Pictures of my papier mâché

Here is the site model for this year's Anthology. As you can see, it takes up my entire dining table. This covers an area about 1000 yards by 750 yards. The mottled areas are the primeval forest. The blue is the Great River Ouse (in England). The cliff is where my Baron's Keep will be. (That little wheel-looking thing there is actually the curtain-wall around the Keep and 2 other large buildings. The tiny things that look like sheep are actually the cottages of the village of Woadsbury. The landscape is taken directly from Google Earth (there is actually a bend in the Great River Ouse just like this at 52° 01' 39.74" N and 0° 52' 52.43" W.) The cliff and the forest are pure invention, as is the village and name of Woadsbury. But my Ed actually lived along the Ouse (pronounced Ooze) for several years!
This is the view from the edge of the cliff looking down on the bridge and the village. I didn't spend much time on the cottages - I really just want them for placement so that I can decide who lives where and what they do. As I develop my story, I'll be adding stone walls to contain sheep and goats, further defining each cottage's "yard" and putting in small gardens. I'll put in trees, too, of course, in scale so that I can determine "views" from various vantage points. I had intended to put in painted Q-tip "trees" for the whole forest to give it the 3D effect I wanted (yes, serious overkill! That would have been thousands of trees!), but our story covers several thousand years and the forest will disappear over time. I didn't want to limit my model to only MY story - so my solution is to cut material to lay over the open areas, painting it to show what the landscape looks like in each different time. It'll be rather like playing paper dolls with the landscape! :)
There are two bridges over the river, the one above services the roads that lead to the NW (towards Segontium in my story's time, and Liverpool today) and to the SW towards Winchester and Somerset).

This second bridge services the roads leading NE towards Cambridge and SE towards London.

Our little village has a thriving woad industry, thus the name Woadsbury. (Woad is similar to henna, coming from a plant and used to dye the skin - only henna is a reddish/brown/black hue and woad is a lovely blue color.) This industry produces goods dyed with the lovely woad and in demand all over England in the time of my story in 500 AD. This third picture shows where the road drops right into the trees from the bridge, but it doesn't show how. Hopefully, I'll get the 3D forest overlay done soon. That will really make this effective! I plan to use batting (for depth) but that will be rather difficult to paint. Of course, I supposed I could make it a winter scene! LOL

Anyway - there are the first pictures of it so far. It has already proven invaluable in working out many details for my story and for Ed's. The group seems to really like it, too. We'll be carting it back and forth to all of our Writer's Group Meetings because it's just too helpful in working out the early details as we weave our many different stories into one glorious whole!

My Baron Woadsbury is the founder of the line, receiving his title and lands from Arthur himself. I'm having so much fun writing it!

It Scent Me Back

I like having growing things around me, so it was a natural thing for my girls to put a couple of packages of bulbs into my stocking at Christmas. But they couldn't stop there, of course - no way. Being the funny girls that they are, they also included a small ceramic cup shaped like a Santa head. With it came a compressed "coin" of soil, and grass seeds - the idea being that the soil fills the Santa head, the grass is pressed into the soil, and the grass grows, looking like Santa has a spiked, green hairdo...rather like a chia pet, er, without the chia.

It was a joke, of course, so, also of course, I put it all together and placed it on my kitchen windowsill. The sight of that silly thing gives me a smile every day. And in the middle of winter, it's always nice to have a little green, too. But today it gave me something extra.

Santa was looking pretty ragged and wild, so I pulled out my scissors and gave him a haircut. He looked immediately better - and rather like my father in the 60's and 70's when he had a flat-top. Of course, Dad never went for green hair, so the likeness was fleeting. But then I lifted the little guy up to my nose and took a sniff.

Now, my daughters and husband, and just about anyone else who knows me, will find nothing unusual in that. I sniff just about everything - food, leaves, books, paint, sticks, squished ants (don't ask) - smell is a very important part of my life experience and I include it purposefully in my memory imprint. (No, really - quit wondering about the squished ants. I'm not going to tell that story.) So raising that small plant to my nose wasn't surprising. But the result did surprise me.

