Lots To Show Today

Posted on by Sandy Webster

Lee and I found this passion flower on the trail today. So it had to be the drawing this morning. Here are the last four days.

A few brown dead things

from along the trail and some

from on the driveway.

 

Couple more dead leaves

dried, curled, rumpled and holey

– just right for drawing.

 

A very ratty

mud-filled feather is cleaner

as drawn on the page.

 

The passion flower

remedy for sleeplessness

is difficult to draw.

 

I finished my sewing as far as I could take it the other day. Now the studio is cleaned up of all the scraps, machine, ironing board, iron, pins, threads, scissors, etc. I miss the needles as soon as I put them away. I might just have to piece together some scraps if for no other reason than to keep stitching.

On the idea of sewing clothes. The thing that I like the best when looking at those who are modeling clothes is the looseness of them. And yes, the models are thin and everything looks loose on them. But when you go to look at larger models wearing clothes, they all seem to be in stretched out to the max knits. Every shirt catches on their bum. It just does not look good nor comfortable. So given a choice, I am going for comfortable. The linen pants I sewed are loose so they create a breeze when I walk. The shirts are big enough to fall away in the back and not get hung up. I added asymmetrical bottom pieces to the short vests I made a couple of years ago. I like the two tone of them. I like how they flare away from the body. I like how they looked layered already. I am not sure I could find anything in the stores that looked like these things I sewed. And I really like how I have been influenced by friends in Australia who just keep putting pieces together until it can be worn out in public.

So once sewed, I threw them all in the new washing machine and dryer to see how that worked on the linens. Then I ironed them and put them on hangers together with matching pants. I think I might do that with all my clothes. Just hang them together so I don’t have to go looking for what goes with what.

I agree with the stories I hear about how Covid and isolation has caused us to become more casual in our clothing tastes. We want to stay with comfortable. Even when this is finally over I don’t see myself buying much in the way of new clothes or shoes. I know what I like and have made sure to have enough to get by. Lots to give away when I get out to give away.

Other things along the trail this past few days.

 

Bambi.

His mom.

And Thumper.

I found some more faces to work into the fairy book.

This one almost ready to fall off the tree.

One carved in stone.

And this one giving me the side-eye.

I did start another page in the Fairy Book. And wonder what to do when it is finished. If I go to edition a small number of them I may just try to do it myself. The Stoat Story cost me not only the printing cost but just shy of $100 to get the pages shipped from Asheville to here…..a two hour drive but something I really can not do right now with Lee. I also think I would like to use a more fluttery paper to go with the subject matter…we will see how I go on that.

The books I sent to Australia are beginning to show up now. So far they are pleased to get them and make donations to the Kangaroo Island Wildlife Center.

And then the other morning while waiting for Lee to finish up in the bathroom down by the studio before we continued our walk, I looked close at one of the pieces that did not make the burial. It is a forty inch square canvas with much stitched and glued to the surface. Lots of shellac afterwards. It was the original idea for Lost Peaces about our penchant for going to war. And while I was staring into the textures I took some close up pictures.

Here a peace dove is shot down.

He ends up in the specimen drawer with others, all have the reasons for failure tied to their stiff and curled feet.

And this hole. I love the doorway-ness of it. “Holes are for taking things out and putting things in”….I read that somewhere. I also think these colors are luscious. I miss the days of just picking up bits and pieces and sticking them onto a surface with the intention of telling a story. I do not do this anymore because there are enough stories out there already and we can only listen to so much before everything becomes a slow meaningless hum in the background of our lives. But this, this one small part of a bigger humming speaks volumes to me. It is loaded with memories of those who were telling big stories at the same time. The ones I loved sharing ideas with….the passions we had to make our own noise in our work. I miss them. I miss the feeling. I want to walk through this opening and return to then. I really do.

And this other bit. The fragility of cloth and thread and paper in the company of organized metal pieces. Hard nails and screws that have had a hard time of it. They all, every piece of this work, seem exhausted by the efforts of keeping peace. And yet some of us just pick up the needle and thread and try like hell to hold it all together. I need to look at this work more often. I need to see the hopefulness and not the destruction. As these times have revealed, some things are worth holding onto and others are simply not.

And a small note on how Lee is doing. He is traveling a bit more into his past. At least twice a week he will hide something he thinks is necessary for his trip “back home”. Yesterday he told me that the house had changed and nothing was familiar….he wanted to know where the other things were…where the other people were. I said, “Let’s fix dinner.”

