products from home

Eggs, honey and maple syrup.

Diving and age

My younger two kids prevailed upon me once again and we went to the local swimming pool on Tuesday evening. I talked myself into joining them in the water; afterall, swimming is supposed to be good exercise, and I used to like spending time in "the pool" when I was a kid. As a matter of fact, I used to be able to do a front flip off of the diving board. So, of course I thought nothing of doing a straightforward dive off of the board. I followed Marsden into the water, ignoring a searing pain eminating from my left big toe as I left the board. It wasn't until I was trying to help Ida get warm by the side of the pool a few minutes later, that I noticed the trail of blood I was leaving at the pool's edge. I looked at the bottom of my toe. It seemed to now have a hole in it. What happened? Is it the forty extra pounds of weight since I was 14 and used to do this with ease? Was there a nail on the end of the diving board? Is it the ancient quality of the dried and calloused skin on my feet that can't sustain the pressure of jumping from a diving board?

A second family arrived at the pool. I sat with Ida, my foot elevated as I tried to stop the bleeding, and watched a teenage girl do the most beautiful swimming I have ever seen. As she propelled effortlessly through the water, seeming to move at great speed, she caressed the water with a reaching action that involved rythmically turning her wrists at each stroke. I liked thinking how, once she was dressed and out of the water, one would never know about her sensuous strength as a swimmer...she would appear to be just another normal teenager.

Two uses for plastic milk cartons

Collecting Sap

 

Seedling ID

Heroic Task (Or what I won't do for my son)

Car dug out of 2 feet of frozen snow in one and half hours by 50 year old mother and 18 year old son, so son could get to soccer practice. Thank-you to neighbors for final help pushing it out and pumping the flat tire!

Feeding the Chickens

We have about an hundred chickens. (and currently no steady egg sale market so palettes of eggs are stacking up on the kitchen counter) Somedays, it is a real struggle to get that afternoon feed accomplished before it is time to set off in the car to guitar lesson or Spanish class. I found myself a few days ago, struggling to retrieve an antique wooden clothes pin from the mud under the chickens, as they cluttered around, excited about the maggot-ridden peanuts that I had brought them in a cellophane bag closed with the pin. The maggots had had plenty of time in the bag to make a fine sort of webbing that swaddled the bag, the nuts and the clothes pin, but I picked it up from the mud and put it in the now-empty food bucket. It is wonderful to even be able to put maggot-ridden peanuts to good use.

Drawing and cooking

I spent the last 2 months pretty intensively helping Ivan (my 17 year old son turning 18 this week!)  learn to draw so that he could have a fairly competent portfolio with whcih to apply to the Harvards of Animation school. (Ringling and CalArts)  I began to feel jealous, watching him, and simultaneously I remembered my friend Portia encouraging me to apply for NEA grant in Drawing...we suspect its probably a bit less competitive than Painting, though, we could be wrong here....

SO I began drawing as soon as we were done applying.
I am working on a drawing up in my attic of the years of soccer sneakers and shoes that have accumulated. I plan to finish the drawing and then throw the piles and boxes and bags of shoes away. (Except for ones that might be useful to Ida And Mars who still have years of soccer ahead.)

So this morning, I'm standing in my kitchen watching Marsden eat his cereal and I realized that it was something I wanted to draw; him hunched over the bowl in his patterned sweatchirt with the dizzying chaos of our kitchen stretching out in all directions from where he was eating. SO I ran off and stole a big pad of paper from Ivan who was still asleep in bed.

I drew for 3 hours from about 11-2. I kept telling everyone to let me keep drawing. I drew Marsden first and then worked out from where he had been, having made indications of how everything related to him. I had to keep asking the rest of the family all to move away from the counter or to put the milk back where it had been.( I decided that it was worth having the milk and half and half get warm just to get so such a drawing accomplished.)

Let me see if I can photograph and post the drawing as I am immensely pleased with it.

 Once I was done with the drawing, I attended to the 3 loaves of bread I had rising overnight, the piles of unwashed dishes (I hadn't wanted anyone to clear because I was drawing!) the leek and potatoe soup that had to be made and the spinah pies and baked beans for dinner. AS usual afer making art, I felt happy to cook and be Mom now.