Handmade is best, hands down

Made water bottle cozies for the kids and my husband for Christmas this year out of recycled wool sweaters and Sculpey clay. I think the animals and skulls are my favorites. I had mushrooms for the green one but at the last minute decided to save them for another project. I have so many.

Art has gone to the dogs

Started another pastel picture (can't seem to call it a painting, maybe because it's not wet!) for a friend. I have another one in the works. Still mean to finish the Ms. Rushmore piece and then I want to begin on another portrait of Sue with her daughters. I don't have any skills to speak of with this medium, but playing with the colors has sure been a lot of fun! Here's Rascal in four pictures so far.

Art 4 Love

Here's where I'm going to leave it for a few days. I'm not sure what I want to do with it now. I either like the background or I want to change it. I can't decide what to do with the faces. So I'm going to do nothing for a while and see where that takes me. This is going on the wall where I'll see it in passing. Sometimes looking at a thing out the side of your eye can help when staring it dead on doesn't.

And this is what I started with this morning:

Art 4 Love

So, I started over AGAIN, because the last version was just too dark and creepy for me. Plus, I tried this underpainting technique and it wasn't until I started putting flesh tones over the top of the purple that I really got it, figured out what it was supposed to accomplish and then I was like, OH. So I wanted to try it again except in a purposeful way instead of an accidental one.

It's coming along pretty well, I think. I hope to finish it today sometime. I'm definitely enjoying the process, trying not to work too hard on just one area before heading out to the next. Definitely going to want to do more of this. Any requests?

Art 4 Love

I got some more work done on this early. I learned that I have to put in the dark stuff first so I did some of that and now the process makes more sense to me. Definitely need more practice working on faces. It's hard not to overlay personality on there at the same time as the color, but I'll figure it out, or try again.

Art 4 Love

Progress, of a sort. I took my friend Cherryl's suggestion to add another friend to the pile. My husband walked through this morning and thought it looked like Mt. Rushmore, so I've officially named it "Ms. Rushmore." More work to do, but it's starting to get interesting.

Brick layers

Last weekend I watched as my husband pulled up chain link fence posts from around our house. There were nine posts that needed to come out, each one with a twenty pound slug of cement around the bottom. I felt for him, but I have too much respect for my back to have offered to help. Earlier he'd found a black snake under a piece of old linoleum in the corner by the house. The snake must've been cold because it waited there while he went inside to get his camera and snap a hundred pictures of it before finally slithering off somewhere. The snake was the other reason I wasn't out there.

We're working on putting in a patio right outside the back door. I've been dreaming of one since we moved here. We hadn't done much about it before this for two good reasons: we weren't sure what kind of patio we wanted to install and we didn't have any money to put one in anyway.

Last week we eliminated both obstacles when we found the bricks for our project in a nearby roadbed that the city is in the process of widening and repaving. Underneath layers of concrete and asphalt was a nine foot wide swath of bricks, laid down sometime around the beginning of the 20th century, part of a road that goes through Jacksonville south to St. Augustine and beyond.

Some of the bricks have diamonds molded into the tops. Some say Graves B'ham Ala on them, some say Southern Clay Mfg Co. Some don't say anything at all. The colors range from deep red to yellowish to orange. A few are chipped, most are intact, some look as though they were taken out of the mold before they'd quite set up and laid across a curved surface to cool. These warped ones are my favorites.

By the time we were through hauling we had about a thousand bricks. A guy we met while grubbing around in the dirt told us that each brick weighs about ten pounds. It made me feel a whole lot tireder to know this. It made my youngest son feel a whole lot stronger. He started hefting them two at a time after that.

There were quite a few people out there digging in the roadbed besides us. One guy, Mike, was loading about sixty bricks at a time into his little white sports car. He was rueful about it. "My buddy was supposed to come with his truck," he said. Mike told us his wife was not crazy about all the bricks he'd been bringing home and stacking around his house. This was in sharp contrast to my husband's wife, me, who not only approved of free bricks but was actually helping to lever them out. For the record, I only accompanied my husband on eight trips. He and the boys did the rest on their own. I'm a cheapskate, but I'm a cheapskate with a bad back. See above.

