"How long have you painted?"

It wasn't the question.  It was the looks on their faces when I answered, "Since the first class", the surprise they voiced, my realization that they thought I'd been doing this difficult frustrating thing for years.

It didn't take away the impatient irritation I felt with myself today after muddling a white oak into a form the teacher and I agreed was best described as a melted tree.  It certainly doesn't clear up the confusing graphite maze that is supposed to become a photorealistic rendering of a place I loved--I still look at the crazy mixed up scribblings on the watercolor sheet stretched on the board as if I wasn't the one who drew every molecule onto its surface.  No, that question can't perform magic.

Well, in fact, maybe it did.  The question was spoken and confidence bloomed where discouragment and impatience with myself had been.

Photorealism class is tomorrow. 

Everyone is registering shock that summer is almost over.  According to the buzz, July never showed up--everyone remembers June, the crazy wet month around here but after that it seems that August just showed up on the chance that no one would notice that we got only four days of July.  Yeah, everyone agrees, there was an Independence Day.  We have vague memories of the town's parade--the little kids riding their decorated bikes, our finest firefighters on their always-clean fire engine making the crowd stick their fingers in their ears to avoid being struck deaf by the siren the driver sets off time after painful time, and the firemen from the town just to the south who bring their rig up to drive down the main drag, too.  Those guys cheerfully taunting our townsfolk with insults about the firefighters' willingness to go slumming to lend our parade some class.

And after that, we draw a blank.  That's all the July anyone can remember. 

Now I suspect that we did have July.  There's no way all the mosquito bites itching up and down my arms and legs could have appeared if July hadn't happened.  I remember driving west to art classes, I remember a woman who looked just like my mother-in-law being in the house for a while.  Jean's shown up for a couple of quick visits, two days every month or so, and there's quite a pile of mail that's grown in the space general neglect left it.    The colony of envelopes and magazines reminds me of a petri dish loaded with bacteria that I grew in my sophomore biology class.  I couldn't stop the bacteria from populating the agar-agar (or whatever that jello-like stuff was) and I had nothing to do with all that pesky mail either.  But I do recall that growing stuff like that takes time.

So I won't demand a re-do of this summer or a recount of long lazy days.  It's time to direct efforts towards returning to work and having students go to school.  This week I'm getting Nephew equipped for dorm life and urging him to buy some clothes.  He'll be competing with a lot of other grubby students for laundry machines.  I think of how his life is going to change at the end of August.  He's going to be challenged to live life on his own terms;  I hope the past year and a half here has given him some experiences that will help him stand strong.

Parker manfully faced summer school and did six hours of math each day, catching up with where he would have been if he'd worked during the regular school year.  He's been sad and close to home for about six months now.  I don't really see anything that will come and lift him back into happiness, but I hope something will.  He's my baby, you know, my baby who towers seven or eight inches taller than I am, my baby who is angry and sad.  This is a tough end to my childraising.

Jean will move from her summer digs to her schoolyear apartment three days after Nephew is moved into his dorm.  I'm casting about for some help with these driving and lugging chores, but it looks like I'm on the moving crew.  She's a sweet daughter still, far from home as she is.  She's looked after her mama a bit this year,  calling and emailing her care instead of being here to offer it.

As for her mother, she's chasing interests she's been saying she wanted to for years.  While weeds overgrow the flowerbeds,  I seem to have gotten myself endeavoring to do things that I have ample experience failing at.  That's okay.  You can't always work on things you can already competently do and expect to grow.  At this point, I'm willing to work and fail and learn.

Maybe the reason I have the impression that lazy summer days didn't show up this year is because I was too busy and unlazy to notice them.    Even so, I do know they've been pretty amazing.

But before we break into song, let me tell you why we're singing this particular song. 

At first it seemed that it wouldn't be too hard to find what I was looking for:  stationery to write a letter on.   Not stationery to write a tiny note on, not stationery that acted over-familiar with the recipient, seeking to share a sly wink  by having naughty little jokes on it, not stationery that was all design and no room to write on it.  Just writing paper that could carry a newsy letter to someone and wouldn't make too big a deal about it.

By the time I checked the stores in my town and found nothing I knew I'd have to pull out the big guns and go to the Impossibly Chic paper store in downtown Big City.  Though it meant leaving my visiting mother-in-law in the care of her son for a few hours, I did drive eastward on the freeway of neverending construction, missing only one vital, but ever-changing exit point.  Once I could get off the freeway there was festival traffic to crawl along with--this weekend is the big Irish Fest hoopla at the lakefront grounds.  Finally I unstuck my car from the hoopla-bound and went to the shop.  Now you may start warming up your voice, because the singing will commence soon.

The Impossibly Chic shop has all kinds of paper goods, nice paper, hard-to-find goods that are sold by a sales force proud to work at the place.  Besides the trendy salespeople, the place was crowded with brides-to-be and their long-suffering mothers, sisters, and best friends.  The long suffering were being dragged through a huge torturous stock of things that only brides-to-be are interested in.  If you're interested in the bride-to-be or feel that you at least have to act like you are, you lash yourself to her and get dragged along.  By the looks on the faces, some of the younger sisters and even some of the mothers were bored silly with the whole wedding planning project.  There were mutinies brewing in Bridal Land.  Luckily I could go to the stationery aisles, safe from impending cat fights.

But here's the thing I learned at the shop today.  Apparently people do not write to each other anymore.  They may sign their names on a card to put onto a present and they might write very brief thank-you notes, mostly it looks like they fill in blanks on invitations and announcements or have them printed,  but people definitely do not write letters. 

