Getting along

We got the dog and cat on the same day and they've always hung out together in the back yard. When the cat comes in every morning,  he rubs and rubs against the dog. I'm not sure if the dog minds but she endures. Now they've started hanging out with the peacock. Only it's metal and falls over when it rains. I bought it because it struck my fancy. Made me think of Flannery O'Connor. Maybe when I look out at my yard at my peacock I will be inspired to write like her. Or just write something.
At the very least, it makes me stop thinking about mentally ill people who go out and get guns and shoot up a bunch of people for no reason, just because they were watching a movie. Imagine if we could all just hang out together peacefully?

Whole friends

I made a new friend today. Her name is Rebecca. She is an art teacher who is taking a watercolor class at Cheekwood, like me. She got married this summer, moved to Nashville, and her husband started law school. That's a lot all at once.

They live in an apartment with a working fireplace and she has been looking for a job as an art teacher. Those are hard to find -- working fireplaces and jobs as art teachers.

We settled down on some benches in the Japanese garden to paint on a day when looking up through the ginkgo leaves at the sharp blue sky would make you catch your breath. When the chill of the night air had driven you under the covers for your best sleep in weeks and the bright sun the next morning twanged and throbbed like an amplifier on high.

We talked about a surprising aspect of starting your married life. How you have to figure out how to be alone more than you have to learn how to be together. Especially when your husband is driven and a hard worker -- very attractive traits! But how do you support him and be with him and miss him at the same time?

"Bless your heart," I said. And I meant it. My own heart could feel that mixture of love and longing and loneliness. Because I have been there.

You can see her sweet spirit in this photograph. While Rebecca painted, a young girl stepped over the rail and joined her. The girl's mother can be seen admonishing the child. But Rebecca was calm and welcoming. Any school would be lucky to have her as a teacher!

While I bent over my study of ginkgo leaves and Rebecca tackled a larger landscape, I remembered the early days of my marriage. In rapid succession, I finished college, got married, moved to Nashville, set out for my first real job, and my husband started medical school. I went from sleeping with stuffed animals in a dorm room to working as a night supervisor in a busy newsroom. Casting about for things to occupy me in the day, I swam laps in the pool. Volunteered at the hospital. Took walks. Made friends with other medical spouses. There weren't many of us and none of us had money. But we organized simple gatherings -- playing board games and drinking cheap beer and laughing. Classmates who weren't married dropped by our apartment at mealtimes, even though I wasn't a very good cook. These were bright people and we talked of things like cinematography. People said, "You will remember these as some of the best times of your life." That is true.

Rebecca came and sat nearer to me and I shared my watercolor pencils. A set of them cost $30 and when I bought them I felt grateful that I could afford them. In our newly married life, we could afford to go out to dinner once every year, on our anniversary. I knew it was the same for Rebecca.

Her mother was coming to visit next week, she told me, and she couldn't wait to show her mom around town and spend time with her. That's when I realized that perhaps I reminded her of her mother. After all, I'm old enough. For the first time, that sort of realization passed over me like a warm breeze, rather than a sharp prick of selfish grief. Perhaps it was the influence of the Japanese garden with its winding, carefully tended paths that remind us to meander and enjoy and wonder and embrace, its artfully arranged stones that recall the gentle flow of water and time, which passes and teaches. Time carves a place in us that calls to others and those relationships -- unexpected and new, some momentary, some lasting -- make us whole.

in praise of zinnias

Is there anything easier on the eye than a patch of zinnias? This is the riot of pinks and orange and reds that I admire each time I step outside my kitchen door. What do I love most about them? How easy they are to love! Right before we went away for the Fourth of July weekend, I noticed how my lemon balm (that I had bought in a single tiny pot as a nice-smelling addition to my herb garden) had exploded and overtaken what was supposed to be a cutting and vegetable garden. It had to go. So I set aside my packing and errands, knelt down in the dirt and yanked up the lemon balm. This was not such a bad job since it smells so good :)

No time to run to the garden store for a pack of annuals, so I rooted around in the junk drawer of my kitchen and found a pack of zinnia seeds. I troweled a couple of rows and tossed in the zinnias. I'm fairly certain I did nothing else. No watering, tending, fertilizing. Nothing. I went away for a week. Came back. Unpacked. Discussed the heat. A few days later, I walked out my back door and there they were, smiling and waving at me. "Remember us?" they seemed to chirp. The zinnias are still going strong. I suppose I'll lose them to the frost. But this reminds me why I don't raise cantankerous flowers like orchids. Not when a tiny seed and a little dirt can sprout and spread so much happiness and color and life.

Life interruptus

Things that happened while writing my first post.

I had to stop and look at this cool praying mantis by my back door.

