied both of them. I rolled my eyes at their mundane and banal lifestyle. Where was the excitement, the romance, the adventure? While they were settling down for the evening, I was going out - anywhere. To a friend's, for a ride, even to my young aunt and uncle's, anything not to stay at home .  Now here I am, 30 years later, longing for the end of the day and my trip upstairs.

It would sound better if I told you that while I'm upstairs in my "boudoir" that I have candles lit, Enya on the CD player, and I'm writing my thoughts of the day in my journal, or sketching my room, or knitting a cashmere shawl. Sometimes I am doing one of these things - except Enya, whom I am definitely not into. Most of the time, I'm sitting with the laptop ensconced on my lap, the TV on,  a kid or two plopping on the bed, the shower running, and someone calling to me that there's no toilet paper (I'm the only one who knows that the TP lives in the linen closet).

My dream is to someday have a study. The room would be painted red, be lined with white bookcases, and have a love seat where I could plop down and read and write. I'd have a small TV, a club chair, music, and a huge work table in the middle of the room, and writing table in front of a large window. I'd be able to leave my journals out on the desk, the laptop open for writing, and art projects spread out on the worktable.  I'd have a wall sconce flickering with scented candles. a plush rug on the floor and my paintings on the wall.

And I'd probably go right past the study each night and head for the bed, the laptop, TV, kids eating popcorn on my bed, Julia doing her homework on the floor, my husband edging me off the bed with his laptop and a pound of paperwork, my night table draw open to hold the overflow of books, tissues, hand lotion, and remote controls.  And then I'll call my mother, who will answer the phone from her den. Now that she lives alone, she doesn't like to get into bed too early at night, so she watches TV or reads in her little den and keeps the phone and her tea on the bench of her piano.

I see the future and I'm worried. I don't play the piano.

1. I am typing this with a squint because my glasses fell off my night table last night and I can't find them. They're so far under the bed that I need Julia to shimmy under there and see since I can't get down on The Knee.
2. Julia is staying home today because she has a stomach bug and everyone else feels crappy too, including the DH who had to go to work at 6:30 a.m. for a meeting and whose Back Is Killing Him.
3. Feeling very left-brained this morning, thus the numbered paragraphs. My brain is intuitively switching over to the analytical and linear in anticipation of returning to work. The disability insurer still has not approved my leave for the period from 4/25. I'm beginning to get a taste of what it must be like to try to qualify for long term disability. I am only trying to heal for a few weeks on short term and the medical records they require and assessments are overboard. I'm thinking they might next make me have an independent medical exam, but since I'm going back to work on Monday, I'm hoping I don't have to. All I know is that the knee doesn't feel any different than it did pre-surgery, pre-physical therapy, and pre-$700 injections and I'd gladly trade my time at home for a knee I can walk on for more than five minutes.
4. I mailed off the round robin journal. It's a good feeling to complete a piece of artwork and send it on its way. I'm actually between deadlines this week and may be able to "play" in the art room. I had an idea of what to do in the other journals, something that came to me in a dream and I'm going to experiment with it today.
5.   I'm still  plowing through the now overdue library books - I'm remembering now why I stopped going to the library - and the book I've enjoyed the most is Alice Munro's Runaway:Stories.  She is a writer sitting on top of her craft and the collection contains many gems, especially the three linked stories that trace a woman's life from early womanhood to middle age.  Right now, I'm in the middle of Chasing Shakespeare, which as the title suggests, is a literary mystery involving Joe, a small-town, down at the heels,  graduate student and Posy, a wealthy Harvard graduate student, chasing elusive clues regarding the true identity of Shakespeare. which leads them  through the remnants of Elizabethan London, churchyards, graveyards, and through the machinations of Posy's wealthy family.  I wish I could say it's been a fascinating read, but it's like a race horse stuck at the gate as the impetus of the story crawls through the muddy back alleys of historical details regarding the identity of Shakespeare, which are too technical for the average reader who only has  handful of information regarding this controversy.
6. This is the end of my bulleted list for now. Must go do laundry, clean kitchen, and figure out why The Little One has two baskets of clean clothes and allegedly no room in her dresser to put them.  Not a bad way to spend a morning, all in all. Chalk up all typos to myopia.

My Sister Went On Vacation and All I Got Was a Dead Seal Picture

Lots of bloggers returning from vacations and writing about reentry and blogging. I think some of them may feel like this seal.

Go to Ever So Humble to read Amy's evocative post about how much to reveal of oneself in writing, particularly blogging. This is an issue that all writers struggle with, but none more so than the autobiographical writer, and I include most bloggers in that genre.

On the home front, we are having a gorgeous Sunday afternoon following a Friday and Saturday of cold, rain, and fog. It seems that May shook off April's showers and pulled out the sun for her first day. Saturday afternoon, Stan and I found ourselves home alone, with the fire going, and watched Pieces of April, which had me bawling like a baby at the end, and Shall We Dance, which I enjoyed 100 times more than I'd planned to. Neither us could remember a weekend afternoon when we were home alone and watching movies. The last time probably was, let's see, how old is The Princess? Right, 20 years ago. This empty nesting has its advantages!

I also have Finding Neverland, but I'll save that for later, for much as I'd like to pop it in right now, I have to go watch The Little One's softball game.

I spent most of yesterday and this afternoon finishing a journal for a collaborative round robin exchange that starts tomorrow. I invested a lot of time in this sucker and I just hope that this group of 14 artists keeps it together for 14 months and I get it back. I only know three of the participants, and only two of those personally, so I'm a little apprehensive about sending the baby out into the world. Right now my studio is in total disarray. The beads, ribbons, foil, acrylics, pens, brushes, watercolor background sheets,  eyelets, hammer, needles and thread, and tons of books are cascading all over the tables and onto the floor. I'll worry about that tomorrow....

But OMG - I'm supposed to go TO WORK on Thursday! My ever-kind boss suggested I wait until the following Monday, and I may, but the thought of the paperwork involved and the process of hectoring the doctor's office manager to get it over to the disability insurer almost has me throwing in the towel and going back on Thursday....but not quite.

How is the knee, you ask? I have days, like today, where the pain is diminished down to a specific spot, but the tendons have to be stretched and restretched to walk without limping. And then I have days, like Thursday through Saturday where it hurts like hell and even Vicodan doesn't do anything.

But my new attitude is - don't worry, be happy! We'll all get through this, and that's what pain killers are for. After all, can you imagine my kids flipping out over having two parents lying in the bed going "my back/my knee" and no income?? Have no fear! Mother is here and ready to slay those phony injured car accident victims once again!