And yesterday I also finished reading the Australian mystery, The Dry, to him. He does not know so much what the story is about but likes the sound of my voice describing other things, other places. Next I will read him the latest Louise Penny novel about Inspector Gamache. It comes on the first of September.

Thank you to those who ask and those who keep in touch by sending cards and newsy notes. Last week he hid the bag he keeps them all in so I know he values them.

Til later with more fairies, more clothes I used to wear, and maybe even a new bit of stitching.

 

 

A Little Respite

Posted on by Sandy Webster

It is interesting how going into this fairy book and looking for what is already there can be so comforting. So the lesson must be that whatever I am searching for is right here….I just need to breathe deep and start looking.

We had a little help with that when our masseuse showed up in costume, walked the trail with us, blessed the space we live on and then flitted off. Wonderful David.

I have always made the time to do the drawings a day.

Another big one

from the wing on the other

side of the turkey.

 

A dirty feather

left by an otherwise clean

well-groomed mourning dove.

 

A river birch tree

has leaves that look like these here

from the ends of stems.

 

A hardy weed with

dark green leaves and lavender

blossoms sprouting forth.

 

And just this morning waiting for the caregiver to arrive I had time to draw some saddle shoes in the My Life in Clothes book.

I heard from our long term care insurance contact this morning that Lee will not have to be evaluated for another six months. The covid virus makes it too difficult to do in-person interviews. So he is good until late February and then another decision will be made. We also have finally met our ninety days in requirements so from now on all those expenses of having someone look after him will be paid for. This is a very good thing. For the three afternoons a week it has cost about $1500 per month. And that is also the amount of a new washing machine and dryer this month. So good new all around from the insurance company.

I notice that I have had to do things in such a hurry now with Lee’s dementia. I race through so I can help get him ready for the next thing I have to hurry up with. I plan every move from the time I get out of bed. Get his toothbrush ready and make sure he has put some clothes on before he heads out to get the coffee I put on right after putting paste on the toothbrush. Next hurry my way through a shower, get dressed to join him in the kitchen. Tune into whoever “is in the box”….friends on facebook to read to him. Get out to feed the deer and birds right before daylight because that is when they come in. Then get Lee into the shower and have clean clothes ready to help him with when he gets out. Then go fix our breakfast before having to hold his tee shirt or tell him his shorts are on backwards. Then breakfast, then the news with a cup of coffee. Then the dishes, clean up. Go for our walk on the trail. Return to start the drawing a day with whatever we found on our walk. Then feed the cats, the fish in the pond, maybe do laundry, or maybe just the ironing. Then get him pointed in a direction that I think will hold his interest and I can make necessary phone calls. I think about having a drink but it is only 9:30 in the morning.

Plan dinner, make sure things are out of the freezer, remind him not to go up where the chiggers will bite him, tell him again that the neighbor is not pushing the property line closer to us, get him interested in something else. Walk to the mailbox to put a DVD in and hope that another one comes with today’s mail. Fix lunch, eat lunch, clean up lunch. Have a cookie with the noon news on what horrendous thing the president of our country is up to today….this can become an obsession as you wait for him to simply implode. While thinking about it I pull another part off the advent calendar. He is wearing considerably less now…some hair gone, private parts exposed, footless and almost legless.

I might go into the yard and while I fill the fish pond once again, I will help him line up some rocks, convince him to take them from one line and put them into another. If it is a caregiver’s day, I make sure the TV is tuned to the cop channel and scoot downstairs to see what needs to be done. So far this past two weeks I have one pair of pants and the other that just need the hems today. I brought down some other tops I made to see if I can use the extra linens of grey and darker grey on them to change their look.

I find I am wearing the same things in the five days between laundry. Lee is too. Clothes wear out quicker if you wear them so much. I look at the other women in line when I go fully masked to pick up a take out. At first it used to bother me that I might look a bit tattered, wrinkled….seems my favorite clothes are those I have added patches to over spills or loose linen that is a bundle of wrinkles by the time I get out of the car. My hair is not combed….it hasn’t been in in the last six months. I don’t put on earrings….seems a bit silly when you get the rest of the picture. Anyway, those other women are not wrinkled, they are not patched….but they are masked for the most part and keep six feet away from me and anyone else. They are not my people. I am now totally convinced that my real people are down in Australia….a land that taught me how to be comfortable and be myself. A land that calls me “gorgeous” and makes me believe it……no matter how wrinkled and somewhat messy I may appear. Maybe we could call it frazzled. That would be better.

