Poetry Friday: A Vacation Memoir

Happy Poetry Friday everyone!!!! Its been ages since I wrote a poem. My poety self disappeared for a bit there under knee x-rays and layers of homeschool curricula. Am back and am not to be beaten down. Feeling very inspired by all the determined women who made office during the recent election. If they can all manage to accomplish political careers and break glass ceilings then I will battle to squeak out a poem on Fridays. Huzzah!

This week I am thinking of our recent trip to Hawaii. We spent some time visiting A's brother Miq and his wife, the inimitable  Penny (visiting family is a good excuse for trips to exotic locales!) and then we also took half the vacation to island hop about on our own and explore. We came to Hawaii for our honeymoon ten years ago so we were returning after a decade to not only enjoy the tropical breeze but also to remember where we started and celebrate having made it this far, back in a kind of grand circle. It was kind of a family vacation/second honeymoon/relative visiting trip...just a little of everything in there.

It was fun to go back as a painter. I feel like it changes the way I see so much of life...I notice amazing colors, the way light glows along an edge, and the soft quality of the air in a vista. One of things that really has stayed in my mind was the fruit. Its a beautifully agricultural and lush place so there's no shortage of ripe, juicy, glistening fruits everywhere. The fruits we have here are equally lovely really, there's just something very fresh about things you don't have where you live. This is what I am remembering now as the weather crisps and blusters outside our house and December looms large.

A Ripe Visit 

Staying in their teak, jungle bungalow
Was beautiful, like the breakfast papaya:
Glistening crescents of spoon-soft gold;
Florals melting into the walls of your mouth. 
They smiled easily and shared their croquet set,
The balls rolling into a dip under the banana tree.
Life there was warm and soft, rippling onward.
We stripped magenta ramubutans slowly and read
Languid stories to the children about dragon gold.
I got up one morning with the roosters and
Watched dawn rise over corrugated metal to the
Nutty snap of a longan skin between my teeth.
We made outings like good vacationers do 
To Chinatown for highlighter pink dragonfruit
To a local farm stand for starfruit with a song
Like a raspberry catching the crest of a sunset.
And to the pineapple plantation where the fruit
Rises like trophies out of a vast plain of thorns.
We picked guavas in a baking crater and ate them
Dripping juice on the gearshift in the front seat.
We found one wild lilikoi, plump and dangling from
Vines tangled with lipstick, wild fuchsia blooms.
That night when we sawed it open at the table
And passed around sips of the jellied seeds
They told us about a friend's newborn daughter
Improbably named after the passionate little fruit.
On the last morning of our visit, hustling for the plane
We ate breakfast together standing in the kitchen
Scooping up avocado flesh with spoons
And then hurling dripping mango into our mouths.
Desperate to eat up paradise before our flight.
We drove out of their bouncing lane and
Saw them framed by an enormous santol tree
Wrapping his arms around them in the sun.

Our host today for Poetry Friday is Amy over at The Poem Farm. Please drop by and savor some of the other contributions if you find yourself sitting with a mug of tea on Saturday morning in a quiet hour. A little poetry does a body good.

Have a beautiful weekend!

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We're back from a breathtaking trip through the tropical islands of Hawaii....with four children and a spouse on crutches. Life is insane. Homeschooling is very occupying suddenly. The leaves are falling and blushing and glowing. I am feeling very busy and full and wondering how to shift things about and make a little bit of spare space. Space suddenly seems in short supply. Am mulling over more yoga, a permanent Sabbath day, quiet hours, early rising, group meditation and other ideas.

 And the camera has gone off with a friendly postman to a Canon hospital and will be laid up for four to six weeks. There are photos on my phone waiting to be collated and labelled and shared out with here floating in the universe but so far I have not got that far down the To Do List.

Am still stuck on #302 Do Laundry and will let you know when I manage to arrive at a further point.

Until then....xoxoxo

Peek In My Portfolio

It's been quite a while since I talked about my painting, but don't worry, that's not because I've quit! It's just because summer is insane and I forget to share. I am also having a little bit a lull right now because our painting group is on a kind of holiday for a few weeks but I fully expect to continue painting as soon as I get the chance. I thought I'd do a little bit of painting outside of our meetings while we were all adjourned but I am amazed to discover that I have done none. Zip. Ah well...I'm growing big juicy tomatoes and thinking fondly of my brushes.
Here's the latest stuff I've painted, right before our recent break.

Part of the Grand Teton Range, I forget which peak.

This painting and the next three I painted while were on our family vacation this summer out at Yellowstone. I took my brush roll, my paintbox and a small portable watercolor block and painted using a little water in a soda bottle with a cap, whenever the group (we were with a family reunion) had a moment of downtime. It worked beautifully and was really exhilerating, some of the first in-situ work I've done. Another great thing about it was that it forced me to work quickly. I tend to get really caught up in all the slow, picky details of paintings and sometimes overwork things as a result. I'd like to become more quick and suggestive. These paintings were step in that direction.

We stopped for a picnic lunch at this lake and I painted while everyone else finished eating after I was done.

This tree was outside my cabin window and I sat at a desk and painted it one morning while the sun got warm and bright.

This IS the cabin window. Really hard to paint the fog on the windows, the light in the drapes and the shape of the log walls.

This is right around the corner from our house, I stopped the car to look at these amazing tree full of red berries a couple of times before I realized that I needed to paint them.

