Today was a day off of sorts, a day to recoup after one of the strangest work-days I've ever worked (which left me enormously grateful to my co-workers). I didn't have my regularly scheduled writing class and although I had every intention to spend the day writing, instead I wandered, rambled around the house, read some required and non-required stories, and began to pull invaders out of the ground and start the process of nuturing some little seeds. This year I have a grow lamp (an artificial sun) and a heating mat and a schedule. This year I have a plan. There are mostly peppers in the seed starting unit right now but also some strawberries, some marigolds.

The wild onion type grass that grew like mad under all the mats of dried leaves...well that's not part of the plan. Weeding feels like a physical, ruthless, version of the kind of revision heavy writing I've been doing. I am pulling whole chunks of stuff out of the ground, deleting entire pages, and hoping that the tulips and the tales will be better for it.

We can grow stuff no matter what else goes on in the big bad world. I was struck yesterday by the compliment a colleague gave me, she said "you have the best attitude." I hope to keep my attitude fresh with some careful seeding and weeding. Less onion grass, more strawberry.

Thanks,
Rachael

I spent most of my day today cleaning and sorting, tossing out random old magazines, and donating lots of seldom worn clothes, and trying to impose some sort of order in our little house. I still have piles of things and plenty of space filled by un-necessary objects, but maybe there is more room for new ideas.

Each time I do this kind of weeding cleaning, I find projects started but not finished, threads of the same paintings and stories. The best of these will get to some sort of a finish this year, I think. I can sort of see a way to tie up some of my paper-doll people with my short stories, the weedy leafy drawings with my garden, and the hands and feet with travel.

If every drawing was a story, every story a drawing, I might have something here. Something coherent, consistent, communicative as it is creative. I can dare to dream...



As it is all so ridiculously tied to the season of purging and starting again, I tell this and then I'll turn the computer off, go upstairs and start some seeds before bed. These sketchbook pictures probably serve as the truest record of the best of my cluttered working visual and verbal method. I never really clean my sketchbook, though I ought to harvest from it more than I do.



goodnight then,
Rachael

We drove to Syracuse this morning to retrieve some paintings, spend some time together, and as we did the trees were full of snow. I tried to draw the odd beauty of lacy snowy trees but the drawings failed. My friend Paul sent me pictures of his backyard which tell what I mean. The morning, the light, the snow, all the white stuff seemed heavy on those thin black branches.

No, it's not what we wanted to see in late March when we are all hungry for our gardens, but this morning was shockingly beautiful and we magically got to see it.


I've been trying to become a better reader, someone who retains more, who connects all the little pieces into some cohesive whole. I have friends like that, they read well. They are well. As part of that project, I went wandering around the literary journals online and I found an ear (a great little poem for Evander Holyfield) and a story about zebras making jelly. It has made me just a little better to remember all the creative out there in this snowy world. Not at all cold. Not at all frozen.

Snow melts, stories get forgot, paintings come down from walls and meals are prepared and eaten all in a day. All in a day.

A domani.
Rachael

I've been writing fiction (Polish plumber story is done, garden story begun) and drawing more in my sketchbooks. If I could tell the stories of the people on my bus. I can draw only a little bit of what I see.
I hope you are drawing what you see. What you can. What you need to. I'm trying.

It's been a while since I last posted, but I have been busy learning, thinking, living, and realizing some amazing things. Consider then...
Luck
A week ago we heard on the news that a tornado touched down in a mile wide stretch of Atlanta. Turns out this is about the same mile wide stretch of Atlanta we used to live in. Our good friends have houses in Cabbagetown and Reynoldstown and East Atlanta and we found ourselves staring at the computer and rivited to the news looking to be sure almost no-one was killed. How could a tornado touch down in the middle of town and not leave many many dead?! The luck of it struck us in our hearts because we are so far removed from tornados in our little northeast town. Or so we feel. But when we saw the trees in houses of our friend J., we gasped and then remembered that he was not home. He was on vacation. There are pictures from The Creative Loafing folks of the devastation but I can't find many of the clean up, the comraderie, the connected helping that goes on in that neighborhood.

Little drawings of owls
On a recent day of wandering I was in the public library and picked up two books in the art section to sit in a sunny spot and leaf through them. The books were seemingly very different, a French mistress of Picasso's and an American photographer, but both had bookmarks with the same distinctive owl. It looks familiar and I think I might be able to trace it to a friend or aquaintance, but the idea that they would appear on the same day in two books I happened to pick up struck me as something. I don't know what that something is.


And now here we are a few weeks hopefully from the warm days of sun, from the growing thing-ness of Spring, from open windows and greater optimism. Loose ends will be tied together in tidy little bows and there will be blooms again. I wish you sunny days and loss-free moments when the wind blows. Should losses come, here's hoping the re-building makes you stronger... it always does.

Rachael