Summer sounds of children

A stay at home day, recovering from some strange debilitating summer flu, feel weak and tired in an "I've got the vapors" sort of way...but the windows are open and the sounds of my child and the neighborhood children drift into the window, summer sounds, laughter and jokes, the kind of easy talk that comes with wandering around in damp bathing suits and barefeet, and it is the sweetest sounds, the summer sounds of children.

Sunday Quote

Deep peace of the running wave to you,
Deep peace of the flowing air to you,
Deep peace of the quiet earth to you,
Deep peace of the shining stars to you,
Deep peace of the Son of Peace to you.

-Celtic Prayer, The OneWorld Book of Prayer

Library windows

The theme for summer reading in New York State (and a fair amount of others) is Make a Splash (with reading at your library presumably), hence our themed windows. Have to say afterwards I wish I had done an Amos and Boris whale and continued the mouse theme and put a whole lot more fish up but a girl gets tired and I was mostly winging it (my original sketch was a beach scene - sort of
Harry the dog at the beach but then I realized I have zero sense of perspective and couldn't pull it off). I generally decorate the library windows twice a year - spring reading program and then summer as both have themes. One of my favorite comments ever was an adult telling me that it was so great I made my art kid-friendly. No attempt at a childlike quality - this is the way I draw!

and the seasons they go round and round...

Last day of school, last day of fifth grade. He is now a middle-schooler he tells me, one minute cocky and thrilled, the next feeling a bit bereft and melancholy that his six years at his elementary school has drawn to a close. I felt the latter, driving to work after dropping him off for the last time there, thinking how eager he is to be an older boy like his brother and how, though I love them so at any age, I miss my children younger, those young ones lost to memories and photo albums, driving down the sunlit roads playing the Joni Michell song one plays when feeling the years. Ah, this gig of aging... Hard to believe my last child is not even in grade school any longer.

Pippi Longstocking's House

or at least the house they used in a movie about the beloved high-spirited girl. This glimpse taken from a tour boat looking back at Amelia Island in Florida. The guide said that the scene was ice cream mayhem - lots of children running about eating ice cream cones. They used local kids from Fernandino Beach and around Amelia Island as extras, however the problem was the ice cream kept melting in the Florida heat so they used scoops of mashed potatoes in the cones.

Terrible Crap!

Looking through a few poetry books, first two handfuls grabbed from the bookshelf that sits in the hall filled with poetry (you would think it would sprout wings and flowers). I am looking for a poem for a friend, finding many gems but not for the type poem requested, more poems that remind me of why I love poems and how they speak to me between the lines and after the commas and periods and the close of the books. There is one book, a slim volume, I won't name the poor poet, as besides being a mere 25 cents marked at the book fair, someone has scrawled "Terrible Crap!" on the title page. I can't remember if I have seen that before - I am just perverse enough to buy a book of poems just for that reason alone. I like to browse. I can tell a good poem from a bad poem - but often I like a bad poem as well as a good - for the heart or thought behind it, for a winning line. I take my poems from songs and subway walls and tidy lines and ambiguities and clear as a bell and Hallmark sentimentalities and children's scrawls and little pockets and enormous shattering truths. Best, the poem that lands on your open palm like a snowflake, ice star, magical, melting the words into your skin, a soul's tattoo.

Sunday Quote

It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.

- Diane Ackerman

Talk pink to me

Future Guy Say Wha, part one

Running from the mutant transforming aliens, a boy ducks into a tunnel hoping to hide, little realizing it is a TUNNEL OF TIME and within moments he is zapped by the gammablueberryjamma rays and thrust into the OUTER REACHES of time, a world unlike his own where giant plastic flowers grow and ginormous insects wait their next meal...our young friend, if he is not careful....stay tuned for the next installment of FUTURE GUY SAY WHA? whenever we get around to posting it.

Sunday Quote

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms or books that are written in a foreign tongue. The point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live your way some distant day into the answers.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

Day fifty-three

Photographs of the beautiful Florida coast, the heartbreak of what we are losing.

Two Koi with one stone...or a carp in the hand...

...is worth two in a bush? Not so good these bird turned koi sayings as I don't want to kill any Koi with a stone - but here is Koi/Carp and an interesting explanation why they seem to turn up in tattoos as well as ponds. An odd day visited by ghosts of old angers. Antidote: Glee finale, carp posts, mystery novel in bed.

Sunday Quote

May all I say and all I think
be in harmony with thee,
God within me,
God beyond me,
maker of the trees.

-Native American Tradition, Chinook, The Oneworld Book of Prayer

Doughnut cake madness

This is the thought that came to me in the middle of the night - I will get a cone and I will make a munchkin donut tower! Yaha! This is possibly why I do not rule the world as these are the sort of thoughts rattling around in my bean.
It took about 100 doughnut holes and two trips to Dunkin Donuts to fetch them all. Plus a trip to Michael's for the cone (if you want to make one - cover one of those styrofoam flower decorating cones with foil and stick donut munchkins on using toothpicks putting toothpick in first and then donut, packing tightly).
Was it a hit? When you can get a bunch of 11 year old boys tumbling in the door to stop, open their mouths up in silent awe and then utter all sorts of wowza, you have reached the mountain top, my friend. Who can ask for more?