Tag Archives: watercolor

Headlines from the Birdfeeder

My daughter Savannah bought me a birdfeeder camera a couple of Christmases ago, and I am not yet tired of it. Every single day of my life, the pictures it captures fill me up with joy. They make me laugh and make be wonder. They tug at my heartstrings, delight me, and spark my creativity.

When the birds land on one of the perches in front of the seed bin, the camera makes a little click that gets their attention, and for a split second they often gaze right into the lens as if posing. The camera captures gorgeous, jaw-dropping, hilarious portraits. It documents movement and life in my yoga garden. And the pictures remind me that most days I don’t have to venture beyond my little corner of the earth to feel at one with the universe.

How ’bout I buy you big sunflower seed?
No, I’m not hiding anything behind my back!
Humans are wrong, I am sooooo cute!
Grackles like birdfeeders, too!
Cheeheeheeheehee, I got the best one!

I anthropomorphize everything. Dogs, squirrels, plants, my car (I love you, Mary Arizona, especially now that you are paid off and all mine!). Everything has feelings to me, even the blue plate I broke last week in the sink. My empathy knows no bounds, and I have made my peace with this odd fact about myself. I used to suppress this tendency and only talk to squirrels, for example, when I was alone. Our society makes you feel weird for caring about the feelings of animals (especially when people around you are eating them). They make fun of you for cooing to the flowers in the bouquet you bought at Aldi and naming and talking to your car, although I know lots of people who have named their cars and talk to them when the roads are slick or the heater is slow to get warm.

But I will apologize no more. Just last night I felt sad for the calf in a food picture my sister sent me (why she keeps sending her vegetarian sister pictures of the animals she is eating is a topic for another blog!). I no longer care what people think of me for feeling the wilt of the tulips in my yard, for worrying about a sparrow being picked on, or for crying over a dead red fox squirrel in the road.

My warm embrace of the emotional connection to all living things, past and present, has come to live in my newfound joy of artmaking. It is alive in the writing of my recent book Loving Lincoln. It was validated by the intensive yoga training I just completed. And it is manifested each day in my reactions to the life captured on the birdfeeder camera, which, I admit, has taken my anthropomorphizing of birds to a whole new level.

The camera has inspired art.

Here I come!
Watercolor
Watercolor
Ipad Drawing
Odd bird taking out the recycling.
Watercolor in my Engagement Calendar

The camera captures me out in the yard, which is always good for a laugh or a piece of art.

Pastel

The camera also inspires stories. The photographs captured by the birdfeeder camera are often scenes from real-life human (I mean bird) drama. The birds land and fly away, jockey for position, tweet and squawk at each other, box out, rebound, defend, and dine peacefully. All walks of life. All colors and colorful personalities. I feel like the birds want me to write their stories, although not all of them would agree, I suppose, with my interpretation of the facts.

Here are a few headlines from the last few months…

Obnoxious Cub Fan Gets Served

Jack Sparrow, the neighborhood baseball bully picked the wrong Cardinal to trash talk this evening. He’s had run-ins before, but the dinner seeds got a little bit jammed down his throat this time. Talk about just desserts, they’ll be talking about this take-down in the backyard eastern redbud for months. No comment or defense from Jackie Sparrow, who witnessed the altercation. Just look at her, looking on, pretending not to know him—everyone in the trees knows she can’t take that husband of hers anywhere. 

Move Over, Blue-footed Booby

There is a new Yellow-footed Old Bird in town who is the talk of Monroe Ave. gossip. Five pairs of morning doves have been hanging around lately just hoping for her to make an appearance with that strange and wonderful big jug she keeps in her crop. There are also reports of house finches, titmice, wrens, cardinals, and the odd blue jay stopping by regularly in hopes of getting a peek and a taste, truth be told. There is a crow who watches from high in the oak tree two houses down, cawing loudly to alert the bird world to the arrival of the Yellow-footed Old Bird. And a red-bellied woodpecker dining on suet was overhead telling the downy woodpecker on a nearby branch: “The blue-footed booby is no longer my favorite other bird!

Near Miss at Stace-Place International

A Northern American Cardinal had to make an emergency landing today at Stace-Place International. He was coming in from the rotting sumac tree, flying low across the fence, when he noticed an obstructed perch. “It was like a big black blob there,” said Cardinal, “All I could see was black and sparkling flecks like stars!” The European Starling who had been hogging up the perch told authorities he was not, in fact, trying to create an international incident. He was just trying to eat a couple of seeds in peace. The Cardinal landed safely on a Cedar branch resting on a garden shed. No one was hurt in the incident, and no tickets were issued.