Some people were collecting them to sell. I found an e-bay listing with links to information about the Old Brick Road and the Dixie Highway. Vitreous bricks were considered a big step up from the sea shells and sand normally used for road surfacing and Jacksonville alone had seven miles of brick road. My two boys were more interested in what the seller was getting for them, which was a buck and a quarter each, in lots of 250, delivery extra.

Once we had the bricks we started wondering about where we could get the sand to cement the things when they were all laid out. My husband suggested Lowe's but I thought, why spoil a perfectly free patio project by buying dirt for it?

So my first idea was to dig a hole in the yard, since Florida is basically a big sandbox floating on the ocean. "Didn't you want a koi pond?" I asked my husband hopefully, but he said he was just thinking about something small and trough-like, and nothing as big as we'd need to get enough sand to fill in all the cracks between the bricks, as well as a two inch layer over the pea gravel.

Then I remembered the drainage ditch out behind the house. There's a shoulder along it just behind our fence that's a favorite all terrain path for the local teenagers and their grandparents' golf carts. If we dug our hole there and covered it up with palm fronds we could get all the free sand we'd ever need as well as put an end to off road golf carting. My husband agreed with all of this plan except the part where I trap my neighbors' children in a pit and so sometime this week I expect to put my sons to work hauling dirt and sifting it in their free time.

The downside to free bricks is that it's pretty labor intensive. Recently I took a rock hammer and chipped old asphalt off bricks for a couple hours. If the boys and I do fifty a day for the next twenty days they'll be all cleaned up and ready to lay down in a few weeks. By the time I've gone through them all I'll feel as though I know them personally.

I'm looking forward (probably pretty far forward) to sitting out on the patio in the morning, sipping my coffee and imagining the sounds of horses' hooves clippety clopping over those bricks, seeing in my mind old Model T's with families out for a drive, clattering over the same stretch of road years later. It would have been a lot different back then. Not nearly as many people. There would have been a lot more trees and shade and the smell of swamp just about everywhere.

Now that we have all the bricks we need I'm anxious to finish our patio. The bricks are patient, however. They've waited a hundred years to be found by us. Another week or two won't matter. It's me that can hardly wait.

Art 4 Love

This is going to be a series of creative endeavors that I'll complete for love and not money. I do enough of the other already.

My first official project is a pastel painting of me and two friends, Cherryl and Dorothy, giggling after lunch (or was it before lunch?). Here's the first picture. More to come.

Company's coming! (Now is the perfect time to panic!)

I'm expecting company next week so, true to form, I'm now seeing my house through panic-colored glasses. All those things that I meant to get to someday have now become a lot more urgent. Nothing in my house looks the same as it did before I knew I was going to be entertaining and my brain has been writing post-it notes to itself. (Remind boys to pull out those two rusty posts by the front steps. Lay new tile in the bathroom floor.)

I love company, really I do. Since we've moved we're a lot farther away from most of our friends and relatives so having people over is a rare treat. I especially like sitting with everybody at our dining room table, looking through boxes of photos, drinking a cup of coffee and eating something sweet. (Remember to pick up something sweet at the bakery section in the grocery store. Or maybe make raised cinnamon rolls. Do I even own yeast?)

Last time we had a visitor it was a teenager from France and she stayed with us for six weeks. I re-grouted my bathroom shower in her honor, not that she noticed. I mean, she was a teenager. (Re-paint both bathrooms? Or would it be faster to wallpaper?)

I work myself up into this housekeeping tizzy a whole week before everyone's due to show up, cleaning things that I'd never bother to clean otherwise, like under my refrigerator, and organizing things that nobody will ever see, like storage closets and filing cabinets. (Vacuum out all the window sills in the house. Where did all those dead bugs come from?)

Pretty soon I'm snapping at my children to clean their rooms and snarling at my husband to organize the tool shed. Don't they realize how essential it is that our house be perfect in every way before company comes? (Should I go buy a "Bed in a Bag" at K-mart or see if I can find a complete sheet/bedspread/dust ruffle set that's hole-free and actually fits the bed in the guest room?)

