Orchid Cactus

When Jesse was a baby thirty-odd years ago, my neighbor gave me a cutting from her orchid cactus.
It has hung in some window of every place I have lived since then. It used to bloom off and on in the hall on Parkview Avenue, but after I left there in 1996 it has been irritatingly barren. It's gone through many stages of what I thought was impending death, but always revived enough to limp along to see another year. Now, it has suddenly found a reason to blossom again in the bay window of the living room, it's leaves shiny and glossy and fat.

Go figure.

Death Wish

Twice in the last three days I have found Poppy outside the pen. The first time was at 11pm when I walked home from dinner with David and Thom. As I started to open the door to go in I heard the unmistakable sound of cackling nearby. In the light of the streetlight I could see Poppy happily pecking away in the garden in front of the house. Needless to say it is quite a challenge to get a chicken to go where you want her to go, especially in the dark. By the time I had gone in to get my flashlight, she had disappeared. I searched and searched, but it's a big world out there and a chicken is small and cunning.
At one point I discovered her hiding under Diana's lilac bush, but by the time I had opened the gate to shoo her in, she was gone again.

As is my habit, I soon began to cry and babble about the chances of a chicken surviving the night in the open. Also as is my habit, I could not give up. How long I searched, I have no idea, but finally I spotted her half hidden by the blue tarp covering some construction materials next door. Somehow I was able to chase her into the pen, into the chicken house, and lock the door.

It's amazing how an experience like that can be so intense, and then once it's over it vanishes as if it had never happened. I closed the gate to the chicken yard as always, walked back to the front door, opened it and walked in to the ecstatic dogs just as I always do, my tears vanished, my heart back in normal rhythm.. It's as if the earth closes in on the unexpected, and all one has to do is right the wrong to make it disappear.

Today I found her out again, casually strutting around in the deep grass of the back yard next door. There's always an escape artist in every bunch.

Time Marches On

Here's the garden as it looks today, or at least part of it. This is about half of what is there. I can't get a picture of the whole thing without including the neighboring houses and street. I'm feeling quite happy about it, proud of the way it has transformed the whole end of the Water St.

My thoughts and a lot of my activities have been centered on the gallery over this past month. The time has been unhappily ill-spent. I have resigned the presidency, but will of course still be a big part of the organization. The details are not important now, but the story is a familiar one in my life. Sooner or later I find myself at odds with galleries, with the selling of art. It seems so far removed from all those wonderful ideas careening around the heads of the creative mind. What we do at the gallery seems to have nothing to do with art........at least not the way I understand it.

I was a great student. If I could have sequestered myself in the "ivory tower" forever, I would have.

Experiment

As I was cleaning out the drawers of my desk I came across a package of t-shirt transfer paper I had never opened. Always on the look out for a new medium, I decided to put a picture of one of my paintings on cloth and then sew over it. The idea of working with fabric has always intrigued me and I've seen fantastic things that others have made. Without any plan, I put the image on an old t-shirt that doesn't fit me and then sewed the outline of the subject on the sewing machine. It held some appeal for a short time as I stitched around fingers and teeth, but it wasn't long before I began looking more at what I had left to do than at what I was doing. Determined to have something to show for my efforts, I made a pillow cover out of the thing. It's a little slice of experience, though, that might come back later in some more satisfying way.