spooks

October 31, 2009 | Filed Under ordinary | 1 Comment 

pumpkin pies

October 30, 2009 | Filed Under familial | 1 Comment 

capes, masks, pumpkins (”at last!”), kids with knives. the grass a little cold. those pumpkins were beyond ready to carve, soft, soggy seeds, sticky, so very orange. i knew jude would be upset with his jack-o-lantern for not having the face he was dreaming of. in the end i cut the eyes and eyebrows to be two large eyes together and the day was saved. who needs eyebrows, anyway, i said as he gave me a dirty look.

lola is wearing her ruby slippers tomorrow, a dog in a basket, blue gingham and all that. the boys are as yet undecided. i love it this way, having things in the house to carry and clip and strap onto, costumes they have already made into something that makes them feel as amazing and powerful as they actually are.

accidentals

October 26, 2009 | Filed Under lists, ordinary, royal buffet | 4 Comments 

the newness of weeks, every week a new tree with a hundred branches. on sundays i make lists in my head about all of the new leaves i could possibly turn on monday. somehow monday is the only day that i can turn a new leaf. tomorrow i will be sure to work diligently with the dog. tomorrow i will be sure to do more messy art projects with the kids. tomorrow we will play the piano every day. easy to say, harder to do, life and all getting in the way. and then a monday will go like today, nothing happening much at all, and the entire week is wasted until i can renew my plans next sunday.  a change of perspective is in order, perhaps?

list of leaf turning

cello from violin shop: in the house, recently practiced. rusty is too good a word for these fingers.

halloween goodness all week long, including the carving of pumpkins and creepy foods. suggestions?

dog to first real obedience class on thursday (fingers crossed)

soon: new christmas and winter lovelies in the shop (look towards the end of the week: wreath + ornamentation + little birds mobile)

trying my luck at another giveaway (this is a very good one, on the field guided blog: that light (in white)would be the perfect replacement for the acorn light currently illuminating our otherwise wonderful bedroom). it would be nice if you’d cross your fingers along with me, even if you enter yourself.

the woman named tomorrow

October 24, 2009 | Filed Under extraordinary | 4 Comments 

apple juice on chin and all, i’ll kiss that boy any time. jude, you are such a weirdo and i love it.

this morning, how do i sing of this morning? the morning was already blowing in through the window last night, around two, just before i went to bed. i cleaned up my heaps of paper mess yesterday and actually vacuumed the studio floor so it was hard to go to bed, sitting at a clean desk, twisting wire, cutting out birds, listening to music together in the quiet, the wind telling us about the morning. shortly after this lola woke up and would not go back to sleep. i drifted off as she was galloping a miniature horse on my head and shoulder. great. and then came the morning. the sun in silver and the brightest colored white, those unspeakable trees, the thousandth bird in the window, the sky, the leaves singing of the morning, the night tucked away for later. but the wind, the wind this morning is the wind of poems, wordless and wild, a dream invisible.

baby bumblebee

October 23, 2009 | Filed Under familial, royal buffet | 1 Comment 

fall, are we there yet? i do think we are, though the trees won’t put their colors on. everything is just faded, a little brown, a little yellow, a sorry blushing red. flickr tells me that there are colors in the north. this is what we in the south trade, i suppose, swapping those colors that fill us with orange and gold with the chance to run barefoot at the end of october.

we visited the orchard, a bit too late this year, i’m afraid. most of the trees were empty, the few apples there were rotten. thankfully there were bags of perfect apples up at the shop so the trip was not in vain. jude did come home with a bee sting, which mildly freaked me out since he’s never been stung before and flashes of memories of bee-allergic people ran through my mind. but all was well enough and an orchard-made fresh apple donut (that was hot and sugary and all that it could be both now and evermore) cheered him up. a few more orchard photos can be seen here, if you wish.

ernie is off to fetch chinese. hello, beautiful. hopefully the place around the corner measures up the place that was around the last corner near the old house.

tonight i’m finishing a giant custom wired mobile for a new baby in georgia. i love making giant mobiles and i really love using wire. i wish i could make them for the shop but they’re really scary to ship as they’re so fragile. maybe i’m a bit too controlling, but i really would rather hang them up myself, all of the mobiles, and bend up the wings and do the things that make them look their best. alas and alack i cannot travel along and hang things for trusting royal buffet lovers. but if i could, know that i would, and getting my passport stamped and such would be so much more fun than filling out those customs form at the post.

grass offerings

October 18, 2009 | Filed Under extraordinary | 1 Comment 

the sun spills from the glass of the window onto the couch, yellow and bright, slanted, pooling for the morning. this is where i sit, pushing lincoln logs and rhythm sticks down to the other end, a cup in my hand, the noise of these little people all around.

