Our son, Patrick, is opening that beautiful bottle of scotch from Kent. It is delicious. Balvenie 12 year single malt. I keep up with filling pages of the Covid Coping Book 2.
It is what we all are drinking to get us through….no repeats of labels allowed.
Every couple of weeks I will get a package of labels in the mail from our friend, Marla, daughter, Amy, (always different teas) and her partner, Ben, who are using this time to clean out liquor cabinets and tea drawers. We have all become less particular during covid.
I forgot to photograph the previous days of Lee’s and my socks, so will put them in next time. But the last six pages of Drawing a Day Books are going to be covid masks.
A comfortable
covid mask from Medicare
is so wearable.
Safe Mate covid mask
purchased from Amazon Prime,
three colors, one price.
And another old journal writing about Australia.
Train to Ararat
I watch the land slip by and imagine how it was before farms and houses. The land barely lifts here and there are low valleys, low hills and everywhere it is dry and brown – a greyed brown. Eucalyptus are gathered in groups along the landscape. Old decrepit ones seem abandoned by their kind as they struggle alone to survive. My fellow travelers read a kindle and a magazine unaware and seemingly immune to the drama flying by our window. Tiny dust devils swirl upward here and there across the plowed fields in search of a cloud that may bring moisture and push them back down. I don’t see it happening today between Baran and Ararat, VIC. Just what are those cattle all chewing out there?
I can’t remember if I shared that one before…here is another…
2007
Is there anything like a belly full of extraordinary food and wine – then locked up in a single cabin first class on the Ghan swaying your way into the Northern Territory and listening to the anti war version of Waltzing Matilda” I think not!
I am washed, lotioned and propped up in a space that is pie shaped, 24” at the pillow end and six feet down it is panning to 48”. My door to the hall is across from my daughter Amy’s cabin. A wash basin folds up not six inches from my right foot. All I need is here in this space.
A wonderful dinner with Aussies – full of politics, wineries and family talks and a promise to meet at breakfast. Then there is the window- more than a metre and open to the outback of Australia. What is out there in the dark? I know it is wild, mysterious and beautiful – nothing less. I will sleep through some of this and be sorry that I did. But I am older now than the last time and can trust Australia to be here when I wake. Good night.
And more from the other pages of books. Here I took pages from a John C Campbell catalog and then printed them using a gelatin plate, stencils and acrylic paint. They were bound into a book that serves no purpose other than to have pretty pages and I thought would be a good sample to inspire students in a printmaking class.
And you can see in my desire to have no waste, the folios are of different widths.
Two days ago I drew these lines in a sketch book. They are my matrix for the tether lines in the new poetry book.
After I photographed the sketch I put it into a photo app program to get more of what I wanted to use going from page to page.
I am going to stop and get some tea. And here is a poem about tea that I will use in the book.
Tea Leaves
I tilt the pot and pour
the last of my herbal tea.
Watch the leaves
settle in the bottom.
Wondering about
the hidden messages
of tea leaves,
I pull the cup closer.
It smells delicious.
And before I know it
I have altered what
they were trying to tell me.
til later…