One of the benefits of working from home is the opportunity it affords me to be around when my kids are home too. I love waking with them in the mornings, making them breakfasts and lunches, seeing them off to school. I love being around when they return, hearing their stories, helping with homework, sometimes listening while they process hard parts of their day. This benefit is less measurable than the retirement package I don’t have, less practical than the health care plan, or the paid vacation. There are days I feel crazy and bitter about choosing to work as an artist (with all the inherent financial risk), then other moments, like this one with my daughter laughing about some dream she had, where I see with perfect bright clarity, the graceful braiding of my home life and my work life, and I feel grateful for the endless benefits.
on chard
It is still out there in my garden, drinking in the cold rain, soaking up that distance winter sunlight, looking surprisingly cheerful and verdant despite it’s immediate surroundings, all dead leaves and chicken manure. I clipped an armload of it this morning and crammed it in my crock pot along with some white beans and potatoes, in hopes that chard’s perpetually sunny attitude will rub off on me!
thinking like a potato
There are days when the urge to crawl out of my skin, shed everything, and somehow reposition myself in the universe is strong. I know this is a piece of the human condition. We all experience that uneasy urgency from time to time. We are not potatoes, nestled in their silent dark pockets of earth, content with simply gathering moisture and developing starches. We are fidgeting, curious, meddling humans. We precipitate conflict, create obstacles, feel love and pain, desire things, reject other things, worry, and wonder. Some days, when my human-ness reaches full tilt, I look to the potato for a bit of perspective.
The Final Five
I know, there are actually seven tomatoes in this photo, but upon slicing them open, two were unusable. These were the last of our summer tomatoes and as I chopped them up for garnish on our pesto pasta last night I said a little melancholy goodbye to the harvest season. We are beginning the long damp march through winter, a time for rain boots, hot soup, and sewing projects involving wool.
playing around
This morning I got my work for the Portland show boxed up and sent off, cleaned off my studio tables, did my prep work for teaching, and posted art on ebay for the first time. These last two hours I spent experimenting with some colored woolen samples a friend gave me. I made these odd little strips. They remind me of ladders or DNA strands. I’m not sure what I’ll do with them.
just leaf it!
I have to fight the urge to pick up every one of these spectacularly bright leaves when I find them strewn on the pavement. I want to pocket them, press them, rub them against my cheek, maybe stitch them into a quilt that will turn brown and brittle in days (okay, not a great idea). That is the crux of their loveliness, though, like snowflakes and fresh flowers they are utterly unperservable. The turning leaf is breathtakingly beautiful as it twirls down from it’s tree, as it lies in ruffled heaps amongst it’s yellowed counterparts. Enjoy us now, enjoy us now, they whisper as I walk through them.
on being back in the classroom
I easily settle into the quiet controlled environment of my studio work life. I adjust the volume on my stereo with a turn of my wrist, change the lighting with a flick of a switch, I’m tired of sewing, I change seats and work on an entirely different project. In the classroom things are far more volatile. Yesterday we printed the first round of silk screen designs. I came home with magenta and green paint in my hair, under my fingernails and somehow in one armpit. But inside that chaos is joy I cannot muster alone in my studio. Kids so thrilled with their screen printed robot or winged heart that they are forming future plans to make a living printing shirts.