Domestic Disturbance at Stace-Place

“Jesus, Phyllis, I’m trying to eat here,” screamed Mr. House this morning, as the sparrows gathered for third breakfast (or was it pre-lunch?). Witnesses told a reporter quick on the scene that Mrs. House did seem a little randy. “It is spring, you know,” said the chickadee, “We’re all feeling it right now.” The pair of mourning doves on the ground below the feeder were not interested in sparrow TMI, though, and flew off to a nearby fence to cuddle and coo in private. Once the authorities arrived, Mr. and Mrs. House were peacefully eating with the other sparrows, and no one was willing to take time from the meal to offer any more details of the kerfuffle.

Lady Cardinal Finally Wins

Yesterday morning all the neighborhood was abuzz with the news that Mrs. Cardinal had finally beaten Mr. Cardinal to breakfast. 6:00 a.m. on the dot, was her winning time. “It was still kinda dark!” chimed the titmouse, who was up early to catch a flight to a birdfeeder down the block. Mrs. Cardinal was so pleased with her accomplishment, she could barely eat, she said. But she did eat, oh, yes, she did, and and later reported: “Best seed I ever had, and I will see you here first tomorrow and the next day and the next day after that!” The crow in the oak tree just squawked. “Fat chance, orange beak.” Sadly, the crow was right, and Mrs. Crow had to eat crow the next morning. Mr. Cardinal arrived at 5:59 a.m. to take back the win. Mrs. Cardinal later admitted to friends, however, that she was really much happier sleeping in and waiting for the morning rush. “Eating alone in the dark is no fun at all!”

Hello, you!

Young Sparrow Monopolizes the Photo Booth

Yesterday afternoon, a young house sparrow parked herself in front of the camera in the Stace-Place photo booth and refused to leave. She just kept sitting there, setting off the sensor, smiling and cheesing and leaning in too close. The grackle offered to move her, but all the women (a wren, a cardinal, and four house sparrows) said to leave her alone. “She deserves a little time to feel good about herself,” chirped the lady starling, “We’re all feeling the stress this spring.” The lady finch added: “Yeah, with global warming and crazy orange politics and schizophrenic Illinois weather and that insane young cooper’s hawk trying to take us all out, we women could all use a little “me” time.

Falling

I stepped outside into the warm sun and despite the brisk Autumn air, too cold for bare legs, my summer-loving heart was smiling. My freckled face was a feeling-good grin and giant sunshades, framed by freshly crimped hair. I was puffed up and downstate pretty in my Lotus-for-POTUS t-shirt, wool lumberjacket, leggings, and purple Allbirds sneakers with chunky white soles. I was a little full of myself if I am honest; and that vanity pause to congratulate my casual, put-together cool was my downfall.

I should have gone back into the house to humble up and check my conceit at the door instead of skipping down my porch steps and up the sidewalk toward the town square.

Because thirty seconds later, I was falling, tumbling down in instantaneous slow motion, landing hard on my right knee, a victim of my mirth and the broken, sidewalk slate at the corner of my front garden.

My hands burned from catching myself on the ground, but I pressed them down and rolled myself over onto my back. I grimaced. A flaming hematoma was blooming on my knee. I looked up at the blue sky and accepted my prostrate position. I breathed into the vulnerability of my human, middle-aged body.

One minute you’re open-hearted and skipping. The next minute you’re flat on your back and humbled. Hello, life, you bastard. I didn’t need this metaphor from the cosmos, by the way. I know full well that every day and life itself is up and down and sideways. And falling.

Some people say: “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” I now will always say: “when life brings you down on your knees, roll over onto your back and have a little think.”

I cared not that someone might see me and look away or pass by and not see me at all. I did not rush myself to get up and get going. I am not British. I do not keep calm and carry on. I am a grieving mother. I take my time to gather all the good and the bad and the ugly before continuing on my way. In part, I stayed still on the ground because I worried about my ability to get up and walk. But mostly, I just wanted to be still for awhile, feeling the cold ground holding me up.

A European starling flew overhead. I imagined that her affected screech was for me. A greeting or acknowledgment, a shared moment between fragile creatures confronting their particular days.

I noticed the sedum turning fall, the grass still emerald, house sparrows conferencing in the barberry bush, and a dog barking far off in the distance.

I rubbed the dirt from my hands. I touched the leggings on my throbbing knee. The fabric was not torn, but I could feel the swelling and the scraped skin underneath it.