It is time to clean out the closet. I noticed that yesterday we tore Lee’s half completely apart three different times looking for his electric razor and cord. He said he put it in there so it would be ready when he goes…..goes where? I explained again that we can’t go anywhere, we are going to stay here for now. But the search went on. I was about to just order another one when I pulled out the towel drawer again and lifted up the towels. There it was. I lectured him on the importance of keeping it on the counter and plugged in…he got it ….. at least for now.

I glance at the time….if it is near 3 o’clock, then I can have some wine. If it is later and dinner is all set except the heating up, I might have a scotch or gin and tonic. He will have the gin and tonic. Anything that requires sipping, he has lost the concept. Sometimes he will ask for a wine and then dump it down the sink. I have learned to pour just the tiniest bit in his glass.

So now I had better head into the studio where the sewing machine is waiting for me to put the hems in. The ironing board is wondering what to do next, the pincushion is losing its pins, the patterns are waiting to go back into their baskets, some mending of even older clothes than I have on now are waiting to be “fixed”.

So til later.

I am trying not to think too hard on my friend’s surgery that she was finally able to get scheduled this morning. The whole idea of being in a hospital now with covid is frightening.

Off to those hems….and a sewing machine that is making noises like it could use a good cleaning….it has been at least ten years or more since I found someone to do that.

Bye..

 

Rainy Days Are Not Good For Dementia

Posted on by Sandy Webster

I managed to get the one basil plant I have trimmed and chopped with olive oil to make cubes for the freezer. Then on to a loaf of grain bread turned into french toast for the freezer.

A brief walk outside between showers revealed that Lee had decided to take all the recycle bottles and line parts of the driveway. We got that picked up so it did not look like there was a wild party out there. Next we took all the ferns out to get some of that nice rain and he brings in a massive shop broom to sweep up the leaves on the porch. I get him sorted with the vacuum and then realize he has taken it out on the deck in puddles to vacuum whatever he sees there. I put it away.  A few more forgettings where he is going to do something and what it is he would do when he got there and he is now out on part of the trail moving rocks. I am not going to look. Later.

Yesterday he brought me another large turkey wing feather from a walk with the latest caregiver. She did so much talking and looking around that I only got one new pair of pants sewn. But there is always next time. Next week we go back to one that has more energy to do things with him and a new one to come on Friday. Hoping we get as good as we did with the old company.

Anyway back to turkeys.

Here you can see those big wing feathers being stretched out.

And the last four days of drawings with one of those feathers on a page.

What a pretty weed!

More yellow blooms will pop from

the very tall tops.

 

A little sweet pea –

wild and trying to escape

the blackberry thorns.

Much too big to fit

on the two pages I have

for drawing this one.

 

An old bamboo leaf

caught my eye as the perfect

subject for today.

Lee is back in with two mud covered small feathers. I will draw them tomorrow. Now I have him settled in front of the TV with the cop shows channel. It will hold his interest until he drops off in an afternoon nap.

Lately he has forgotten how to eat some things. Sandwiches are dismantled and eaten with a fork after cutting up into very tiny pieces. If I remember to demonstrate how to pick it up and bite into it, he will follow suit. For sure our eating out days are over. This covid isolation has come at a good time.

I did get a little time to work on the fairy book.

Our evenings are spent watching whatever I could remember to record or a Netflix series. We are finishing up the last season of a Showtime series called The Affair. I have never seen a program that is so long and has not one character that you care a whit about. Privileged, entitled, self-indulged, thoughtless, witless, each and every one of them. And there are several covering three generations. And why do I watch it? One, I am hoping the screen writers will change something to make the characters at the very least tolerable, and frankly it has the most energetic and athletic sex scenes I have ever seen. How they pull that off with so many in the room while filming is a mystery. I actually prefer the British series where such matters are implied rather than exposed. I will be glad when this one ends.

The rain will be moving back in soon and if Lee has not taken a nap, I will find a book to read aloud to him. We can sit on the porch, listen to the rain and the sound of my voice and have an early glass of wine.  Dinner will be the last lasagna I put up in the freezer. Tomorrow I will make more.