The first whiff transported me to the house I lived in until I was ten. I was upstairs standing at the window and our neighbor was cutting his grass just below me. I don't know why the smell took me there. I've lived several decades since then and, I assure you, we cut our grass at all of the places we lived! Perhaps this was the same variety of grass as that growing there in Detroit. But, for whatever reason, that smell took me right back to eight years old. What an incredible power! I could feel the screen pressing into my nose, the windowsill under my hands, hear the whirr and catch of our neighbor's push mower and the birds twittering in his cherry tree. It was like magic. All of that from one little whiff of just-cut grass in my kitchen in California in the middle of winter.

So, today's beautiful thing is the delightful way that scent can spring a memory (especially when it doesn't include squished ants)!

Extraordinarily Ordinary or Ordinarily Extraordinary

Today was such a lovely, lazy day. We had our son here with us for an extra day because of the holiday and we slept in late, sat around and played video games, laughed, ate fun food off trays in the library (my project is still taking up the whole dining table), and watched a new sport (team handball - very cool). We didn't do anything special (though I did finish my big project - that was really nice); we didn't even go outside. In fact, we never even looked out a window so I have no idea if it was a beautiful day outside. It was just a nice, lazy day.

So, when I asked myself - what was my beautiful thing for today - there wasn't anything that really stood out to me. It was just an ordinary day spent with loved ones. And, of course, that was it.

When a day spent with people I love, laughing, eating, and playing together, is so common that I think of it as "ordinary" - that's a beautiful thing. When my life is so filled with love that sneaking kisses in the hallway with Ed is "ordinary" and laughing with Drue over something that his girlfriend said is "ordinary" - that's a very beautiful thing. I'm so grateful for a life full of ordinary days!

Out of the Blue

Sleepovers, youth camp, duets, choir cantatas, these are only a few of the memories from growing up in Detroit with my best friend Sandi. We both sang well and were just beginning to find our way in the area of music in high school. She had an older sister, Joy, who (I think) intimidated us both because she had already made a place for herself and was widely recognized for her beautiful voice. Sandi was far more confident than I, but I suspect some of that was bravado that I wasn’t wise enough, yet, to recognize. She had lost her mother already, too, and her relationship with her father was much more mature than my own. I remember very conflicting emotions of awe, competition, envy, and affection. Then my dad accepted a job offer in California and dragged me kicking and screaming all the way across the U.S.

The next time I saw Sandi was when I was pregnant with Emily. I’d lost several pregnancies already, but was quite secure in the successful end of this one. Out of the blue, I heard from Sandi, saying that she was in town and wanted to visit. When she arrived, she had a photo album full of pictures of the child she had just carried to term and lost in the first few weeks. Her whole life was still consumed by the grief she was both wallowing in and trying to crawl her way out of. I didn’t hear from her again.

Twenty-nine years later, I sent a friend request on Facebook to old friends with whom I’d sung in college out here on the west coast. Joylin and Jeff had pastored a church for 30 years and were now “retired” and working a regular job. When Joylin accepted my friend request, I happily sent her a short here’s-what’s-happened-in-the-last-30-years note, then took a quick look through her friends list to see if there were any other old friends in there. Imagine my surprise when I saw Sandi’s name!

I eagerly clicked on her icon and was overjoyed to see that she allowed friends-of-friends to look at her pictures. I clicked on old pictures of when she and Joy were little kids with goofy hairdos and clothes that were all too familiar to me! I have pictures with those same hairdos and old-fashioned clothes! Then I clicked on more recent pictures and felt my eyes sting with tears as I saw beautiful children, now grown, standing by her and her husband. All of these years, I’ve been so afraid that the last view I had of her had remained her only reality. But I see that she’s had all of the wonderful breadth of experience that comes with having children...all of the stinky diapers, hilarious sayings, bumps and scrapes, teenage angst, and tearful passages into adulthood that come with that marvelous thing called parenthood.

I sent her a friend request, of course, and I haven't heard from her yet - but I know I will, and I'm looking forward, so much, to reconnecting with my old friend. Today's been a good day, but the most beautiful thing was finding an old friend out of the blue and knowing she was whole.

Another Beautiful Thing

I spent all morning today changing settings and organizing my Facebook. I found I had four requests from people who wanted to see my paintings, which was wonderful — but my website was down, which was a real bummer. Fortunately, my daughter, Kate, had made a profile for my watercolors on Facebook long ago, which I realized I could use until my website is back up. So, I went and looked at it.