I thought about Mack and the election and the novel waiting for me at the public library’s circulation desk. I thought about the difficult week I had just had, my lovely birthday party with my family, and the quiet, restful, lazy weekend in front of me. I thought about summer gone, fall’s arrival, and the coming of winter. I thought about falling and walking. I thought about my dogs inside the house and the pumpkin-bucket of Halloween candy on my dining room table.

When I was ready on my own terms, I stood up, gingerly testing my knee. It was boil sore but bravely bearing my weight. I was hobbled but strong enough to get on with my day. I was no longer full of myself, but I was okay.

Life is hard. It knocks us down. It leaves us with bruises. We are always falling, I suppose, in this way or that way. Falling reminds us to be in the moment, that we are human, and we are alive.

Dissonance

Recently I began a new project that combines writing and painting. Since I am a comfortable writer but a novice, unskilled painter, I planned to write a series of short essays and then illustrate them with watercolor. My therapist suggested that I experiment with the reverse, paint first and then write an essay. It was a terrifying prospect, so I put it off until  two weeks ago when I had an idea for a safe test, a photograph of myself doing a cartwheel in my yoga garden.

The painting is ridiculous, much like the photograph, which I thought would provoke a funny essay about how bad I am at painting, how weird it is that I like being physically upside down, and how unusual it is to be a 57-year-old woman who can and frequently does turn cartwheels. But it was not a humorous essay, even as my right humerus bone in the painting is a hoot of disproportion. The essay had nothing at all to do with my joy of cartwheels and the good rush of blood to my head. The words that came out of me instead were an emotional outpouring of how upside down I have felt all this year. Not the good kind of upside down, like a downward dog or a cartwheel, but a bad upside down like discombobulated. Dizzy. Dazed and confused. The kind of upside down that makes me want to vomit.

Grief and loneliness and the uncertainty of this damned, crazy world always make me feel sideways. Feeling sideways is just life. Nothing special about me. We all have forces that knock us askew. I have learned to balance the kind of sideways that life inflicts upon me. I counter it with creative and calm remedies I daily employ to stay upright. I practice yoga. I write. I paint. I walk, cuddle my dogs, and watch birds. Yet all during this productive year, this contented, creative, cathartic year, a new and different force threatened my uprightness. Numbers. Stupid numbers. All in my head, but these seemingly real numbers had done a number on my equilibrium; 10, 30, 57, and 80 had turned me upside down.

Mack should have turned 30 in March, and on October 7, 2024, she will be gone 10 years. Mack has been gone half the time she was here on this earth, and it is a fact that astounds me. I cannot bear it. The truth of it has been impossible to face, and spending the past twelve months being the age my dad was when he died made it more difficult. Being 57 has been like having an anvil of death hanging from a thread above my head. My dad should have turned 80 this year, and though I know so well the sharp edges of living, year after year after year, without my daughter, I want to see 80. I need to keep Mack’s memories for so much longer than a decade.

A week after painting and writing the upside-down essay, I sat at my laptop to write this annual blog post to commemorate the anniversary of Mack’s death. I couldn’t do it. I was worked up by what the painting-first, writing-second process had unearthed and unleashed. It is not at all a bad thing to examine my emotions but looking for answers to my upside down made it hard to find the words to express my state of disorientation, my fear of the numbers.

But while I was stumbling and struggling to right myself, I got an unexpected email. A watercolor of mine was accepted for publication in a quirky online journal called Waves. It was a self-portrait I had done while recovering from the deep removal of skin cancer from my ear. I painted it to find humor in my fear about the plastic surgery I would have to repair the damage. The issue of Waves in which “My Left Ear” appears is entitled “Dissonance.”

Dissonance. Yes, that is precisely what I was feeling.

Dissonance: the lack of harmony among musical notes.

Dissonance explained my year, my numbers, and my false belief that I was upside down in a bad way. Some notes of my life this past year have been lovely chimes out of creative flurry, the completion of a new book, professional accomplishment, and the establishment of new friendships. Other notes clunked from fear, exhaustion, and physical pain. The note of those damned numbers clanked. The note of no yoga for five weeks of convalescence honked like an injured goose. The note of my trepidation of a new project I wasn’t sure I had the talent to do justice thumped a little too deeply to be good bass. And grief, oh my dear constant grief, is always an unharmonious whisper.

Dissonance is awkward and unpleasant, but it makes you long for melody. It makes you want to hear and see and feel your life differently. I had lost my tune. My song was, indeed, dissonant, but I was still singing.

