My Summer Vacation

What a jam-packed summer I've had so far, and it's just about to get busier. We've hiked and biked, painted some Zen works of art (ephemeral, with chalk on the driveway and with watercolors on paper with my little one, who immediately painted over my calligraphy), did some experiments in crochet, exchanged rock-craft skills with my mom, and just generally hung out and relaxed. (Oh, and countless rainy-day viewings of Horton Hears a Who!) All this time was spent far away from the computer and without the camera along, so there's not much photo documentation to share.

Next up is a week-long camping trip with the family and visits from grandparents. To keep up with everything, I'll be taking a blog break through the end of August. I hope to be back in September with the renewed energy that the start of a new season brings.

Before I sign off for a while, I'd like to share (very shyly) some of the writing that I have been doing in a Writing Circle this month. Once a week, a group of women gather in the moderator's living room and write for an hour straight. Then we read our work aloud (this is the terrifying part for me every week). There are some truly astonishing pieces of memoir, poetry, and fiction that I have been privileged to hear read aloud, and I feel so lucky to learn from these women.

Here's a piece that was inspired by three paint colors (see if you can pick them out), a photo of two little girls squinting into the sun at the beach, and a postcard of the idealized beach vacation, circa 1950:

Sometime around June, after the first wildflowers have faded, I start to hear the siren call of the sea. I'm sure most inlanders who live only a few hours' drive from the shore feel it too. It's the pull of dark mango sunsets and violet evenings; slow, free days spent in full sun with nothing but a bathing suit on; the breezes pushing worries and responsibilities far away. At least that's how the beach felt to me as a child, unburdened by the tasks of packing up the mildewed tent and piles of sleeping bags and endless mountains of squishy hot dog buns and jars of yellow mustard and pickle relish. That was my mother's job, of course.

When I was growing up on the Gulf Coast of Texas, my family spent a long weekend at the beach just about every summer. It was a cheap vacation for my struggling parents. My father would pitch a tent right on the packed sand. Despite my mother's best efforts--a basin of water and a towel placed at the tent flap for our sandy feet--the sand, as sand does, would creep into the tent on the soles and between the toes of little feet. The wet sand clumped and then dried. At the end of the day, when we walked into the tent to plop down in our sleeping bags, our feet made a quiet zip, zip as sand was trapped between hot flesh and cool plastic. When night fell and we drifted off to sleep, human sounds subsided and the rhythmic waves--always there beneath our playful screams in full sun--filled the tent, our little world. I fell asleep touching the sand through the tent floor, asborbing the echo of the waves hitting the shore.

At first light we'd emerge from our tent to the quiet waves. Shedding pajamas and donning damp bathing suits, we'd race to the water's edge. The ocean had left us treasures in the night to discover: yellow seaweed with strange rubbery leaves and bulbs that looked like hollow balls; broken sand dollars; a plank of sodden wood. I searched for seashells and watched hermit crab holes bubble and fill as the waves touched my toes.

The sensations of being surrounded all day and night by salty water and sand are still so clear to me decades later. But one memory seems more like a dream, though evidence exists to the contrary.

One morning my mother led us out into the waves. We waded out until the water reached my chest and I felt that I would be pushed by the gentle swells too far offshore, where the water was deep and green. But the water gradually became shallow again as we faced the horizon, and I could see the sandy bottom clearly. My mother reached down into the sandbar and pulled out a perfect sand dollar, like an ocean bone alive against her palm. As my mom sifted through the sand again, I did the same, and we found sand dollar after sand dollar, enough that day to fill a pickle jar.

That jar full of sand dollars still exists somewhere, stored in my father's attic or garage, the remnant of a perfect day of discovery in which my mother had performed the magical feat of plucking rare treasures casually from the sea floor. I could not look at my mother again without a sense of awe.

* * *

I'll be dropping in to view my Flickr contacts, so I hope to see evidence of your summer adventures. I'd love to read about what you're up to, so please drop me a line or leave a comment to keep in touch. Have a great summer!

Tale of the Boggy Woods

Yesterday I sought out the boggy woods and made my peace with the rain. The skunk cabbages were happily submerged up to their leaves in water. Water is their essence, after all, and the hot August days will soon cause them to dissolve from within and turn into lacy skeletons.

Fern fronds waved lazily beside the skunk cabbages, and the duckweed swam upon blue sky and white clouds.

Green embraced everything, creating an inverted canopy as it enveloped the roots of a downed tree.

Frond upon leaf upon water--a verdant mosaic that wove a quiet spell around me. A spell so powerful that I stepped off the boardwalk into a boggy place and rooted myself in a dark pool. I became Green Woman, mute and still so that I could trace the water strider's arrowlike wake; count out the rhythm of the bullfrog's croak; feel the skitterings of squirrels and birds on my limbs and in my hair.

And then I emerged and sought out a dry spot under an oak tree. I followed a mossy trail and shrunk myself down to curl up under a bower of ferns. Later I will collect the acorns as they fall like raindrops.

Living in Macondo

"At sundown on Tuesday the water tightened and hurt, like a shroud over the heart. The coolness of the first morning began to change into a hot and sticky humidity. The temperature was neither cold nor hot; it was the temperature of a fever chill. Feet sweated inside shoes. It was hard to say what was more disagreeable, bare skin or the contact of clothing on skin. All activity had ceased in the house. We sat on the veranda but we no longer watched the rain as we did on the first day. We no longer felt it falling. We no longer saw anything except the outline of the trees in the mist, with a sad and desolate sunset which left on your lips the same taste with which you awaken after having dreamed about a stranger."