Besides the usual housekeeping chores I occasionally catch myself contemplating a whole house makeover or a new landscaping project. (Maybe I can get my neighbor to come pour a cement patio in the back tomorrow. That'll give me a week while it sets up to go buy a table and chairs and maybe find a swordfish on a plaque to jazz it up a little.)

Underneath my panicked outer self I realize how dumb I'm being. I know that the reason people visit is because they want to spend time with us and not because they want to critique my housekeeping and decorating skills. (Order cable for the week that they're here? Or stick with seven channels and adjusting the antenna every time you change stations?)

The outcome to all this frenzied preparation is always the same. I basically chase my own tail right up until the last 24 hours before my company arrives. That's when I abandon all hope of achieving the perfect Better Homes & Gardens House and settle for the Disinfected Domicile instead. At the last moment I race through the house, spritz all available surfaces with bleach and throw all the clutter into the nearest closet. In the end, it's a relief to run out of time for anything but the bare minimum. (Get more bleach. Build more closets.)

My daughter says if I entertained more I wouldn't be as prone to freaking out prior to a visit. I think she's right, but my pool of available dinner party guests is kind of thin right now. I need to be more like Elwood P. Dowd in the movie "Harvey" and start inviting more people over to my house. Elwood never worried about what his house looked like. He just enjoyed talking to people. Besides, he had his sister to keep things up for him. Now that I think of it I can completely understand why she seemed so on edge all the time. It was the thought of all that company coming. (Invite more friends and family to Florida.)

Welcome to Gator Country

Garage sale season has started. It's the weather. Once the heat breaks, the little white cardboard signs come out, and all you have to do is drive up the street to find a little something that you didn't know you needed until you saw it in someone's yard under a sign marked, "Everything on this blanket - half off!"

Last Saturday we found a neighborhood sale down a cul de sac on a small lake. One couple was selling the man's extensive collection of hand tools ("Can't see good enough to use 'em") and if you bought something his wife would throw in absolutely free your choice of allen wrenches from a box of about a hundred. My husband bought a grinder from the man for twenty dollars. He showed it to our neighbor who promptly told him he could have gotten a brand new one for half the price. It might have come to blows soon after but then our neighbor wisely decided it was a better model than what he'd first thought so they're still speaking to each other.

While we were out bargain hunting we met a woman who had pictures of her sons and husband standing next to an eight foot alligator (strung up under a tree and presumably dead) and also of her 18 month old grandson perched on the alligator's back (cut down from the tree and definitely dead). The one of her grandson reminded me of a picture of my brother as a child, posed on a pony, except that in his case the pony merely looked bored and not dead at all.

The woman was very proud of the pictures and was carrying them from house to house showing them to everyone she met. This is clearly something that people do down here, pose next to alligators. My neighbor has shown me a picture of him and his cousins and his uncle, standing next to not just one, but two dead alligators. I noticed that everyone that the woman showed the pictures to seemed admiring and matter of fact about it.

To me, alligators are an alien life form that's best viewed from a distance, say behind a 2 inch plate glass window at a zoo or aquarium. It makes me go all squirmy inside to think about putting a toddler on an alligator's back and taking a picture of the occasion, I don't care how dead it is. Or maybe it's because it's dead that it's so disturbing, except that if it had been alive I'm pretty sure that would have been worse.

I didn't ask the woman with the pictures where her husband and sons had shot the alligator. I didn't ask her whether her family would be eating any part of it or whether they would have it stuffed and mounted or whether they would take the skin and make shoes and purses from it. I realize now I missed an opportunity to learn something more about the culture where I live.

But at the time, I was speechless with shock. For one, in Michigan, when people show you pictures of their grandkids they're usually posed in front of fake autumn scenes with colorful silk leaves artfully scattered around the foreground and a backdrop of split rail fencing with maybe a cute woodland creature, like a squirrel or chipmunk, perched on top. There are no dead reptiles anywhere in the picture.

I've never been one for staged family photos myself. It could be this is just a new trend and I'm out of the loop. Maybe the next new thing in family photography is dead bears or wolves or badgers with all the kids dressed in their Sunday best and parked on the carcass. It's nothing I'd want framed and hanging in the living room, but you never know. Different people have different ideas about what's attractive in a family portrait.