I read through old postings and followed links, realizing more and more just how much work Kate put into it for me. She didn’t just set it up and post my pictures; she also looked into art groups where she then registered, responded to people who posted nice things about my work, and generally did what she could to make my page a success. I was so touched by some of the things she wrote, so grateful for the effort she put into my page, so humbled by how she did it all behind the scenes without even letting me know what all she was doing for me.

I’m terrible at maintenance. I’m a good organizer (initially) and I know what needs to be done, but I’m terrible at doing it. I always have such good intentions about checking things every day, dealing with things NOW instead of, well, whenever, putting things on my calendar, being responsible – but I stink at all of that. I’m easily distracted, curious, prone to enthusiasm. I love big undertakings, extravagant projects (like, um, the model I’m working on right now), and often jump from one to another. Strangely enough, I also love tiny miniatures, perfect details, authenticity. And I’m pretty good at those things. When I start an ambitious project, it usually works out pretty well. But please don’t ask me if a bill is paid, or what I did with the message I took for you yesterday, or if I mailed the registration and fee for the art show where I’m supposed to show my work. I’m likely to say, “Bill? Message? Art Show? Cool! I’ll put together a really great display for it. Maybe something with pillars....Let me go get my sketchpad!”

Kate, however, is much more well-rounded. She’s creative, like me, but somehow she’s also responsible, dependable, and thorough. I can only assume she got that all from her father, because I know not a single one of those chromosomes came from me! She’s beautiful, too, and slim, which I think is just a little bit unfair, but I won’t belabor that point because she’s also one of the most generous people I know. (Both of my girls are, actually, which is a constant joy to me.) Her unsung work on my page was a surprise, but not surprising: it's just who she is.

I started out intending to say that today's beautiful thing was the joy of being part of a team -- working together with differing talents toward a single goal...but it turns out that the most beautiful thing I found today was the quiet, loving generosity of my girl.

Today's Beautiful Thing

I’ve discovered that there’s no real magic in having a deadline (unless there’s someone there with a whip or docking sheet to make you pay for being late). I’m one short of a taskmaster (thank Heavens!) so my Thursday deadline keeps getting ignored because other things are also important. I need a better motivation.

This leads me to think of something else that is exercising my mind. Last year was a disastrous year for us (with the single ineffable exception of the birth of my granddaughter in June. Oh, and the remarkable joy of having my youngest daughter and my grandson move in with us in November. And then there was the astounding experience of having all our children together with us at Christmas). Hmmm, let me rephrase that statement.

Last year was a disastrous year for us financially, and, to a lesser degree, in terms of my physical well-being. I’ve had a series of small, worrisome maladies, from sties to lumps to boils to infections. Never overly serious, always painful, always unattractive, always there. I don’t believe I had a single day last year when one of those was not present. But that’s not what I want to talk about – the result of all of that is my point. In the same way that a pebble in my shoe can make me oblivious to the beautiful scenery through which I’m passing, all of those minor ailments were a serious distraction from the beautiful things in my life.

This year, I want to change my metaphor. I’m throwing away the pebble/shoe idea and I’m going to think of myself as an oyster. When an irritant gets into my shell, like a stye or a lump, I’m going to use that as a reminder to go look for something in my life that I like – and I’m going to use that joy to smooth a layer of nacre over that irritant. By the end of the year, I expect to have a pearl where before there was only irritation.

So, because I had yet another stye start swelling my poor eye yesterday, I’m going to lay my first bit of nacre.

I love that thrill that comes when I pile a collection of materials on my counter and prepare to create something completely new out of them. Usually, by that point, I’ve already gone through the stages of casting about for an idea, getting sudden inspiration, and writing a materials list. Then I’ve felt the rising anticipation as I set about collecting or buying the materials, dealing with problems of availability or even possibility, before finally dumping them all out to begin. But the project I started yesterday was different.

