If this blue and white path is to remain, it will have to be unified, connected. Right now it just looks broken.
What about another tree?
I may stitch a way station halfway up the slope with a brightly lit path leading to it.
Let’s call this one, Green Silk Moon.
I’ve been fiddling with this quilt longer than I might otherwise because I’m not home. I don’t have other cloth projects to distract myself with. Those of you who know me know that I’m more of a beginner than a finisher.
I had the funny (illuminating?) thought: what if most of my quilts aren’t finished?
I know this has come up on Jude’s blog in the past, this idea of non-completion. She may have said something along the lines of: until they are sold or given away, every quilt in my possession can be considered incomplete.
It might sound burdensome but it’s actually liberating.
Colorado saw a little snow last night and it’s cold again.
Screens so caked with snow, I had to open the door to see the accumulation.
So far, we have only four or five inches but it’s supposed to snow all day. Today’s plans cancelled, of course.
I left the writing retreat early yesterday and so did two others. They were predicting snow for much later in the day for Amherst and even later than that for Boston, but it was already doing SOMETHING at nine a.m. and anyway I was gonna be too tense to be able to write or listen well. It was the right decision.
What I wrote on Saturday and Sunday morning was disappointing in any case. For instance, the scene I produced yesterday started in Henderson, Kentucky and somehow ended up in West Feliciana, Louisiana. Oops. People didn’t know if the daughter was the mother or the daughter or dead or alive. Ha! This kind of feedback is helpful.
Other off-the-cuff writing didn’t land either. One narrator (um, that would be me) was dubbed “smug.” Yikes.
Listening was the best though. It often is at these things. Many phrases and characters will stay with me for a long time (I’m looking at you, Ronna!)
I drove briefly around the UMass campus on Sunday and there were so many new buildings that I barely recognized the place. Oh, there was the library (I liked a carrel on the 11th floor). There was the art complex (topped with solar panels — yeah!) And there was the ugly concrete Campus Center. There memory held — it was ugly in 1978 and remains ugly today.
Didn’t feel a lick of nostalgia.
Speaking of snow and blizzards and memory and the 70’s, I would’ve been at UMass during the Blizzard of 1978. Hmm. I don’t seem to have much memory of it and let me just say that is as good a descriptor of me back in the day as anything.
As for the tariff decision, I’ve been schooled by Hubbell. Let’s take the win, he says. Marshall got it wrong, he points out. Don’t be so defeatist, etc.
Yes, it could have been worse because in this timeline EVERYTHING can be worse. The SCOTUS could have, for whatever reason, hallucinated all over the relevant statute and invented more (MORE!) broad and sweeping executive powers. They properly read and applied the law. Hoo-hey!
Let me emphatically state that I am thrilled Trump lost on this.
This post features a somewhat random selection of photos from a recent trip to The Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass. I posted about this visit here and posted about a visit some time ago here, Sterling Clark and his Money.
Jean-Francois Millet, The Knitting Lesson, 1860Constant Troyon, Going to Market on a Misty Morning, 1851Pierre Duval Le Camus, The Drawing Lesson, 1826Jean-Francois Millet, Young Girl Guarding Her Sheep, c. 1860-62Edgar Degas, Little Dancer Aged FourteenJan Gossaert, Anna van Bergen, 1526-30Winslow Homer, Undertow, 1866George Inness, Wood Gatherers: An Autumn Afternoon, 1891Winslow Homer, Sleigh Ride, 1890-95, close upWinslow Homer, Summer Squall, 1904, close upWinslow Homer, Two Guides, c. 1875, close upWinslow Homer, The Bridal Path, White Mountains, 1868
In my notifications, I get “look back” compilations from Amazon photos. They’ll show me, for instance, 20 pictures from the same day from the last five years. These from Hawley, Mass. caught my eye.
For several years in August, I joined others for a writing retreat in this small hill town north of Amherst. I forget the beauty of the place and how much, as a Berkshires kid, I really miss landscapes like these.
Where feels most like home to you?
One more thing. While rooting around old files, I found this posted poem. I wrote it in June of 2017 — early in Mango Mussolini’s first reign, in other words. Parts hit hard because of that. I think it’s a good poem.