For two, I'm just not used to thinking of alligators as something you hunt and then pose beside. Deer? Sure. Bear? Absolutely. Rabbits? Got a couple pictures of those.

I'll know next time how to react. I figure it's bound to happen again. According to the Florida Fish & Wildlife website there are a million alligators in Florida. Every week in the paper there's a story about some poor sod losing an arm or a leg to an alligator. Granted, the sod in question is usually high as a kite and swimming in gator infested swamp at four in the morning, so it seems as though if you take the minimum precautions, i.e., stay sober and don't go swimming in alligator bogs at night, chances are good you won't be eaten by an alligator or probably even nibbled on very much.

The signs warning you not to feed them are at boat landings at every state park we've visited so far. It definitely makes you cautious about letting your dog off the leash to get a drink. (Quick! How do you call an alligator? Here, Fido!) I took a picture last month of my husband holding our dog on a leash while she quenched her thirst at the Bulow River State Park. He's scanning the river and so are my two boys standing on the dock by the landing. The dog is the only one in the shot not worried about becoming alligator snack food. It's probably the closest I'll get to having a family portrait with an alligator in it, even if it's only the idea of an alligator that's in the picture and not the real, live dead one, like other people have. I think I'll have it framed.

Having a wonderful time. Wish I was there.

I vacationed in Ludington this past summer. It was great to walk to the lighthouse, visit favorite restaurants and just pretend for a week that I lived in a small town again. I found myself falling into old habits like talking to people I didn't know and consequently made a friend of the woman working at the laundromat. I know she's my friend because she asked me to hold the fort while she took off in her car to run some errands. People don't do that in Jacksonville, Florida, which is where I live now.

It's been a year since I moved to the south and I'm getting used to it here, but there are lots of things I miss about Ludington.

I miss walking in the woods and not worrying about what could possibly land on my head and bite me. Here there are banana spiders that grow all year round. A particularly impressive specimen used to be by the gate to the back yard. It was nerve wracking to walk past something the size of your hand with eight long legs on it, but it's funny how you miss things after they're gone. Something ate it last night and all that's left are the legs. The web is still intact. So I'm thinking it had to be another spider that did it, and it's gotta be bigger than my head. At least, now it is.

I miss swimming in fresh water. Admittedly, you can only do that five days of the year in Lake Michigan without getting hypothermia, but at least it doesn't make you sticky afterward and there's absolutely nothing in there that will eat you. Here the ocean is warm from April until December, but there are a few caveats. You have to stay away from river mouths during spawning season because those are favorite hunting grounds for sharks and if you see jellyfish on the shore, it's a clear indicator that they're in the water, too. Some kind person walking along the beach told me that if you peed on the part of your body where you got a jellyfish sting it would stop hurting. This is good to know since it will make it less embarrassing when I lose control of myself from the pain when I do get stung. I can just say I was applying first aid.

I miss four seasons. There are no seasons here. Well, okay, there are, but they name them differently. Instead of winter, fall, spring and summer, it's hot, damn hot, jungle hot, and Africa hot.

I miss Ludington-scaled things, like the distance to downtown. In Ludington, downtown was three blocks away. Here, it's a half hour drive, then another twenty minutes to find a place to park, then a brisk ten minute walk across a parking lot that's the temperature of the surface of the sun to get to your final destination.

I miss going to the store and having six or eight people I know stop and say hello to me. Here, I go to the same two grocery stores twice a week and the cashiers ask me for my ID every single time. Even I'm beginning to doubt I am who I say I am.

I miss throwing my children outdoors to play. In Ludington I did this three times a day. They didn't always go, but I made the attempt anyway. Here I don't have the heart to do it. For one, right now it's Africa hot out there and for two, there are snakes. My husband keeps finding these four foot long snake skins outside in the yard. If I stopped admiring them do you think he'd stop bringing them to show to me? Last weekend I added quarter round molding to the regular molding in the bedrooms, just as an added barrier. You never know. Maybe snakes like to get out of the heat, too.

Most of all I miss my friends. The best part of our trip was seeing everyone and catching up. Email is nice but it's no substitute for sitting in the Brewpub or Chef John's and cackling loudly enough that the people at the table next to you want in on the joke.