Yesterday, I already knew what I would be making: I wanted a papier mâché model of a particular landscape (for yet another project) so the parameters were already set. That was my first set-back – since the parameters were set, that meant I’d have to use math to work it out to scale. Ack! The Dreaded Math Problem! (And let me assure you that this kind of thing was never one of the “problems” worked out in class. There were no trains running towards one another, nor imaginary numbers that needed to fit into some fraction of an idea! No, I had to figure out how 1000 feet could be divided conveniently into 18½ inches so that a 5½ foot tall person could be honestly portrayed by the toothpicks I’ve set aside for that purpose.) I fretted and fretted over it, burning up sheet after sheet of paper with my pencil and (mostly my) eraser until I gave up and decided to just make it the size I want and then work out the scale later.

So, I transferred my picture onto the back of a large piece of my longest Christmas wrapping paper, and covered it all with clear contact paper so that the moisture wouldn’t hurt my dining table (because this model IS the size of my dining table), and you know what? The dimensions worked out just fine. When I divided the length of the line designated as “1000 feet” into…um…I guess that would be 1000….and then compared that to the ¼ inch graph paper for my…er…other dimension…..anyway, it worked out to 15 feet per square. Isn’t that a nice round number? (Don’t worry, I had Ed check my equations.) So, there I was with this nice drawing and no more math to do! Hooray!

I gathered my Google Earth picture (for reference), paper, hardware cloth, wire cutters and pliers, a dish tub, flour, water, and a whisk, and stood, staring at the crude drawing, and enjoyed that feeling of impending creation. I wonder if God felt this way just before He said, “Let there be light”? I hope so – it’s a wonderful feeling!

Anyway, once I got the armature finished for the hill and cliff along the river, in no time at all I was up to my elbows in flour paste (and splattered liberally across my shirt and pants, too – and how did that glob get onto the back of my head?). I exuberantly tore rolls of thin masking paper into strips, baptized them righteously in the flour paste, and arranged them with abandon across my miniature landscape. I covered my wire armature with a mummy’s closet-worth of ragged bands, smoothing them gently into the cliff face that looms over my Sharpie-colored river.

Not liking the overly-flat surface elsewhere, I crumpled aluminum foil into small hillocks and dells, laying more saturated strips over them, criss-crossing them like a football coach’s playbook. When I finally had every inch covered with multiple layers, I squeezed the paste out of the last handfuls of paper strips still in my dish pan, and stretched them out into long, thin, mashed glumps (technical term, that) to form the banks of the river. Then I left it to dry. The first stage was done, and it was a damp, lumpy, wheat-smelling thing of beauty!

I didn’t HAVE to tell you the whole process (so far). The beautiful thing in my life yesterday was the thrill of starting something creative. But, the beautiful thing in my life today, was telling you about it so that I could experience it again. (Because, alas, it is taking all day today to dry, so I can’t play with it again until tomorrow – I mean, work on it. Yeah, that’s right.) So, the beautiful thing in my life today (other than it being my son’s birthday and having him here for the weekend) is telling someone else about something I’m excited about. I can hardly wait to find out what is going to be my beautiful thing tomorrow! This oyster thing is really working out well, so far.

Tangled Tinsel

Christmas has always been my favorite holiday and I expected elegance this year. We now live in a darling little Victorian house and I’ve been planning a Picture Postcard Christmas for months: delicate lights and garlands outside, candles, garlands, tinsel, and a glorious tree inside, covered with lights and my collection of old world glass ornaments, all sparkling and filling the house with the scent of pine. I even had the perfect place to set up the Christmas Village (about 15 buildings and 50 or 60 figures, with street lights and fences and shrubs and cobblestone paths) where my grandson could enjoy it.

All of our children would be together: Ed’s two, my two, and their two. My first husband and his new wife and his dad would be coming for a couple of days, also. It was all working out beautifully. We got our 5^th-wheel ready for the girls and their babies to sleep in. And I got the last of our moving-boxes unpacked and the perfect space prepared for the tree in the Library. Then life got in the way of my expectations.

Daughter #2 and Grandbaby #1 moved in with us in November and suddenly there were blankets and pallets and toys all over (not unusual in a grandma’s house). Then she got a Christmas job in Hanford so I was home with my grandson and no car every day. This was all good (except the car was inconvenient), but it rather made cheese of my schedule.

Then it started to rain.