As soon as I logged onto blogspot and set up the blog, my husband came into the room where I was sitting and made five phone calls. In a row. He talked loud. And then he turned on ESPN. He told me how his fantasy football team was doing and that he was worried about a friend. He asked me what I was doing.

I moved with my laptop to the kitchen. My daughter came in and said, "What are you doing?" She told me about where she had just been (to learn about a college) and about the tough Calculus problem she was trying to solve.

My mother called. She said she was at a Peter Frampton concert, even though she is 70 years old. She said she remembered when I played those songs OVER AND OVER in my room. She held the phone up so I could hear. Then she said she had to get back to the concert, intermission was over.

I typed an email to my friend Carroll and thanked her for encouraging me to start a blog, even though I had only written half a sentence. She wrote back an encouraging note. What would we middle-aged women be without girlfriends?

My son came in the room. He said, "What are you doing?" I told him. He made cookies and washed the pans and then asked to be tucked in. Which he still likes me to do sometimes, even though he is 15. I love that.

OK, I admit it. I love life interruptus and I got the post written anyway.

Painting interruptus

It is never a waste of time to sit by a stream and paint, even if the painting doesn't look anything like what you are trying to create. Even if the painting makes you laugh out loud. Laughter is good! It tightens the abs! HA HA!

Finally, after three (or was it four?) weekly classes of watercolor instruction inside, we were allowed to go outside and paint!

The instructor warned, "It is probably a bad idea to sit at a picnic table because you will be surrounded by people. One of my students was so suddenly surrounded that it frightened her." That kind of statement is like a challenge to someone like me.

As the class spread out over the grounds of the mansion and gardens where the classes are held, and the instructor suggested nice niches for sitting in a foldable soccer mom chair and practicing with paints, I spied an inviting picnic table by a babbling brook. "Aha!" I thought, "I will be able to spread out nicely on this table." And even though the instructor had suggested that we might want to narrow our focus at first to, say, one flower or one tiny area of landscaping, the area beyond the table allowed me to practice painting a stream, a waterfall, a pond, bushes, flowers, leaves -- all the things that we learned in class.

I set out my paintbox and easel and paper and supplies by the peaceful stream and immediately began to wish that I had paid closer attention to the helpful instructions about how to deal with the wind and paintbrushes that dry out too quickly. I began to wish that I had paid more attention to any of the instruction (at all). The other students -- middle aged women like me who had carefully taken notes -- were engrossed in their watercolor studies in cozy, secluded nooks in the color garden.

I began with a study of the brook and then tried to paint some bushes near the brook, bending over my paper to concentrate. Suddenly, I was surrounded. My quiet picnic area was swarming with moms and tots. A mother, grandmother and two small children arrived and, I am not making this up, stood in front of me (between my table and the stream) and took multiple photographs. They even had the children take off their shoes and wade in the stream right in front of me. Then the mother led her children over to the table and said, "Kids." She lowered her voice, "This lady is an artist."

I looked at my page with squiggly white lines that were supposed to be a stream, and a green blob in the corner that I was referring to as a bush. I said, "I am not an artist. I am a person who is taking an art class at Cheekwood." The mother said, "Oh." And the grandmother said, "We'd better go now." She placed her hands on the children's backs and guided them away, looking over her shoulder at me.

The instructor came over. She wondered aloud if the crowds around the picnic table were bothering me. "Oh no," I lied. "I can totally tune them out. I am the mother of three children. In fact, two teen-agers and a college student." Her eyes glazed over. This was getting autobiographical.

She looked at my painting and said, "Hmmmmm. Sometimes it is easier to start with a smaller study." She made suggestions for how to move forward. She didn't smile when I laughed and said, "This is really bad."

She said, "You know it's just as important to do things the wrong way as it is to do them the right way. You have learned something." Whoa. That's profound. Could this watercolor class be about more than just trying to learn to paint with watercolor?

Then I said, "I sort of like this bush that I painted over here." And she said, "That is because you focused on the broad brushstrokes. You have created the shape of the plant and you are allowing the viewer to fill in the details on his own. It is important to allow the viewer to use his or her imagination."

I thought about that statement from Master Yoda the watercolor instructor for the rest of the day. Because good writing does that, too. It provides the reader a framework for the imagination.

Painting with watercolor is one of the hardest things I've ever tried. Signing up for the class was about making a weekly "artist date" with myself. The weekly artist date was suggested by a book I was reading to try to discipline myself to write more, which is what I said I would do when the kids got older and didn't need me as much. This first post is about trying to paint outside on a pretty but windy day by a stream and learning some things about writing. Even though I wasn't paying close attention to instructions, I learned something anyway.