Mostly milk, no sugar, strong coffee.
July 2009 Archives
We had a few minutes before the student concert, so I sat on a bench outside the music building and drew a tree.
We picked our own blueberries in Massachusetts two weeks ago, and today some local berries were part of our farm share. Supper included corn on the cob, too. Monumental flavors of mid-summer. (Tomatoes still to come...)
The hamster goes around in his wheel. A boy works on a guitar riff. I draw leaves and stems in ink. Repetitions shape the evening.
Empty box of sandwich bags. Not sure why this spoke to me tonight - after all the landscapes and natural shapes of the past weeks of vacation - but here it is, moments before it was flattened for recycling.
We bought flowers at the market to brighten our return home - all credit to my husband for the idea - think it may become an end-of-vacation tradition.
Along the Taconic Parkway, the trees grow close to the road. We have shade and not much traffic - a peaceful change of pace.
The rain began in the small hours of the morning, and by the time we were awake, the bay was full of whitecaps and pounding waves, with rain blowing almost horizontally against the house. We saw the sun again by afternoon, but the waves have continued, and the tide was higher than usual after the storm.
I think nasturtiums are my favorite flower - I love the bright colors, the wild waving stems, the smell and peppery taste of them.
One cousin teaches a younger cousin.
So I drew a view from the porch...
As a child, I imagined that this stone building overlooking the rocks and the beach was a house for the lighthouse-keeper to live in. But another house is much closer to the lighthouse. I was forgetting about that, and now I'm not sure what this building is or was for.
When we got to the beach today, an abandoned dribble castle stood very near the breaking waves. By the time I put away the Sunday paper and began to draw, the water's edge had moved, and the beach expanded. Two small cousins had waded in up to their waists, and were getting ready to splash another, larger, cousin. He laughed, and pretended to be knocked over.
The morning fog lifted; the afternoon brightened... the horizon became visible again across the bay.
"Ooh - look how many crabs we've caught..."
(The crabs were taken back into the water and released a few minutes later. Tomorrow it is quite possible that they will be caught again.)
Rocks in the bay at mid-tide. I can learn a lot about abstraction from looking at rocks.
While sitting on the beach this afternoon, I looked across the bay.
My father's watering can was right beside the front porch this morning.
Took the train from Pittsburgh to Boston today, and this is how the landscape looked between Philadelphia and Trenton.
I saw this on the ground when I was walking home from a friend's house this evening, and picked it up, thinking of Harold.
Dark chocolate, of course. Just a couple of squares were left.
One of my best friends from high school came through town last night, and gave me a tiara this morning as a birthday present, instructing me to wear it all day. So I did. (Well, I took it off when we went to pick up our youngest at camp and run a couple of errands, but otherwise I wore it all day... ) A marvelous time, with conversations, reading, good food, friends and family, ending with a very very long multi-generational party in the back yard. The glowstick was added to the tiara during the party.
Arm detail from one of the chairs in the living room.
I love looking up into the trees at dusk. Long hours of daylight conclude slowly, with talk, silence, and just looking.
Newly baked... wish I could paint the scent of it.
Dark red and so sweet.
Two blue bottle caps. (Sounds as if it might be the beginning of a song.)
We had sparklers in the back yard after dinner. Youngest child can now light her own with a kitchen match.
Today was cool and rainy, but a holiday, and we dug in the garden, began cleaning the the overgrown parts of the yard, and went and got flowers for the hanging baskets.
Another sign of summer: at last count, there were 9 pairs of zori (or flipflops) in our front hall, in a drifted heap with children's sneakers and my favorite sandals at the foot of the staircase. En masse, they remind me of a school of fish. (Hmm... front hall as tide pool - an idea to explore further.)
This chard with ruby-colored stems came in today's vegetables from the farm. I need to find ways to cook it so that it tastes as dramatic as it looks.
