Goldie Garland

I had a little ball of yarn and a hook that did not make it into a box yet, so I’m crocheting a garland of Solomon’s knots, a chain stitch my grandma Goldie taught me when I was just a young girl.

I should be packing like a crazy woman, but oh well… I’m not working on a Sunday. That’s my excuse, or it was, as it is now officially Monday.  I just updated my previous post with a YouTube video so now I have “Blue on Black” stuck in my head.

Amazingly, I have listened to more music this year than I have in ten, thanks to that little Blue Tiger sound pod, a Pandora Radio app on my cell phone, and Spotify on the tablet.

 

MONDAY: once again, I start a post and finish later.

The lyrics, “Blue on black, tears on a river, push on a shove, it don’t mean much. Joker on jack, match on a fire, cold on ice, a dead man’s touch. Whisper on a scream, doesn’t change a thing, don’t bring you back, blue on black” ring especially true this year.

I have whispered on silent screams and cried tears on rivers of grief.  Too many friends, relatives, former classmates, acquaintances, neighbors, and even my cat have died. It seems like an Angel of Death has been harvesting from my neck of the woods over the last year or so and it is not over yet. Just yesterday, on 9-11, a massive stroke claimed a dear friend’s sister.

The Goldie Garland is appropriate because I’m doing a quiet memorial, blended in, on a Christmas tree this year. That’s what the clay drop ornaments are for… no, I’m not making one per person, I just cut out a bunch… didn’t count them. Bit morbid? Nah… just acknowledging the grief that lingers and infiltrates everything without suffocating anything, if that makes sense. People live and laugh and breathe and die… that’s life. I want to remember those I had the privilege of meeting, of sharing time when our paths crossed, to smile over the memories. I want to celebrate the lives they lived and not get bogged down because they died.

Thanks for reading!

 

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TILT art WIP maybe done

This is the “Tilt” drawing started awhile back… taken to the emotion depths of grief. Faber Castell Polychromos on 140 lb. Canson paper, 9 x 12 inches.

It’s done… maybe… I had to walk away from it before dark pencils blackened the entire sky.

Photo is a quick cell phone snap… if you want to see it in person, odds are that I will take it to the SOAP Gallery’s First Friday Art Walk, 5 to 9 PM on Champion Street in downtown Youngstown on July 1, 2016.

Thanks for looking!

 

Emotional Storm

I woke up early yesterday, puttered around long enough for a pill to kick in, then laid back down to catch some more Z’s. Right before waking up again, I slipped into a dream.

There was a storm coming in the dream… the kind of storm where clouds gather dark and the wind kicks up a scent of rain long before the first drop falls. I was outside gathering things… art supplies and finished pieces, feeling a sense of urgency sparked by distant thunder. Then I was standing on a front porch, it felt like home, but my awake home does not have a porch.

Anyways, I was standing on this porch in my dream, studying cloud patterns in the sky above the tree line in the field across the street and here comes this wolf walking straight towards me.  It is huge… and absolutely beautiful. I am scared but mesmerized at the same time, so I’m frozen in place, just standing there, watching it watch me as it walks right up to me. I’m not scared anymore, okay just a little apprehensive, but the approach was casual with no snarling or anything.

Then the wolf embraced me by placed a paw on my right shoulder and its head on my left, nuzzling head to my head as if trying to hug me and that’s when I woke up. I recall the fur being oh so soft and plush and surprisingly sweet smelling, as if freshly bathed in scented waters.

Since it was one of those dreams that make me wonder (never dreamed of such a wolf before), I posted a brief thing about it on Facebook… curious as to what friends may think it means.

 

Emotional storm clouds broke a couple hours later, while I was sitting on a bench in the courtyard staring in disbelief at the message on my phone, so very much awake and hoping like hell that I was back in bed and this was all just a bad dream. My aunt Lynelle was too alive to die… too vibrant, too happy, too young, too free… She was only three years older than me, had just turned 59… how could this be?

Answers to the rush of questions would come later… the rain of tears came first.

Maybe someday I will write a tribute to this amazing, beautiful woman who lived life to the fullest, loved to the max, and painted bayou scenes with such living colors that it could make you want to go play in a swamp… but, today, I just want to savor her memory and keep some thoughts to myself.

Thanks for reading.