In painting, perspective is one of the hardest skills to master, much as perspective in real life is almost always hard learned. Recasting my year as dissonance didn’t erase the worry that had plagued me, nor did it give me hope that the next year of my life will be harmonious or even a little less dissonant. It didn’t help me figure out how to write about what it means to me that I’ve passed ten years without Mack, either. A perspective of dissonance does, however, give me back my beautiful and necessary upside down, my downward dogs and my cartwheels. Oddly, too, the idea of dissonance is a gentle reminder that I am only human.

A definition of dissonance might also have soothed my dread of those dastardly numbers.

No.

No, actually, as Mack’s spirit is reminding me as I write this, it is just that the year of awful numbers will soon come to an end. After breathing and sobbing through another October 7, I will turn 58 on October 9, and then I will fall sideways into whatever future starts for me on October 10.

There is precious little we can control. Life will blow us off our feet in terrible and beautiful directions we cannot predetermine. Dissonance is just the range of all emotions, the far and wide of the good, and the depth of the sorrow that life gives us. Dissonance keeps us awake and alive. It helps us appreciate the precious melodies. Mack is alive for me in my dissonance and in my melody. She is with me in the joyful upside down. She will be with me ever still, going forward, laughing at my ridiculous paintings, teasing me out of the dark hours, and singing be back into tune so I can keep her stories and continue writing and painting my own.

On painting Mack: I find it very painful to paint her face and to imagine her in watercolor. Watercolor is like a dream, and I long to paint her alive. I have tried and failed to capture her lovely spirit. When I paint anything else, I am fearless, but painting Mack opens a vulnerability that is terrifying. But, when I am brave, I will keep trying to do her justice. My painting, after all, is not art, it is therapy. It will remain a work in progress, just like me.

Out of Words

I have not been writing much this year. I am not quite myself, and I feel a little adrift.  Writing has always been my creative outlet, and since my daughter died my emotional release valve. Writing is how I understand the world, process pain, document joy, try out crazy ideas, and express thoughts I could never say out loud. It is frustrating to lose a tool that keeps me sane, but it occurred to me the other day that there is a good reason why writing is eluding me. I know why it took me the better part of a day to write a blog post for work and why when I sit down to write in the evening the blinking cursor stares me down.

I am out of words.

Writing is giving me a holiday because my brain is tired. I spent the last half of 2022 and all of 2023 preparing a 900-page edited volume for the Jane Addams Papers and writing my own book about women and Abraham Lincoln. Of course I am out of words. I used them all up!

And it is true I am not quite myself without them. I am adrift. But I am only a little adrift, which is to me, to quote Lincoln, a matter of profound wonder. I have been doing okay without writing for these first two months of 2024. I have been calmly weathering my missing words because I have a second tool to keep me sane. Watercolor.

Last July, my therapist suggested watercolor. We are working on my obsession with control and the anxiety that overtakes me when I don’t have it. She believed watercolor might help me feel the power of letting go, that learning to go with the flow of the water and the color making their own way across the paper might show me how calming it can be to loosen my grip. As a bonus, she was certain watercolor could compliment my writing.

I was skeptical. I am an old dog and afraid of new tricks. I assumed painting would frustrate me. I am not artistic, I said. I can’t draw, I said. Failure will make me sad, I said.

On my first day of painting, I ate all those stupid, doubting, self-defeating words.  And I have been painting ever since, completing, thus far, nearly 100 small watercolors. I do let the water and the color have a say, and I love the imperfect paths and the unexpected visions they reveal to me. I admit I try to control the water and the color more than my therapist would like, but I am learning to let go, becoming chill with imperfection, and laughing all the way. When I sit down to paint, I am as calm as I am when I sit down on my yoga mat. For a half hour or so I express myself in color instead of words; and there is so much joy in every silly, little painting I produce. In fact, I laugh deeper down in my belly at my failures.

I haven’t been writing this year, this is true. But I have been painting. And I am learning that expression is sometimes silent. I am discovering that painting is another way for me to understand the world. In my watercolors, I have documented joy, tried out a couple of crazy ideas, expressed some thoughts I could never say out loud or even write, and processed a lot of pain about by daughter, my dad, and my dog. Painting has become a part of my soul.

But enough already, missing words. I want to pursue the idea that watercolor might compliment my writing. Come back now please. I need to write. I feel you close as I write this post, and I want you back. Now, please. I want to introduce you to watercolor.