the back yard, morning white with light, the grass almost silver, pomegranates turning pinker and redder in the corner of the garden. this is where the dog sits, her black coat shining for the sun.

the dirt is still muddy, the trees are still green, the bucket for the sidewalk chalk is full of chalky water. but the sky is now blue, electrified! and blue, few clouds for the dreaming. the wind, pink on our faces flies through the sunlight, the ever taller trees, the ends of our hair. here is the sky unfolding forever. here is the world spinning through beams of gold in space and time. here is a circle of morning, blinding in white, blue, a silvery deep voice on the wind.

fly through my window

October 17, 2009 | Filed Under familial, inspired, ordinary | Leave a Comment 

rainy, cold. we actually close the windows again. we’ve no yellow trees, yet, not entirely, specks of gold, winking cats eyes, in the trees of green. halloween is coming and i’m hoping for leaves underfoot to crunch as we head down the street in anticipation, bags for candy hoisted over their shoulders, masks askew, the clomp of boots, the billowing wave of a cape. yellow, red, orange leaves for halloween. this is not too much to ask, is it?

saturday. the unceasing rain sent ernie home (with coffee) from the shoot. saturdays are dismal when he’s not here, rain or not.

do you have the iphone app for the best camera? if you don’t, you should. it really is the best little thing on my phone.

three places to visit on the interwebs: dos family (love these realistic homes!), the impossible cool (smoking is impossibly cool, or so it would seem), daydream lily (beautiful places and photos and things).

we’ve got it

October 14, 2009 | Filed Under lists | 3 Comments 

flying by

the world in rain, pouring, sprinking, mist and thunder

the dog whines in her kennel, the kids are muddy or restless

lola has had a birthday, more about this to come

should really cut off my hair, it’s quite terrible

entire house clean at once, for once, for a moment

obsessed with recording things on the dvr

sweaters and hoodies flung around the house

made up detective stories

lots of botched ice tea making

half sipped cups of coffee, cold, found all around the house

cold, cold house with windows open and wind blowing

hot drinks, thinking about good hot chocolate

little leatherwings

October 6, 2009 | Filed Under familial, for the mouth, royal buffet | 5 Comments 

i had many visions of fall things for the shop but am coming at them a bit late, it seems. christmas is waving her snowy hands at me and i know that i need skip ahead to make the ornaments and such that have been glittering in the back of my mind. i did manage some bats and an owl mobile, perching owls this time around (although i’m still up to make the owls in flight mobile, just so you know). i was thinking of leaves and things in red, but will have to save them for next year. it’s been a busy time and my energies have had to be elsewhere, everywhere else, all over the spectrum of else and where.

big daddy brought home a huge bag of apples on monday so i just had to bake an apple crisp (or two, ahem), even though the last round of apple crisp was so prolific that i should probably never make it again. the boys pick at the apples, “cooked fruit!” they protest, knowing that ernie doesn’t like cooked fruit, so why should they? i insist on a few meager slivers of apple along with the globs of crisp. i should probably just make some very buttery oatmeal cookies but i really like the apples, and so does lola. and now the house is divided down the middle as big daddy is keen on them, too. so many reasons to make apple crisp.

understand the song of a bird

October 5, 2009 | Filed Under extraordinary, home learning | 1 Comment 

by night, crickets,  hundreds, thousands chirping their last songs before winter, hidden in a planet of places. by day, the morning first and foremost, birds, hundreds, thousands singing and screeching and cheerio-ing the morning like they’ve never seen one before. each day, more birds. the trees, the darkness of the trees home to legions of them.

we read about birds for school, the boys illustrating them. house sparrow, song sparrow, chipping sparrow, white crowned sparrow, most of them sparrows, little and remembered. white breasted, the dark eyed junco, all of them illustrated in crayon. there is seed in the feeder and we see a few, everyone calling them some kind of sparrow, and sometimes a northern cardinal, and simply: a bird.

their songs, though, we cannot yet identify them by their songs. my grandmother used to have a record that we would get out and play, a record of bird songs. the narrator would say the name of the bird and then the bird would sing. the record was green, that vintage green color, and transparent. and there was a book with it, also green. we thought it was the most amazing thing to listen to this record, the birds and their names. i wonder, why, i still can’t identify those songs when i hear them at the window in the new morning, the late morning, the middle of the afternoon?

there are people who walk the woods and know the word of a bird, jotting them down in notebooks, looking them up in field guides. they hike the hills and trees silently and they hunt for these sounds, listening, looking for a glimpse of the singers. my grandmother was a bird watcher, the kind of person who listened and knew. sometimes she knows now, her glassy eyed memory pulling from a drawer with a persnickety handle the name, the song, a story, perhaps. mostly she just watches them, the winter feeder covered in them as they chatter, banter, flicking their wings to turn and fly.