As much as I love my garden and want to work in it every day, July is always the month it looks it’s worst, and I don’t want to go out there. Anything that bloomed in late spring or early summer has finished it’s run and dried up. The sycamore tree is shedding bark, and this year is the worse than any I can remember. I have bushes to be cut back, roses to deadhead, and berry bushes to tie up to supports, but I’m not doing any of it. I have found that I can’t work in the heat like I used to, and since I’m a night person, I don’t get up early enough to go out in the mornings. That leaves me digging weeds between seven and eight in the evening, and puts dinner after that.

After doing two online collage workshops in the spring, I have one of my work tables set up for collage and usually do several small ones each week. I’m also playing with watercolor paint.

To add some new interest to being at home all the time I spent about a week considering getting a cat. It was kitten season and the neighborhood email feed had lots of kittens looking for a home. I couldn’t decide, almost went to see one, but then in a moment of sanity, I remembered how annoying it is to have a cat who insists on being in the center of my work table whenever I’m working on art.

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At the beginning of July, when the newsletter from the local astronomy club appeared in my email late one evening it contained an offer to borrow a telescope from the club. Impulsively, I replied I might be interested, and the next week one of the members backed his truck into my driveway and unloaded a large, heavy scope that he said would use the built-in computer to find the planets and stars I wanted to see. It was much bigger than I expected from the photo in the newsletter.

When I got around to moving it to the center of the patio a week later and tried it out, it couldn’t find anything. I could see Jupiter with my own eyes, but couldn’t find it in the scope. When the fella came to get it, he brought another scope that would not be quite as heavy, and not motorized so it should be easier for me. Unfortunately, the previous borrower had not returned the eyepieces that went with it, so I could find Jupiter in the finder scope, but nothing in the main scope. During the day I practiced using it by focusing on the dead tree in the yard behind me. The wires across the backyard access line are in excellent condition, but again, at night all I saw was dull brown no matter how I turned the focus knob.

At that point, I noticed that my neck and back were complaining about how I was standing at this thing and trying to move it around with knobs that I could barely reach. The man came back and retrieved the scope, suggesting something smaller. I said no, I had learned what I needed to learn: this activity was going to require me to study star charts and measurements, and be way more work than I wanted to put in to it.

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I would guess we are all reading more than we did a year ago. I have been reading about the early 1940’s during WWII. In my blog of December 31, 2019, I wrote about a fictional work about Varian Fry, an American who went to France during this time to help artists get out of Europe to safer countries.

I read a review of “A Woman of No Importance” by Sonia Purnell and ordered it from Amazon. This is the story of Virginia Hall, an American woman who had studied in Europe, fell in love with France, and became a diplomat to try to help the French people. She worked for Britain, and later for United States when we entered the war, to coordinate activities to support the resistance movement. It is a fascinating story.

Some years ago, I had acquired a book called “The Shameful Peace, How French Artists and Intellectuals survived the Nazi Occupation” by Frederic Spotts. A short while after I started reading the book about Virginia Hall, I decided I’d read this one at the same time. This book was in the dining room to read at lunch and dinner, the other was in my bedroom.

And as I’m reading these two books this last month, I noticed some similarities between that time and now. Germany had invaded France after taking over Belgium and Luxembourg. They occupied the northern part of France, which included Paris where many of the cultural activities were located. Germany was trying to take over Poland and Russia, so they set up a sort of provisional government in Vichy with Marshall Petain as president, who did what he was told, but tried to protect the cultural life of the French people.

Theaters, concerts, opera, and some galleries were allowed to continue but were required to include some German music and plays. The German military often filled so many seats at events that ordinary French people couldn’t get a ticket. Some publishing was allowed but censored. The idea was to get the people used to German music, values, and ideas through the cultural venues so they would experience how superior Germans were.

There were French people who collaborated with the Germans, some were fascists, some were just afraid. There were people who kept quiet and tried to live so they wouldn’t be noticed, because the Gestapo were arresting men and deporting them to Germany as workers to produce arms and whatever the German military needed to keep going.

And there were the resisters who were working secretly to sabotage German operations in France, squirreling away equipment, guns, and ammo to be used once the Allies invaded and came to their aide.

Where do I see similarities to today? Our culture has been hi-jacked with all the glorification of violence, our music is loaded with filth’ or not even understandable, and I certainly can’t sing along with it.

