Resilience? Continuing in the face of wounding and inept attempts to remedy? The tree is alive.

And then there’s the sky.

And treasures found along the way.

I feel tongued-tied and heartbroken since Saturday. And it keeps getting worse. We can at least feel profound gratitude that Democrats won the presidency in 2020. Holy shit trump is a disease!

Old collages that capture some feelings or preoccupations since October 7 (when IS the law gonna catch up with Kushner? Middle East peace my ass!)

I may write a whole sheaf of jackhammering haiku! They’re at it again today.

Today Jude talks about the fun or joy in letting pieces be loose. I get that.

The barn quilt generates a fair amount of comment, so that’s fun. Deb thought maybe I could take a little off either vertical side, thereby reducing the cloud chaos and putting the focus squarely on the barn. An edited version below makes me think she might be right.

Though I’ve been resisting binding quilts with black bias tape, I may do so with this one.

Yesterday’s pick of a SoulCollage card. The Angel of Creativity. I love its lush sense of adventure.

(I hope the SoulCollage police don’t show up and scold me for not adding the trademark symbol next to the name) (they have before, by way of welcome to the community, no less). I don’t add it ought of a kind of keystroke-laziness and not out of a lack of respect although over time I’ve grown a little contemptuous of the need to mark it in the first place.

It’s raining again so I’m glad I got in a couple of walks this weekend, including one around Mount Auburn Cemetery. The fall plantings at the cemetery were full of both color and texture. Just gorgeous.

On our local loop, we came across another dead flicker. It’s upsetting. What is going on?

I also made progress (I think?) on about four or five small quilts. Located one more of the infamous tulle-covered “potholders,” so was able to cut out two more rows of houses. More on that tomorrow.

Can I just tell you it’s swampy here? Even when the dew point drops to a tolerable level, the soggy atmosphere and landscape are, well, noticeable.

It’s like living in a fish tank. The sky darkens for the third time today to deliver more rain.

I’m not complaining really I’m not. Not when Greece is under water, Libyans search for the dead after two dams burst, and the Atlas Mountains will soon snow on entire communities recently made homeless by an earthquake.

Owls, traditionally associated with Athena, symbolize both wisdom and death. My sister loved them. It made buying her little mementos from my travels easy because somehow owls are everywhere — on mugs, placemats, statues, and puzzles. Picking up these trinkets was one of the few things I did to accommodate her neediness that I didn’t mind.

Now those owls live here. They’re all over the place.

Last week a scrap of paper sandwiched between two sheets of contact paper appeared on the hall rug upstairs. The Virgin and Child. Huh?

At first I thought it was of the many prayer cards that I brought home from Assisi. They have a way of turning up at odd times and in odd places too.

But no. The back revealed a newspaper article which told me this was made by my sister. Cutting pictures out of magazines and newspapers was her only real creative practice in the end. I remember thinking it weird, as in deficient, that she never DID anything with her cut outs. Lately, however, I’ve begun to see the scouting and collecting as a kind of art form in itself.

I know I’ve shared other times my sister’s made “visitations” — the shattered blue Pyrex dish, her large painting falling like a guillotine. How narrow the evasion of harm! With the appearance of Mary and the Christ Child, can I assume we’ve entered a new, softer phase, perhaps one rife with atonement?

But whose, you ask — whose atonement?

Being in Salem this weekend allowed me to notice a change. How memory is fading. The relief of that. There was a time not too long ago when just driving by her exit, never mind sitting down and having lunch at the end of her street, would have tightened my chest and filled me with dread. I’d feel hints of the weary exhaustion that went hand in hand with our visits. Every visit.

That seems to be muted now.