Daughter #3 had a fender-bender in our good car (actually a side-crusher), which made it impossible to open either of the passenger-side doors and also resulted in a huge ticket to be paid in December. Our already-low-budget Christmas turned into a no-budget Christmas. But nobody was hurt and the car still ran, so we took a deep breath and went on.

And it rained some more.

We finished our stint as King and Queen of the Christmas Festival in Wonder Valley, very grateful for the money, which was now going to pay for the car accident instead of Christmas gifts, and settled down at home in anticipation of the holiday. It was dark when Ed came home from work each day, so we planned to get a tree and get the Christmas stuff out of the shed on the weekend…but it rained. Every weekend. Except the one when we had back-to-back book signings.

For our book came out in November and we had meetings and books signings in December right up until the day Daughter #1 and Grandbaby #2 arrived from Wyoming. It was still raining that day and we discovered that the 5^th wheel had sprung a leak – right over the bed. So luggage and gifts and baby paraphernalia went back into the house, piled in with the blankets and pallets and toys, and our house turned into a crowded, cacophonous chaos of joy for a week or so.

For the first time in my life, there was no Christmas tree. We’d finally gotten the Christmas boxes out of the shed the day before Daughter #1 arrived, but the only decorations that got put up were the candles (and they never got lit) and the Christmas Village. There was no tree, no lights, no ornaments, no tinsel, no star, no angels…I couldn’t even find all of the stockings. And, strangest of all, I never played any Christmas music (if you know the size of my Christmas music collection, you know how amazing that was). To top it off, we celebrated Christmas five days early because this was not our year to have Ed’s children (Daughter #3 and Son #1) for Christmas. I didn’t bake pumpkin bread or make Hard-Crack Cinnamon Candy, the Advent Calendar never got out of a box, and we didn’t do stockings on “Christmas Eve” -- none of our family traditions were in evidence. But this was the BEST CHRISTMAS EVER.

Our Picture Postcard Christmas never happened. And we will probably not be in this house next Christmas, so it never will. But that was only a dream for the photo album. The very real and absolutely perfect Christmas happened in the middle of that noisy, messy confusion of undecorated house and toys and diapers. My two-year-old grandson fell in love with my six-month-old granddaughter, holding her hand, giving her “sisses” (kisses), and stealing her new toys. Daughter #3 bought, wrapped, and gave all of her own well-chosen gifts with her own earned money. Son #1 (who is Child #4) engaged in hilarious cyber-wars with Daughters #1 and 2. My mornings all started with one grandchild or another coming to my bed for some cuddle time while Mom either got ready for work or snagged a little more sleep. There was hot chocolate, loads of cuddles, sweet hours with long-time friends, family meals, lots of rowdy, chase-me-around-the-house time. It was loud. It was exhausting. It was perfect. My expectations had fallen so far short of the awesome reality.

Then, as one last inconvenience-transformed-into-gift, I drove Daughter #1 and Grandbaby #2 back up to Sacramento, dropping Grandbaby #1 off in Fresno on the way. My energy was gone. My emotions were volatile. I was not looking forward to 8 hours of driving in a broken, whistling car. But then I had the sweetest time of the week with my daughter, laughing, talking, holding hands…it was the perfect end to a perfect week.

I stopped for a nap on the way back and got home tired, but wide awake. Ed and Son #1 were playing a video game in the living room. Bless the man, he’d cleaned up all the mess, folded all of the blankets, vacuumed, done the dishes…the house looked wonderful. I looked around at the candles and the Christmas Village…the only evidence that it was December. I laughed at the tumbled state of the village. My two-year-old grandson had played delicately with them, placing everything back carefully. Then some 5- and 6-year-old friends had come over and left the village looking like they’d played dice with it.

I packed them all up and set the boxes by the door for Ed to return to the shed. I looked around my now-quiet kitchen and smiled, remembering a baby face smeared with sticky cereal, lively conversation around the expanded dinner table, a Play Doh game ending with a very sleepy "Ta la" (too tired to actually say "Ta DA!"), and "land shark" chases. No amount of tinsel could improve on memories like that. Though I'd forgotten to take pictures because I was busy chasing babies, the images in my memory are better than any Norman Rockwell rendering. This Christmas wasn't picture perfect....it was magic!