Love this. Can’t even explain why.
Reworking this. Pulled out of a stowed plastic container of half-finished bags this week.
Reading this. And about three other novels and one piece of nonfiction.
Given my size, checking out the elementary school lost and found. It might yield a new hoodie for me.
It’s not often Finn and I meet up with a princess on our walk!
Finished this.
I envy the uniqueness so many of you have developed .. I know instantly if what I’m seeing is created by Jude .. Hazel only to name a few of you. My own creative self is always searching .. lost in trying to find myself. Don’t get me wrong I’m enjoying the journey but would be happy to feel a bit more grounded. Dee your color and style is fantastic.
It is somewhat surprising to hear this because I have felt at sea and like an imitator for the longest time. So thank you! The companionship, if I can call it that, on blogs and Instagram has been such an integral part of the process. In that regard, you are nearly peerless!
Dee~ I agree, I would know your work anywhere. 🙂 Love the Finney-boy and the princess! It cracked me up!
It isn’t just the style of the work, for me. It’s the vibe that just pulses in the image and oftentimes leaps all the way clear of it due to your uniquely copacetic flair for color combinations. For a long time, before I saw one of your selfies, I imagined you looking more or less like your mother does in that photo on the chaise while her mother talks to her. But, you know, upright and actively engaged. Bright eyed and rushing all around with multiple packages in tow at all times. I also imagined you were fairly tall until I started tuning in more diligently.
Third panel on this exquisite cloth, the rising tree branches, family tree, the stories in between the branches, the circular history of family… led me back to your previous post:
(I’ve been away from the internet this past week because daughter E came for a week, just her, no grand kids or husband: the grand kids have summer camp, she is on summer break from teaching. We have not seen her since Dec. 2019 and cannot remember when we had her all to ourselves. Lovely, heart filled time, cooking together, tending plants and herbs, short trips all over, reading together, cuddling in bed, talking untill 3 am one morning, me a zombie the next day as I’m a lark, she is an owl. Family stories flowing all week long.)
My sister and I were also dressed alike but only for holidays although it wasn’t until I was 12 that I finally convinced my Mother to let me dress in my own way. I was two years older than my sister and I hated dressing alike for holidays, especially hated wearing pink, my Mom’s favorite color. She directed the photos, my sweet easy going Dad giving in to multiple takes because in those days, no digital, not even a Polaroid camera so she wasn’t sure how the photos would turn out and they had to be “perfect!”. When you look at those photos, my Mom is glamorous, my Dad has his usual sweet smile and my sister and i seem frozen, forced to pose, sometimes hand on hips or folded in prayer position.
What I came to realize was that the dressing alike, lovely bought as well as hand-made dresses, the patent leather shoes, lacy socks, long hair curled, a new dress for my Mom every Christmas, mattered to a woman who had grown up so poor in Spain that a corn cob was her only doll. To be able to wear a new taffeta dress every year, her pearl earrings, her most precious gift from my Dad, their luminescence softening her face, her shoes matched to her purse, new hat every yea, told her that she had made it…
When my twins were born, I went the total opposite, they did not dress alike and I always put them in bold colors: However, I did give in whenever we spent time with my parents because my Mom had special little dresses made for them, alike in every way:yellow little cotton dresses with daisies embroidered down the middle and all around the hem; soft pink little smocked dresses with tiny roses again embroidered by her. Pale blue little blouses with accompanying shorts, bedecked with rick rack- her grand babies, the dolls she never had.
What a poignant and moving comment, Marti. Someone should collect these and put them in memoir form (she said!). My mother remembered standing on soup lines in Brooklyn so perhaps there was a similar motivation with her concern for appearances and love of clothing. One year she made my sister and me matching gold on white brocade dresses with faux mink collars! Very Marilyn Monroe If you ask me. Also I always go to a dark place with some of this family crap and you remind me that the plain old impatience and unruliness of childhood could be very much at play.
I’m so glad you had family time with E. It was exactly the same time frame for us (December 2019) when we at last saw the boys earlier this month. There IS something nice about the one on one time. Your description is vivid and lovely! C came east to see a girlfriend this past week and we got him to ourselves for one whole evening!