Elizabeth can do this with her hand:
I can’t. Is this even something human hands DO?
So yeah, more evidence of that alien DNA; it pops up in the oddest places.
What do you suppose the aliens use that particular ability for?
Monthly Archives: December 2008
We’re Sorry, That Number Is No Longer In Service
My friend Dee recently asked me to draw her a faerie picture of her own. I said I’d be happy to; it seemed like a good little project to ease me back into the artwork thing.
Two weeks later I have gotten absolutely nowhere on this picture. Not even a single basic sketch that has any aesthetic merit. I pick up a pencil and stare at my blank sheet of paper and nothing. happens.
It’s like the whole art center of my brain has simply packed up and gone out of business. No no, my brain tells me. We are A Writer now. We are No Longer An Artist. My hand agrees, scrawling listless and unappealing lines when forced to operate a pencil instead of a keyboard.
This is kind of a big deal for me…and also not. Since I was a tiny wee thing I have thought of myself as An Artist, and I think I used to be a pretty decent one. Before I had kids I always just assumed that my fortune lay somewhere down that road. It was who I was.
But now it just doesn’t seem…I don’t know…like something I would enjoy doing. I feel no creative impulse in that direction whatsoever. Nearly everything I love and find beautiful can be captured in a photograph, and for the rare exceptions I’d rather just go with the thousand words.
I’m still trying to do that faerie pic for Dee. I figure if I can accomplish one finished piece of art, it will either wake up that slumbering part of my brain or confirm that it’s shut down for good. I’m okay either way, I just want to know.
Going to go stare at a blank piece of paper some more. It MOCKS me, but I will prevail. Probably.
Categories: Artwork, Friends, Life
5 Comments
Love Is Kind
As I may have mentioned a time or two before, we dearly love Christmas around here. In this house we start listening to Christmas music during that first temperature drop of Autumn, usually sometime in October, and we begin decking the halls the day after Thanksgiving.
This year Luke and Elizabeth were too impatient to wait till morning, so we dragged the tubfuls of Christmas decorations out of the shed and into the house as soon as we all got home Thanksgiving night. The kids set right to work unpacking stuff and strewing it all over the floor and furniture. Actually arranging things in a decorative manner is my job; they just want to play with all the shinies.
On Sunday I got tired of tripping over the half-emptied tubs, so I sorted through them to see what-all could go back into the sheds until later (the tree doesn’t come in until a week before Christmas, for various reasons) and what still needed to be unpacked for immediate hall-decking.
One of my favorite Christmas traditions is buying one special ornament each year to commemorate some recent event or current interest. This began twelve years ago, the first time Steve and I celebrated Christmas as husband and wife. I selected a little “wedding bells” ornament that year:
It was nothing fancy, because we couldn’t afford anything fancy, but much like my $7 sterling-silver engagement ring I loved it for what it symbolized. Or, you know, what I thought it symbolized. Whatever.
So Sunday I was going through the tubs, and I came across a box that holds some of these commemorative ornaments. I looked inside and saw that the kids had already emptied it of its treasures.
Except for the wedding-bells ornament. They had left that tucked away inside the box, presumably so that I wouldn’t see it and be saddened by those memories.
It was a little thing, a small thoughtful gesture, nothing huge. But it touched me. It was a simple little reminder that we’re in this together and we want each other to feel loved and cared for. The whole spirit of Christmas in a minor act of kindness.
Happy Love Thursday, everyone, and happy holidays!
Categories: Christmas, Family, kids, Life, Love, Love Thursday
2 Comments
An Invincible Summer 