My local newspaper has been bought out several times and now there is virtually nothing in it but COVID articles, speculation on what our president might do, and maybe one local photo item. Very little about what is going on in the rest of the world.

Personally, since when is it Google’s business to send my emails to spam instead of the in-box, and label them with bright red warnings not to open them because they are dangerous?

My favorite sentence in “The Shameful Peace” is on page 68: “People who think for themselves are a nuisance to any government.” If ever there was a time for us to be a nuisance to government, national and state wide, it is now.

Don’t believe everything you hear and read.

Think for yourself.

 

 

I just noticed another month has evaporated since I last wrote a blog. Where have I been? inside, outside, and eating fruit. My strawberries are still producing nice, good size berries, my refrigerator has a tray of plums from my tree, and the white nectarines are just about ready to come off their tree.

Outside I’m still cleaning up debris from my huge sycamore tree, which is now in the stage of shedding bark, huge pieces of it. The ivy beds around the house have gone into their normal overdrive to cover every inch of ground, and I’m cutting them back as quickly as I can. But this week will do little of that due to near 100 degree heat each day.

Last week, the mixed media group that normally meets twice a month in a member’s home, but has not met since March 5^th, had our meeting in my yard. There were six of us and we spent the time catching up with each other, and having show and tell with the art we have been making. It was so wonderful to see my friends. Perhaps at our next meeting we will find time to make a little art together.

After participating in two online collage workshops in April and May, I decided to take a break and attend to some household activities that had been waiting for my attention.

I had a lightweight summer jacket that I like to wear in the morning when the house is cool which was shredding apart. I drew a pattern from that jacket and made a replacement. Since the sewing machine was open, I noticed some other items that could use some attention.

I’ve discovered that as I get older my clothes don’t always fit the same way they did before, or maybe I’m just not willing to put up with things that aren’t comfortable. I have two other lightweight jackets that I used to wear to work, but now the sleeves were constantly sliding down my arms and getting in my way. They must have come from that fashion statement where women had their jacket sleeves pushed up and bunched up by their elbows. I never did understand that.

So, I shortened the sleeves to suit me now. And so it went, altering those clothes I had put on in the morning and by the time breakfast was over I was changing into other garments for one reason or another.

The sewing project I’m most delighted with is a bit of an archeological rescue. Years ago when I was moving my mother, she mentioned that in her cedar chest were some things my paternal grandmother had made. When I had to sort out her belongings, I looked at them briefly and saw they looked like quilts. A year ago, when I was donating clothing I never wore, I looked at them more closely, but didn’t know what to do with them. They were quilt tops, with unfinished undersides. I put one of them at that top of the cedar chest, in case I got an idea of how to use it.

In the hot summer months, I like to use a bed cover that is light weight, rather than the comforter I use all winter. I took a queen size flat sheet that I had not used much, which was a few inches larger that the quilt top, and sewed them together on the edges to protect the unfinished edges on the backside of the quilt.

One of my fond childhood memories was studying a heavy quilt this grandmother had made, seeing all the different fabrics she used and repeated randomly in different blocks. Now I’m doing that again, searching for matching fabrics in different circles. Such simple things that engage and delight us.

I do hope that in the midst of the craziness around us, you are finding things that engage and delight you. Be careful and stay well.

 

 

This is always my busiest time of the year in the garden. While I’m cleaning up weeds and tall grasses that came up in February, and then dried out in our first hot week, I’m also harvesting spring and early summer fruit.

I’ve been picking luscious strawberries all month. The plants are doing much better this year than last year, possibly because we have been alternating a warm week, then a cool week in March and April. They are doing so well that on the Holiday Monday, I spent a chunk of time freezing berries to enjoy next winter.

I’ve been doing this for many years. I rinse the berries, cut them into bite size pieces and place them on a wax paper lined cookie sheet. This goes into the freezer in the kitchen for an hour or two, after which I scoop the frozen pieces into freezer containers and place them in my larger freezer. With this method, they don’t stick together. I can take out just enough for my breakfast granola each morning.

I also have what I call black berries, but are probably black raspberries, which started ripening last week. We are scheduled to have three days of 100+ heat starting Tuesday, so they will ripen quickly.