Excerpt from "Monologue of Isabel Watching It Rain in Macondo," in Leaf Storm and Other Stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

After weeks and weeks of rain, I was beginning to feel as if I were living in Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez's mythical village of Macondo. The rain that I had initially welcomed turned our yard into a bog. It seeped into the basement. It permeated the folds of bed sheets, bath towels, and burlap bags. The saturated air inside our house breathed out a vapor of must and mildew.

Perhaps I exaggerate.

We dodged the daily rainstorms and thundershowers and managed to find patches of sun, especially in the mornings. The rain transformed waterfalls into gleeful cascades. It turned already lush vegetation into a summer rain forest. Evenings brought their own silent fireworks, when the lightning bugs--more plentiful perhaps because of the dampness--emerged and lit their echoing sparks.

The constant rain produced a bumper crop of smooth cherries, their hides having stretched gradually as they ripened into lushness without bursting.

Having done their work on the cherry blossoms months ago, the bees have moved on to other nectars.

The displays of fire in the sky on the Fourth of July seem to have brought back the sun, at least for a time. I'm off to explore while I can.

Off to Camp

I just sent my oldest off to sleepaway camp for three weeks, and I am alternating between excitement and anxiety for her. It will be an intense adventure, and I'm sure she will be opening new doors of experience and discovering windows that shed light on her inner strengths.




She will be learning on her own how to balance her work and play time.





Most of all, I hope, she'll be aspiring to new heights creatively and intellectually.


I wonder if growing up is harder on the parent or the child?

Articulate Threads

"Let threads be articulate . . . and find a forum for themselves to no other end than their own orchestration, not to be sat on, walked on, only to be looked at."

Anni Albers (1899-1994)

The Past Returns

The past returns as I stitch. I guide the fabric through the sewing machine and wonder at its vintage. The piece of linen is silky, with a soft drape. It has been cut from a set of linen napkins I bought at the Salvation Army. Frankly, it was the embroidered mushrooms that had caught my eye. They are not kitschy or psychedelic; in fact, they're almost naturalistic in form. Now each mushroom is a framed rectangle I have appliqued to a small art quilt.

As I smooth the deliberately frayed edges of the linen on the quilt, I think about the moment in time that someone--perhaps a bored but artistically inclined housewife--decided to stitch her own linen napkins and embellish them with these mushrooms. (Why is another questions altogether.) The smooth, unstained linen speaks of frequent use and careful laundering, so I imagine back to a time before "stay-at-home mom" became a post-feminist choice, when housewifery was a fading but still expected norm. When the union of utility and DIY design was valued. I'd guess the '70s.


I cut out another piece of the linen, this time for the soft silhouette of a mermaid's torso. The edges ravel softly and I vacillate between leaving it untouched to move freely as a mermaid would through the sea and tacking it in place with a simple whip stitch. I decide to stitch the edges in place, molding the mermaid to the felted wool background. I use the smallest needle in the package of sharps and thread one strand of embroidery floss through its eye. My newly purchased reading glasses allow me to hold the needle close and begin the tiny stitching.

As the needle glides through the wool and catches a single linen thread, I feel its fragility, as if its wispy weft threads are ready to dissolve like cotton candy. This was a good choice then, to protect the mermaid's soft outline. Each stitch feels like a spell I am weaving for her protection, and perhaps for mine as well.



And as I go back and add a satin edging around the mermaid's arms, the past returns for me in a different way. "La Sirena" on the Mexican bingo card, the image I look for as I am searching for a lucky card. The "kitty" is a bowl full of pennies in the middle of my grandmother's formica table, and all the chairs in the house are crowded around it. The voices of my cousins, aunts, and uncles fill the living room-turned family bingo hall. My father, the family clown they call The King, turns over the top card from the deck, holds it up, and calls out the name: "El Borracho" lurches by with his bottle in hand; "El Catrin" fascinates in his formal cutaway suit. "El Sol" and "La Luna" fill my card with pennies, a row with only "La Sirena" to fill. And, because she is my talisman, she does indeed swim to the top of the deck of cards. My heart races. I squeak out, "Bingo!" before anyone else can claim the full kitty, and the pennies form a rusty pile beside my card.



My mermaid's hair is the color of those pennies, a braid of copper sewn with vintage crewel wool. Three happy starfish whirl beside her, soon to be embellished with embroidered spirals. I am happy with her, how she has formed--her quilted tail, her blanket-stitched net of a top, her sweetly curved arms.

But back to that question I evaded asking of my resourceful '70s housewife--the why? Why am I sewing this little talisman? She is not a useful item like the linen napkin I have ruined to make her. And surely my time--as a "work-at-home mom"--could be taken up by completing any number of tasks: I have images to edit for a work project, dinner to make, a hamper full of soiled cloth napkins of my own to cycle, homework to check, clutter to clear, a child to tend.

Yet I focus on the sewing so that the past can return with each meditative stitch. Not only the textile past that I am rescuing--the beautiful piece of linen and hand embroidery labored over long ago--but those little threads of memories that come back to me to be stitched in place.

Water, Water Everywhere

The rain hasn't let up for days, and I'm feeling the June Gloom. Earlier in the week, however, my son and I caught a glimpse of the sun and mostly blue skies and headed to our favorite creek for a picnic lunch.

We admired the tadpoles, probably already more than a month old, as they swam amongst the rocks. Some kind of water snake poked his head and part of his body tentatively from beneath a boulder in the creek, but I didn't manage to photograph him before he retreated.

We walked to the pond and fed the koi and the growing goslings, still with their fluffy head feathers, while another feathered friend looked on in frustration.

And today's all-day drizzle made it just right for sitting inside and putting the finishing touches on the WaterStone. The mermaid is curled around a felted stone, and her body is fashioned from a vintage linen napkin and thrifted vintage fabric scraps. Her braided hair is vintage crewel wool, and her collecting bag is crocheted from vintage variegated crochet cotton.