This is a strange blog going from the kitchen, to keeping track of Lee, to turkeys, to drawings, to caregivers, to pathetic TV series, and end up back in the kitchen. I can do better. Promise.

Til later.

 

Another Start of Another Book – My Life in Clothes

Posted on by Sandy Webster

I took the odd leftover pages from some of my contact printing that was mostly used for The Stoat Story and bound them together in five signatures using the coptic stitch. Next I put some of the dyed silk shirt that is over thirty years old and also was colored with some of those same grocery store Eucalyptus leaves and pod and tailor tacked them into place here and there on the pages.

Now I had something to draw into besides just the plain pages. I thought it would be fun to draw my life in clothes. It would be something else besides the Fairy Book to work on and something different from my Drawings a Day books. The fun part is trying to remember the first clothes you wore that left such an impression that you never forgot them…whether you liked them or not!

Here is the inside cover with the rhyme that my mother said several times to me.

There was a little girl

who had a little curl

right in the middle of her forehead.

When she was good she was very, very good.

And when she was bad, she was horrid.

I am about three here and wearing the dreaded Sun Bonnet Sue hat my mother made me wear whenever out in the sun. I remember picking strawberries and having to wear some cute little sundress as well. These drawings are from memory and not old photographs, that I really hate looking at.

Then things got better.

My father rigged up an old mailbox with a saddle, mounted deer head and mop to be my horse. I had a brand new cowgirl outfit that probably contributed to my love of fringe through the years. I so wanted to be a cowboy back then at about five years old. And very soon ditched the skirt for those paired jeans and shirts….plaid flannel-lined denim jeans to match the plaid flannel shirt.

On the left are my hat, caps, six shooter and holster. These years were heaven for me. The only horse I had after the mailbox was my imaginary horse, White Cloud.

Today while Lee is with his new caregiver, I had a chance to move on a few years to the dreadful cotillion dress that I had to wear to a dance that I wanted no part of. The drawing is of me standing on the toilet to stay hidden from the chaperones out looking for me. I stayed there until the dance was over. I will post that later with some equally dreadful shoes from childhood.

 

I am going to tack on a story here because there does not seem to be another place to put it.

When last in Australia, March of 2019, I joked with a friend in Hobart that I just needed to find a man to marry when Lee was no longer with me. Someone in Australia so I could just move there….preferably Tasmania.

We went off to Bruny Island for a fun day with another old friend, and stopped at a place for a flat white and muffin. I told the young fellow that I was willing to pay $1,000 just to get the ball rolling. He laughed and said he and I could start in Dubai. I lost interest.

But my friend reminded me that same sex marriages were legal now in Australia and she was single.

Well, we always were quite compatible…ever since we met in the late 90’s at basket workshops I was teaching down under. Her house was always open to me for staying over. She always picked me up at the airport, always got me off when it was time to leave. She always took me to the best shops, got me to where the workshops were being held, fed me well, had mutual friends over for good visits….she is simply the best.

So when she suggested that her and I could get married if it came to that, here is what she said. “I do love you, Sandy. And I’d marry you, but also I could really use the money.” We laughed at that. We laughed at so many things over the years. I can never think of her without just grinning and remembering some funny thing she said.

I remembered her in the middle of the night when I would wake up thinking how very special she is. So just short of six weeks ago, I sent her the check for $1,000 US funds. In AUD it would be almost worth an additional $400. I sent it in a lovely botanically illustrated card done by another friend’s mother, and just used an international stamp for postage.

I asked my two kids if they thought it was a dumb thing to do. I told them I wanted to use my own money from traveling and teaching down under. They both had met Jude on their own trips joining me in Australia over the years, and thought the idea was a good one and to go ahead and do it. The memory of her makes them smile too.

I thought it would be there in two weeks tops. She never messaged me about it. After a month I thought it had become lost and I might be out the money altogether. Mail was coming from Australia within four weeks, so I was a bit worried that I should have gotten her particulars on her bank account instead of being so impulsive. But I so wanted to imagine her face when she opened the envelope.

Well, the other day she received it! Just a bit over five weeks to get there. She says it is the best marriage proposal she ever got and is excitedly thinking of the things she needs that this will help with.  Jude gets the money, I get to smile a whole lot more and when we get married is anyone’s guess.

Here we are in a tavern on Bruny Island.

So the moral to the story is, “Just do it!” Especially if it wakes you up in the middle of the night and keeps you smiling. Just do it.

Til later.