The apricot tree in the very back of my yard was loaded with fruit which began ripening two weeks ago. Fortunately, they are not all ripening at once. There were so many apricots on the tree, I invited my neighbors across the street to come and pick some about a week ago.

I usually have to fight the squirrels for the cots, but this year I’m not seeing as many of those rascals. They must have relocated across the street because my neighbor said he has a lot of them in his yard.

Those tomato plants I wrote about last time need to be planted in the ground, but I’m having a sprinkler problem, which hopefully will be resolved by the time you read this, and I didn’t want to transplant them right before the hot weather this week.

With all this going on outdoors, I’ve spent very little time making art. Crystal Neubauer had a second online collage workshop which included journaling. It ran from the end of April to the middle of May. We had assignments between the classes and we were also given “Prompts” to generate ideas for collages.

The prompt that I think came out the best was “Fifty Shades of White.” I have a lot of old paper: a few sheets from various reams of old typing and computer paper, old stationary, receipts, doilies, wallpaper samples, and old books. I glued them to a black substrate.

After the workshop, I cleaned up the work tables in my studio and set up one area so I could do a quick 5” x 5” collage each day. Ha! Haven’t gotten to it yet. The yard work and fruit processing are taking all my time and energy.

On Memorial Day, I made apricot cobbler and ate dinner outside on the patio with Robert, who was grilling burgers, just like normal. I hope you are all doing well and enjoying creative activities.

Where have I been?  At home, of course.

I have just spent the first three months of this year / decade getting my yard cleaned up from last fall. While my energy is much better this year than it was last year, I find that everything takes more time than it used to. Some of this is because I’m moving slower, being careful how I move about, so I stay upright.

I’m so thankful for my lovely flowers all blooming now – a perfect place to be when I can’t be anywhere else. Having been here for 23 years, I’m watching each tree and plant put on its spring finery, one after the other, in perfect order, just as they have in previous years.

It occurred to me last week that perhaps our Father in heaven has grown tired of our noise and nonsense, and lowered the volume. I’m not suggesting that God is responsible for the virus, but like many of His creatures, He never lets an opportunity go to waste.

This idea came to me as I noticed last week that my house phone was silent after years of constant daily robo calls. The junk mail has mostly stopped. I don’t watch TV, so perhaps your home is not as quiet as mine.

And it’s not just in the U.S. that life had become frantic. Although we barely hear anything about the rest of the world, Israel can’t get a government together, Venezuela is a disaster, Great Britain is tied up in knots, and everywhere there is unrest and uncertainty.

After I got home from Florida last summer at the end of June, I’ve been mostly at home, so my days now are not much different than they have been the last nine months. When I considered travel for this year, none of the gatherings I might attend were in places I wanted to go. I registered for a weekend with the basket makers in Visalia, but we’ll do it next year instead of this month.

I spent August and September cutting back a wall of ivy that I had neglected for too many years. I reorganized closets and drawers, donating clothes and household linens I no longer used.

I have a whole set of new routines that take up my time. Near the end of 2019, my dentist told me I had a gum infection. I have had crummy teeth since I was six years old. Seventy years later, I only have front teeth left and the uppers and lowers don’t come together in a useful way, which limits what I’m able to eat.

My dentist, bless her, is trying to make things better. She removed the tooth which was the source of the infection, and has installed braces on my lower teeth. Braces are different now than they were when I was fifteen. I’m spending a huge amount of time putting on wax to minimize pain on my lip, removing wax, cleaning up residue from the wax, and threading floss between the wires.

I’ve been using gummy vitamins for several years now. After the arch wire slipped out of the bracket on the end tooth, I decided I shouldn’t eat them, at least not whole, so now I’m cutting them up in teeny, tiny pieces every day with the kitchen scissors.

When I’m not in the yard or dealing with my teeth, I’ve been reorganizing the sea shells that I have collected for over fifty years. I’ve started reading those books that I keep saying, “I’ll get to someday”.

I had planned to work in my studio this winter when it rained, but it didn’t rain. So, I’m still trying to balance the yard time with the art making time, and so far, the yard is winning. The one thing I’m missing is meeting with my mixed media friends twice a month.

Individually and collectively we have been given an opportunity to reflect on what our lives have become, what we truly value now, and how we might want to make some adjustments. Let’s not waste it.