Plein air paintings, studio art and lessons
Friday was Funday, and we went to the thrift store to hunt for treasure. Or postpone cleaning the house and catching up on laundry. Either way you look at it, we discovered (among several other great finds) another pull-toy gem: a bouncy, lumbering wooden Stegasaurus. Chas walked it like a little dog while Ford and I bowled in the front yard.
It was another cool day. Ford ground up juniper-cedar boughs and berries with mortar and pestle, making forest floor to mix with glue and make collages:
Austin awoke and fell back to sleep again tonight under the clouds; it was invigorating. It was the first noticeable cold front of the season. Please do not notice that I was taking this picture while driving.
Ford has a new piece of jewelry, the hydroxide molecule ring. Actually, it’s a small keyring with, oh, I don’t know, some sort of ball attached to it. Something like that. And I wasn’t driving when I took this picture, I was at a stoplight. Anyway, he removed it from a little chotchkie that Damon brought home, put it on his finger, and asked me what kind of molecule it looked like. Ford is into molecular models, atomic models, skeletal models. I can thank Bill Nye. Thank you, Bill Nye! You rock! Except when Ford is bouncing off the furniture at 4pm, when I am so very tired in the afternoon, proclaiming (no, shouting) that he is an electron. But it was very cute when he dissected his birthday balloons into protons and neutrons. Of course, the whole bunch of them was the nucleus. Thank you, Bill Nye!
The last of the Gayfeather is in bloom, but most has gone to seed and left to drape the new stars:… 
the grasses.
The Muscadines are ripe,
and the Beautyberries are shouting.
Chas is no longer satisfied with the way crayons and paints taste; now, he is interested in their use as tools. Fingerpaints are in order, although he tends to dislike using materials and tools in ways that are different from his older brother.
Yet, in so many ways, Chas is very different from Ford. Today I suffered multiple minor heart attacks as I caught Chas atop various perches, each time rescuing him from a fall: The back deck has a seat-railing around the perimeter, and he is able to climb atop the railing and prepare for launch off the other side (and down five feet to impale himself on juniper-cedar bramble). For example.
I am frustrated that we can’t pile the kids into the Airstream and drive up East for the next few months. I had more serenity back then: the cabinets were impossible for a child to open, there were no “dropoffs,” everything was so…ship shape. Eighty square feet of control. Minimal cleanup. Simple. Irresponsible. So much less baggage than just the two images below, in and of themselves:
The piece of land, our whole quarter acre of it–I’m so overwhelmed with that right now, I can only sit in my car to photograph it, let alone walk up to a rock on site and watch the sun set, or plant a few Cinderella pumpkin seeds in the middle of summer, or place a few good luck totems around here and there. Something about the land is haunting me and I can’t put my finger on it. Am I just rebelling? Not enough shade? Too many fire ants? Burrs? Mosquitoes? Slippery kaliche on the walk down? Not enough privacy to enjoy a few minutes of meditation, what with the big peach McMansion next door? I’m disappointed that I’m just not clicking with the property, even though we’ve had it for a few months, now.