These Beautiful Days

Once in a blue moon I have an entire day just for me, something I so craved in the time before I retired. I have just finished two quilts and readied them for the 'long-armed quilting lady'. She and I will decide about what quilting design, what thread colors, and I will leave these off at her house, confident that they will be perfect and ready for binding in a few weeks. It was like a bolt of magic when I discovered that I did not have to quilt everything on my sewing machine- an arduous and not very creative endeavor. Nor, did I have to quilt everything by hand. So, these two are off to be quilted with the top and the insides of the batting and the bottom layer. So cool!

I love the process of garnering the fabrics, adjusting the overall idea, and putting it all together - and then changing it! Because I always make quilts for specific people, I love thinking hard about them all the while I work.

So, my day today was my own, in a clean studio, looking forward to my Tai Chi class in the evening.

I am still so in love with this beautiful place where I live.With every pivot you see a beautiful and lush view. I enjoy all the gardens we have planted and nurtured over the years. It takes an enormous amount of work but it is worth it. I find that I cannot be in the vegetable garden long before I am melting in the heat. But then I look out into the pasture and see four deer, and I am surrounded by butterflies and hummingbirds. Even the cows, who annoy me, have that sweet breath and their legs all together are wonderful art.

Here is a broadside I carved and printed many years ago, and I still like it. This is Walt Whitman, a magnificent American poet. Even more than it did then, so many years ago when I was making woodcuts, it seems relevant to my life now.

Our cows are still out there in front of the studio trying to eat the zinnias and generally being bad and leaving meadow muffins in the road. 

But they are part of the life force, along with the almost deafening frog calls, the raccoons we trap and release, the clever squirrels who always defeat us when we put up bird feeders, the dozens of hummingbirds who swoop and buzz around our six nectar feeders.

I love the black racer snakes who are so domestically inclined and lounge around the buildings here in their office hours between ten and four. I love the mud wasps who make such intricate dwellings everywhere on the sides of buildings and I admire the persistence of wrens who nest in such improbable places.

Most of all, I love the many wild flowers in my purview.

As Walt Whitman said, I am staggered. I am staggered by the sheer enormity and magnificence of it all here in our home in the Green Swamp.