I'm planning to visit Ludington again next year, but this time for two weeks instead of just one. That'll give me time to squeeze in a few more conversations, another beautiful sunset or two and maybe even an extra shift at the laundromat.

Cat study

Let the cat out this morning.

She peers as me, trying to figure out what I am. I reach out and cup her small head in my hand, stroke her back, all the way to her tail, surprised at the softness, and guess that my daughter took a brush to her the night before. She begins to purr.

She's wobbly on her feet, back legs collapsing with every step. Still, she twitches her tail and wanders off around the corner of the house, looking for something interesting to play with. Which is funny, considering that she's probably completely blind.

She's a study for all old people on the verge of death. A while ago I started buying canned cat food on the advice of the veterinarian. He thought she'd appreciate having something soft to eat. Then I made the mistake of changing the brand of soft food on her and she up and quit eating all together. For a couple of days she dwindled, until I figured it out. She wasn't sick, she just didn't recognize the other stuff as food, or at least, it wasn't HER food. So I replaced the new stuff with the old stuff and she went right back to lapping it up, as though she was starving, which, of course, she was.

I felt bad afterwards, that it took me so long to notice.

We've had her with us for a long, long time. Now and again we amuse ourselves trying to decide how old she is. 20? 22? 25? Old, anyway. She was around before the kids, I know this, because I remember being very sensitive to the smell of the cat food I used to have to feed them. This was before she was an only cat and one of two. The other cat, Nancy, caught some infection from her cheap cat food and thereafter, they both had to go on an expensive cat food diet, which used to give me nausea when I was pregnant. I couldn't even have the cats in the same room with me because the smell of the cat food permeated their whole bodies. I remember chasing them out of the living room. Eventually they learned to avoid me.

After I had my daughter it wasn't so bad, but by then I had other responsibilities and so there was no time for playing with cats anyway.

Now I only have the one cat left and she's not long for this world. Of course, we've written her off a few times before this and she always comes back. Once, shortly after we'd moved here she disappeared out the back door and didn't come home for days. I thought she'd been killed for sure, by an owl maybe or hit by a car. I thought someone else had taken her into their home. That was what I told the kids.

The day that I decided to clean up the litterbox for the last time and dump it in the trash was the day that she wandered back home, none the worse for her adventure. Then I knew what had happened. She'd stayed with someone else, but they didn't know the trick of living with her and could only put up with her midnight howling for a few days before they turned the gift cat loose again. She came home and we went back to our routine of buying her wet food ("How many days do you think she'll live? 6 cans? 8 cans?") and scooping her box and locking her in the back room before retiring so that when she wakes up in the middle of the night, howling because she can't remember where she is, we don't hear her at all.

Snakes

Today I plan to look out the bathroom window at the concrete steps to nowhere and see if the snake the bug man told me about is napping there in the sun. He said it was about a yard long and showed me by spreading his hands apart and then he said, "It's just a regular garden snake." He said he saw another one poke its head up out of the hole in the steps when he came out of the crawl space underneath the house. "I saw a rodent nest down in the crawl space but it looked pretty old. Probably the snakes have cleaned them out," he said. I called my husband to tell him about the snakes. I knew he'd be tickled.

I thought my sons would like to know about them, too, except I predicted Sam would refuse to leave the house again for fear of getting bit. But he just said, "Black snakes? Those are the good kind," and let it go.

I took a picture of one of them from the bathroom window yesterday. Its head was up as though it was listening. I think if I'd tried to sneak up on it from the back door it probably would've been long gone by the time I got around the corner. When I looked at the picture in iPhoto it looked larger than I imagined and smaller, too.

Steve says that a woman at work, Linda, told him that if you try to corner a black snake it will sometimes shake the very tip of its tail in the leaves to simulate a rattlesnake's rattle to try to scare you off. Part of me wants to see and hear this and part of me is convinced that the snake will chase me.

I remember a story that my dad used to tell me about when he was a boy and he and some friends convinced a boy to take a whip like stick and snap it at a nest of dozing blue racer snakes. "They came right after him and he was running so fast to get away that he got clear across the creek without getting his feet wet!" said Dad, chuckling. I could see the sun coming through the bright green leaves and smell the warm dirt along the path when he'd tell that story. I could see the boys, barefoot at the creek and I could hear the way they talked and the casual setting up of a friend to go do something that probably wouldn't kill him but would definitely give him something to remember the day by.

