A brief look outside this morning as the sun was coming up. I wanted to take a good look before retreating to the studio for next few days. Although the fog is lifting here in Brasstown North Carolina, I feel it settling over our world. There are new blurred lines of ethics, rights and common decency that have eroded our sense of well being and trust. I just want to look somewhere else for now. Retreat into my own space and make the most of something….anything.
The deer in the shadows below just outside the dining room window this morning sees me watching and after one glance up goes back to what he came for….breakfast of corn and birdseed.
There are lovely details in the half dark of the front yard. The corral branches of a Japanese maple against the grey stone of the house.
Rain drops clinging to branches.
And that silly school of wine bottle fish outside my studio window.
One of them is here on the eighth decade page of my scrapbook in the making.
I will add one more cloth page….left blank of course because it will presume that I will have at least a start on an ninth decade. A nice gauzy eighteen inch square with lots of fraying should capture whatever will be going on then.
Once I get them all stitched to their narrow cloth folios that butt into the spine area of the scrapbook, I will make the hard board covers. The front cover will be toji bound over a thin strip of board to allow the cover and pages to open flat. I love how it feels, how the cloth pages just flop over to the left and I see all the marks of that decade that were happening behind my awareness. This was such a good idea to do this for myself. To make a scrapbook like the one I had as a child where I would glue in pictures of all the things, THINGS, I thought were important to have. And now this….a record of recollections, metaphorical and real, of how I remember a decade….one after the other.
I will leave you with this poem I wrote a couple of years ago and return to my pages, my specimens and other poems and stories waiting in the studio.
Time for Poetry
By Sandy Webster
I don’t know where my pad of paper is
the one where I started to write about aging
I thought it was over there on the corner table – but no
another yellow, lined legal pad
with pages torn away exposing the next blank page
waiting for words.
It is a foggy dreary morning
a day to read poetry
or write it.
the mood is right for both
a mood where we want to wallow in feelings
ours or someone else’s.
Sun, birdsong, a gentle touch
would lighten the load
but what we have is dense air
a crow’s moan and loneliness.
I sit at the desk and lift a pen
The air is heavy
I am heavy
we each feel our weight pulling us downward
as we cling to surfaces that want us to move elsewhere.
It is time for poetry.