grass

I have fallen in love with meadows.  It began with a day trip to Skyline Drive and a walk through Big Meadows in late August.  Now I have found that right in my neighborhood, the Spotsylvania Courthouse Battlefield has beautiful fields of grass and flowers alive with buzzing critters. 

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.   -Walt Whitman

Big sisters are the crab grass in the lawn of life.  -Charles Schulz

today's poem

Wavelength

God speaks to me in dreams.

 Mostly my nights are the wanderings

of a resting brain as it ruminates

over life's salad of conversation and thoughts.

 Now and then the channel is changed.

I hear His voice

and He takes me flying,

the recurring dream that weaves

a bright thread through my life,

among the kaleidoscope of day dreams. 

first place in "Abstraction and Reality", national juried show at Fredericksburg Center for the Creative Arts!

overlook in Shenandoah National Park

Below us the rolling hills and patchwork farms
lay under a sea 
of blue green atmosphere,
with here and there a hill rising up through it
like an island.  Faraway in a smudged place land 
meets cream milk white sky
and clouds are calved.
They scatter quickly and grow toward us.

The rocks are warm with three or four hours of sunlight.
Grasses beyond the low wall rustle with ripening clouds of seed heads.
Locusts buzz.  Pine trees rise distinct and solitary
before so much space
fluting outward.

All we can do is stand and look
for we lack the wings needed to fall on the wind. 

camping in Shenandoah National Park

We just got home from our first tent camping trip in years- an overnight in Big Meadows campground.  While I was doing this sketch in the meadow I was visited by a mama deer and her twin fawns.

My favorite part of camping is sleeping in the tent.  Not that I usually get much sleep, I mostly lie awake and listen to the sounds.  We were camping near the edge of the mountain and all night the wind blew through the oak trees.  Midway through the night I heard coyotes and later when the wind died down the owls.  What I didn't want to hear was bears.  We had already seen three that day in trees, on the ground...  I did eventually drift off because when I woke up it was incredibly bright and clear.

two pastels of Bermuda

palm trees and banana leaves

I’ve been doing pastels and paintings of the sun soaked, colorful houses of St. George, Bermuda.  A four hundred year old harbor town, tropical twin of Jamestown.  The town’s houses are roofed white with limestone whitewash, an ingenious method of waterproofing, cooling the house and disinfecting the rainwater as it runs down and into cisterns.  I found this little intersection houses in an alley with a palm tree growing up among them.   It’s squat, rich, rough, burlap draped trunk rises up under the sweeps of palm fronds. 

 

I love the awkward, messy quality of banana leaves.  When we lived in Key West years ago, we had a small tree in our backyard.  It was the favorite haunt of green lizards.  I would trim the old, ragged leaves off and give them to the children to play with, not knowing that the clear sap when it gets on your clothes turns brown after being washed.  It was several months before we solved that mystery.