Lunches with Sue

Every Tuesday morning for the past ten years I’d get a call from my friend, Sue.

“Hello?”
“Yeah, it’s me. Got time for lunch?”
“Sure. Where do you wanna go?”
“What’s open?”
“I dunno.”
“The Brew Pub’s always open. Let’s go there.”
"All right. Say about 11:45?”
“Sounds good. See you then.”

Meeting in the middle of the day in the middle of the week was a ritual for us, a habit we’d formed long ago and found hard to break. Going to lunch together was so much a part of our lives that if we missed a Tuesday it would throw off the rest of our week and inevitably one of us would call the other to try to arrange another day.

“How about Wednesday?”
“No, that’s when I have lunch with Joyce.”
“Well, Thursday is Rotary, so that’s out.”
“What are you doing Friday?”
“Friday works. Is The Grand open?”
“We'll find out.”

Once we opted for breakfast instead right after Sue had pulled a twelve hour shift at the hospital but it was no good. Twenty minutes after we sat down her eyes drooped shut and I made her go home before she fell asleep in her diet coke.

We ate in every restaurant in town, although after a few years we couldn’t always remember where we’d eaten last.

“We ate there last week.”
“Did we? I forgot.”
Pause.
“Well, we could eat there again.”
“Okay. This time I’ll sit facing the door.”

It wasn’t the place or the food that mattered, although what we ordered was ritualized, too, at least for Sue. Chicken salad croissant at Scotty’s and quiche with a muffin at Chef John’s and ice tea no lemon everywhere. Now and again she’d go crazy and order a hamburger and I’d tease her about how daring she was.

At lunch we talked about the people closest to us. We talked about our kids, our parents and our friends, laying out their lives like place settings on the table. She asked me about my Dad and I listened to her worries about her mother. We bragged about our children’s triumphs and commiserated over our friends' incomprehensible desires to do things we’d never do in a million years.

And we laughed. Sue had a great, deep throated laugh that came straight up from her diaphragm. I was addicted to the sound of it. I saved up things to tell her over lunch that might make her laugh. I fattened my phrases and practiced stories in my head. And she always rewarded my efforts with her laughter.

She never questioned my facts or doubted my accounts of how a thing occurred, either. If I exaggerated here or there in the interest of making a point she accepted it. Sue was a loyal listener.

She was forgiving, too. I was late for lunch nine times out of ten, yet she never scolded me for it. She’d bring a book instead. When I’d finally arrive I’d find her patiently reading. Once, when a friend planned to join us, Sue called her ahead of time and advised her to bring a book, too.

I took lunches with Sue for granted until a couple of years ago when one of her daughters thanked me for being such a good friend to her Mom.

“Me?” I thought. “But I just have lunch with her. Every week. Rain, shine, sleet or off season.”

When I knew I was moving away the tenor of our lunch conversations changed a little. Each meal became a bit like the Last Supper in its significance.

“What’ll I do when you’re gone?” Sue asked and I tried to put it in perspective for her, patting her hand and telling her it wasn’t like I was leaving the country for heaven's sake and I’d be back. I was not yet aware of how much our hour and a half a week meant to her or to me. I was still backing away from Sue's gift, her friendship, her love.

The week before I moved, after ten years of sharing everything about ourselves -- our hopes, fears, dreams -- I told her I loved her. You’d think it’d be easier to say.

I figured we’d stay in touch via email or snail mail or by phone. I planned to see Sue once or twice a year when I traveled north or she traveled south. I was already cataloging new places to take Sue to lunch when she finally got down to see me. I thought we’d have our lunches, and each other, for a long time to come.

In the end, it wasn’t me who left, but Sue. Sue who stopped writing when she became too frail to sit at her computer, too weak to move a pen across the paper. Then, last week, she couldn’t form the words she needed to say over the phone. I said them for her.

“I’m coming."
"I love you."
"Goodbye.”

Sue died three days later, after a long battle with breast cancer. I didn't make it in time to see her before she died. But I know she's waiting for me somewhere, a book in her hand.