The above painting was another realy fun experiment in "looseness" as an artist. I worked on all those houses and the stone wall and the angles and geometry and then I took my brush with that bulls-eye red paint and I splattered the berries on those trees! EEP! It was kind of scary and super fun and it just happened to work.

This is one of my really classic-style landscapes. This wonderful tree arches over the little harbor on the lake where my in-laws live.

This painting was really fun too, kind of classic and I really struggled to make it feel like it had depth instead of just feeling flat. I love the colors...that bang of orange on the kayak and all that grey-blue next to it with the sun hitting all those gold/greens at the top. This painting feels like a moment I want to be in.

I love how this painting turned out. The glass jars, 3D effect of all those rows and the peach slices floating inside the containers as well as the metallic lids were a huge challenge but also a major triumph.

 Just as I was starting the canned peaches painting above, and just finishing the apricots in a bucket, below, a fellow painter friend wandered past and casually noted that they were companion works. How funny is it that here I was, painting this golden fruit sequentially and I hadn't even noticed that they "went together." Interesting the themes that develop.

This frame is a sort of goldy-orange metal frame, sleek and simple to counter-balance the sort of country feel of the painting and help it stay more versitile while playing on the same color themes. Love that gold ring of matting he put around the painting.

And now a little framing report. I have a wonderful, creative, kind and very expensive framer. I love, love, love his work but I seriously need to start selling some stuff to afford suiting up many more of my pieces. I thought I'd show you how a few of my most recent paintings ended up looking when he'd had his turn with them.

This painting was framed in a deep shadow-box style frame, and would look great with a small light shining on it to make the sunset scene glow. The colors washed out funny here but you get a view of the thick, chunky frame.

Here's how the painting actually looks. Pretty cool, eh?

And then this last one, which is now actually hanging on the wall in my kitchen! Hooray! I was surprised but pleased when he framed it in a big thick white frame. It's a bit hard to see on the white wall but it is a lovely maybe inch and half to two inch thick edge, and the matting is a big thick white cut on an angle around the painting. He made a pretty small little floral watercolor that could have felt like an afterthough into a much more dramatic, weighty piece.

So, that's what I've got at the moment. I can't wait to update again soon. I hope I'll have all kinds of lovely things to share in two shakes. This whole "taking breaks" thing is getting to me.

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Cook Ahead Cape Cod

It is high summer and we are headed to Cape Cod for a small weekend away, (Ah, blissful place!) but we're also looking to save money. (Haha! On Cape Cod!) We have a motel room with a little refrigerator and a microwave, should something need re-heating, and I'm planning to do all the ahead cooking I can to save the restaurant bills and snacking stops one inevitably makes on these trips.

I want to be like Ma Ingalls, Mrs. Appleyard the Gilbreth Family...women in days of yore when they never left on a trip without a bursting hamper, full of all manner of good things for munching. That has to be doable, right?

I need ideas! What can I make ahead and pack in our cooler and then serve my family between dips in the sea? So far I've thought of:

• Peach turnovers (we picked peaches this past weekend and THEN got peaches from our CSA)
• Hard boiled eggs
• A wedge of nice cheese
• Carrot sticks
• Peanut butter and honey sandwiches, sliced in little squares for snack or meals for little hands.
• Steamed green beans from our garden, tossed with a little soy sauce
• (your idea here)
• (your idea here)
• (your idea here)
• (your idea here)
• (your idea here)
• (your idea here)
• (your idea here)
• (your idea here)
• (your idea here)

So, what ya'll got? Throw me a brainstorm! I'm waiting, in my kitchen, wooden spoon in hand!

Afterglow

Our dining room, here in our rehab-project colonial is in exactly the right spot to receive somewhat mystical evening sunshine, exactly as dinner is being served. It's a wonderful thing, as thought some thoughtful someone has zoomed in on your table and is spotlighting each dish as you serve it. Makes me look forward to cooking, and have a boost of energy and goodwill on nights when I drag myself to the kitchen.

In other news, we are back home from our family reunion with A's extended relations in Yellowstone National Park, and our family is one pair of cowboy boots richer. Ru and Dee picked them out together since they'll be hand-me-down treasures after our biggest boy is done wearing them. Was secretly very pleased that they wanted the viney stiching ones. :)

The trip was one of our personal best as a nuclear family, only one small interpersonal melt-down which was pretty briskly mended and overall low stress/high enjoyment. The extended cousiney, relative type interaction was well above par and left everyone with a much fonder regard at the end of it all.

We all were somewhat frantically counting the years until the next big get-together and thinking "Three years??? Too long....how else can we see these people?" You know you have a cool family if???? A has cool family. I feel lucky to be along for the ride. And I do hope that we end up getting at least one round of house guests out of the week together. There is also talk of a wild, bluegrass tour with the rels, sometime in 2013. Am dreaming about that!

Home From Florida

Just back home again after a week in sometimes sunny, sometimes torrentially rainy, Florida. Great to get away, wonderful to be with family and inspiring to experience beauty in new little ways. Nothing in this world quite like tent camping in the rain to make you ultra-grateful for your own dry bed. :)

Not a whole lot of anything happening around here today except for laundry and schedule resuming and extra naps when we can grab them; time to share a few select pix from our little family rendezvous in The Sunshine State.

And a grand time was had by all! 

Next stop...Laundry Room! See ya'll on the flip side.