Oh I am a lonely painter
I live in a box of paints
I’m frightened by the devil
And I’m drawn to those ones that ain’t afraid
I remember that time that you told me, you said
Love is touching souls
Surely you touched mine
Cause part of you pours out of me
In these lines from time to time
– Joni Mitchel, A Case of You

I was in between things, and then it came to me! Monday! The start of Flower Crazy with Carla Sondheim! I went to my supplies with instructions in hand. Found a jar to put the water in, for the water in watercolor, and figured out how to cut my big sheet of paper into what I needed. Seven by ten inches is sort of an odd size but if your paper is twenty-two by thirty inches you can cut a row that’s ten by twenty-two inches and then cut that into three chunks. Voila. Thank you math!

Strangely my head was still in February as I went east this morning to look around. I think I’ve fixed that now. The February part.

Field of queen anne’s lace
lifting small fine cups above
the white cloth cover.

—

This dusting snow in early March,
veiling and muffling the Berkshires
until the splayed, echoing edges
are just receding greys
repeated onward to the sky.
The charcoal oak,
the unexpected tan-gold willow,
the crosshatch of the dark bare trees
finally rising to the fringed peak.
I pass these and woods of others
who came here as I did seeking
something else than what towns speak.
They brought their short flat-roof’d homes
while I peer into the woods
someone is harvesting
stacking the stubby trunks
in the slashed open near the road.
Circling back around to home
I see the other ancient hills,
the pines not green but bottle
the field stubble a mask of tan
the limbs outlined here in white
to remark upon their blackness.
Back around to home:
a field of queen anne’s lace
lifting small fine cups above
a white cloth cover.
The last downhill:
I understand the blue door
and newly-painted red barn,
one’s mark to lean against
the heavy side of late winter.

—-

Two photos from long ago, January 2001:

Strangely much like the version from 1998:

First off, I’m finding this sort of thing via links on various web sites way too often and I’d like them to stop:

This harkens back to the day when people would try to upload beautifully styled Word files to their web site and wonder why it either looked like trash or they got complaints no one could read it at all. At times there would be sobbing in our office but it’s one of the reasons why we had a gong hanging from the ceiling. It was used ceremonially for the worst case situations that required something between a witch hunt and an exorcism. Hard to explain but you’ll have to trust me, you never missed a gong event.

But then I saw this on the wonderful xkcd site which really explains everything you need to know these days on the web:

Things don’t change that much…really…

Sob…

In case you’re wondering why you should read that author you don’t know too much about or try that new place or listen to some different music, here’s a strong case for not being boring, and an even stronger case for real conversation rather than talking.

Fight it! Fight the urge to speak without listening, to tell a bad story, to stay inside your comfortable nest of back-patting pals.

– Scott Simpson