The only writing of any length that they do is only done in books called "Journal".  The store was stuffed to the doorways with these "Journal" books.  Apparently in this Journal thing the writer writes to herself or to himself and the writing is read only by himself or herself.  It's an interesting step in the progress of human communication;  Human beings now write only to themselves, thereby sparing other human beings the bother of wading through  misspellings, bad grammar, and ideas that may not be just like theirs.

After a long search I did  find nice big sheets of stationery on a low shelf stuck back in a dark corner and I'm looking forward to filling them with my misspellings, bad grammar, and odd and wispy thoughts.

That calls for a celebratory song and  I have the perfect song.  It was written back when people knew how to write letters, when missives flew back and forth between people the way emails do now.  It's been recorded by the biggies who do not need first names: Sinatra, Martin, Waller, Manilow, Haley (and the Comets, of course). 

Ready?  Let's do it!  Put some pep in it, people:

 Yesterday's hunt was just the kind I like--out in the wilds, hunting down a hard-to-find plant variety to bring home to my yard, searching over acres of leaves and blooms so varied and beautiful that deciding which to bag and which had to be left behind was a real workout.

I knew what I wanted to find.  Tilly's foster mother's front yard planter stopped me dead in my tracks the last time I went to pick my niece up.  What was that plant?  I'd never seen anything like it before.  FosterMom wasn't home but Tilly made good on her promise to find out the information and email it to me.  I did a little research on the web and was thrilled to see that my favorite plant place in all of the world--or at least the small world I know about--has the plant, or so the online catalogue promised.  It's a bit of a drive out there, but the price of gasoline be damned!  I counted the drive as a week's vacation, but spent in one long afternoon and concluded that it was an inexpensive thrill if I thought about it in those terms.

I'd forgotten how mesmerizing the farm was.  I'd forgotten the scents and the old shed, the gift shop that is easily overlooked by eyes dazzled by plant treasure as far as one can walk, pulling a wagon that first seems like a silly indulgence, but which quickly becomes filled and then over-filled with plants.

The first thing that fills your eyes is green in varied shades, then the flowers draw your eyes, and if you take the time to look in the treasures in the furthest corners, you will find things that up until now only existed in your garden dreams.

Here are some of the sights at the farm.  Alas!  I couldn't get the plant I went there to get, but did get it's smaller and less spectacular brother.  The plant lady and I commiserated about how hard it is to hunt down certain game in the fields.  I don't feel too bad about the failure, though.  It just gives me a reason to go back out there and hunt some more.

Sol here shows you the hard-to-find entrance.

This is a part of the day lily collection.  The day lily collection is a small part of the farm's offerings.  I never actually did get to the edges of the place.

I want to live in this sweet little house when I grow up.

This is the smaller variety of sea holly I found.  I continue to look for Big Brother Sea Holly.

 Where does the chlorophyll hide in these beautiful leaves?

 If you are a very good hunter and take hours looking around, you'll find this sweet spot.  I hope the owners don't come up here for a good long time--I don't want to have to leave this.

The latest sketchcrawl was a week ago, but it’s been a busy week, so I’m just getting around to posting it tonight.   Showers had come and gone all day.  It was hot and sticky out and the thing I really wanted to draw was a cool refuge. 

This sweet spot was on the street side of a big old oddly rural looking building in the town next to mine.  The lucky folks who own it and obviously cherish it with care live across the street from a parkway surrounding a river that snakes through green neighborhoods.   Wouldn’t you like to enjoy a quiet hour or two here?

An afternoon at the animal shelter with my niece provided a much less peaceful opportunity to draw.  Kittens don’t sit still for long and Cookie Dough the bunny paused just long enough to identify the next impossible-to-reach place he was going to hide in.

For all kinds of reasons  I didn't take care of that tooth problem.  Some reasons were absolutely valid -- (Really!  I swear they were!) -- and some so thoroughly weak that even I knew I was just plain chicken --(Buckbuckbuckbuckbu-u-uck!) but the result is the same.

Who knew you could get instantaneous service at the big dental place?  All it took was a call there and answering the young receptionist's question with the information that my cheek and undereye get in the way of my seeing other things and BOOM!   The choice was either get into the office pronto or get myself directly to the emergency room where the dental office would probably send me anyway.  I chose the dental office, but prepared for the emergency room and the possibility that I'd end up staying there for a while.  I've been fooled by that emergency room trick before.  They say "ER", but they mean you'll be eating bad hospital food for days and you'll probably leave with less of you than you went in with.

Thanks to having to go in to the dentist on an "emergency" basis, I didn't get to see my regular dentist, Dr. Ladykiller.  He did zip in and frown into my mouth at the request of Dr. Young-Yikes!, but Dr. Young-Yikes! is clearly in charge.  She's the one who warned me to take ALL of the antibiotics ON TIME and to go to the hospital if that doesn't work.  She's the one who told me that she didn't want to scare me, but my eye is at some risk and if the infection gets into that, the next desination for the infection is my brain.  She succeeded in impressing me with the seriousness of my situation, a task which intense pain hadn't been able to do.  She failed in her quest not to scare me, though.  I'm pretty fond of my eye and I'm so fond of my brain that my eye is jealous of it.  The potential that it will be invaded did the trick.  Yes, she scared me.

Monday morning Dr. Dr. Young-Yikes!-Husband and I are meeting at 9:30 and Dr. Dr. Y-Y!-H will inflict untold pain upon me.  I intend to be in Madison in my art class at 9 AM on Tuesday morning, but Young-Yikes! was skeptical that I'll make it there.

All of this hasn't changed my weekend plans beyond adding a baker's dozen of yucky capsules large enough to choke a horse into my menu.  I have a Tuesday class to prepare for.  I have vanishing points to identify, value studies to do, and sketch journal pages to fill.

Oh, yeah.  And some high octane pain pills to make it all possible.  Oh yeahhhhhh...