it's three in the morning.  and i'm awake, sifting through beach glass.  today was a gray day, with a soft misty rain thickening the air for most of it.  and tracy and i spent the afternoon at the beach filling pockets and buckets and fists with smooth little glass gems.  ezra came for the first part, and although he was patient and found lots to interest him, 15 or 20 minutes was all he really had in him.  as i was walking him home, we met tracy's aunt and little cousin and we all settled in at the beach. 

 i haven't picked glass in a long time.  it used to be my daily escape in the summer.  i'd lose myself down at the beach for hours.  tom would have to come and bring me home.  often sunburned and sore.  i would get lost in the deafening of the waves and the expanse of lake.  the steadiness of the sound became silence, and it drummed out thoughts that were buried deep.  i would catalog my little collections by date.  or put little notes in the jar.  like the day i spent the afternoon after gala died. (gala was my great dane before edgar).  or certain birthdays.  i always had to allot a portion of my birthday to collect the jar of my birthday glass.  my first pieces that are linked to an event, are the ones i found the day my grandma gladys died in august, 1997.  big pieces of pastel and white ceramic.  i have them on the shelf on the stairs.  so it's been almost 16 years that these little shards started filling my life. 

these are some of my favorites from today.  i love the clear ones.  i love pieces that have texture or even words.  i love the robins egg and soft 1950s green pieces.  i kept finding smoky lavender pieces today.  several of them, that were the color of the sky.  and today, hunting with beautiful people and gentle rain, sharing our finds and giving each other the pieces we thought the other would like, an experience of love and beauty and giving.  a good good day.

 reflections and layers of images have always been part of what i toy with visually.  painting.  collage.  photography.  i like the extra layers.  the dreamy and inexplicable little world that forms on a flat surface, swimming with the depth of light and line and image.  early yesterday, i put floyd outside so i could feed tiny 18 year old telulah without him pushing her out of the way.  he knew he was missing out, and cried in the window.   the angle of the sun and the different layers of glass and screens created a universe of green summer morning.  thankfully my camera was nearby.  6 am is the witching hour for fantastic light.  

maybe it was the light that threw me in the right direction, but when i got to the studio, i felt the need to take away all suggestion of a display space and utilize every corner as a workspace.  a workspace that i can breeze seamlessly through as i keep the projects moving.  and a space that appeals to me visually. 

so the complete quilts are in fanciful piles along one wall.  and the rest of the main floor moves along with me.  accepting the mess i create daily.  but allowing it to be strong with the energy of how i work.  i feel good things coming from this little shake up.

 

a quiet day that spread sun and cloud equally through the day.  sun hot enough to make us sweaty and lazy and then the cloud would breeze over to cool it all off.  and now, late in the day, we are settled inside, for the rainstorm that kept threatening, finally took over. the mantle clock, with it's spring works that tom winds by hand, is like the room's heartbeat.  steady and echoey with that double tick that would confuse me as a child.  i would count it as two.  and every minute or so there is the odd arhythmia that happens.  the ticks shudder together.  maybe it is exactly every minute as it registers the movement of the minute hand. it's very sound makes the room feel more silent.  

i'm filling up with poetry lately.  ezra curls beside me and listens to my whispers.  poetry has to be heard.  i have to form the words.  i whisper as i read.  and the quilts i make carry the words of my whispered reading.  the latest is emily dickinson.  just tiny little phrases of lovely.  so i filled a quilt with them.  'the little sentences i began and never finished.  the little wells i dug and never filled'.  i write the words with my sewing machine and fall more in love with them. there is a new and stronger connection as i feel the words becoming something with thickness and shadows and warmth.  

 

 lately there have been rilke and neruda.  kenneth pathchen.  baudelaire.  and my notebook keeps filling. 

sewing beautiful words into quilts has become what i do lately.  i love every part of it.  but maybe my favorite part is reading scads of poetry.  i had been hunting online, just because it was convenient.  but i've been finding it terribly unsatisfactory.  i have shelves and shelves of poetry, slight little collections and bulky volumes.  one deep cupboard is packed three layers deep with books.....mostly poetry, so it's hard to get to them all.  but tonight i started hunting through my favorites.  or my favorites that i think would work for the quilts.  this pile grew organically as i added titles.  smiles warm my belly with each familiar cover.  these books were lugged into many homes as i moved through my 20's.  and much of the underlining and notes will probably make me blush or giggle.  but, oh, it's good to have them in my hands again.  

 this morning we headed out early on our little morning tour along the lake.  we had heavy rains last night and this morning is covered in a dense fog.  it was a gorgeous walk.  my little iphone camera got a bit of a work out.  usually i like to use words, more than photos.  but this morning we have photos.  beautiful foggy photos. stone buildings rising out of the mist.

 ezra is happy in the foggy mornings.  it was gorgeous out there.   and then we were home.....i instagrammed the photo of the house so it has that old and vintagey look. 

tonight summer is in the sky.  driving home from the bookstore the orange misty light of a summer evening slanted across the sky, squeezing through fences and carrying a verve of happy energy with it.  we drove the length of a one way street  and i had the sense we were driving through movie scenes.  in our bland little town.  with every block there was a visual with the slightest ache of nostalgia. first the light.  the light was the light a movie director waits for all day and panics to get the shot into it's 8 minute window of beauty.  we were in that window.  we passed the firehall and there was a triangle of firefighters, tossing a football between the trucks parked in front of the station.  there was a sprinkling of people on the sidewalk.  a few meandering bicycles.  all perfectly placed and balanced in the scene.  a group sitting at a picnic table eating and having drinks.  and a student sitting on his front porch with a giant curving silver hookah that he inhaled from. and from the next block the park bloomed.  when we approached neil's house, i had to stop the car, for crossing the street was a pair of mallard ducks, male and female, filling the street with their carefree waddle.  and when they reached the other side, drinking long necked gulps of water from the puddle at the side of the road, undisturbed by the car.  a fanciful few minutes this was.  our drive home.  i think it may have been the magic of the light, coloring a placid evening with summer.

my friend teta died a couple of months ago.  the illness that took her was shocking and sudden and cruel. she died just as spring was beginning.  just as the air was warming and the grass was beginning to green.  two short months before she had cried with me when edgar died.  and didn't know how sick she was herself. her's is a loss that keeps sinking in.  

teta was a gardener.  a mother first, and then a gardener.  an artist and a friend and a storyteller.  but all of the layers of her found their way into her garden.  i always picture her hands creased with dirt.  roughened and scratched and beautiful.  teta has left gardens, orphaned and wild gardens that are now bursting through the earth and blooming.  waiting for her, looking for her.  everywhere she lived, she left a garden. and teta lived in the house beside us, the house that is now the studio.  and she built gardens in front and in the back and a huge one on the side.  she built stone steps that move up the little hill from the garden shed.  and the last time ever i saw her was last summer when she came to tidy up her garden and take plants and bulbs to her new home, her new garden.

this sign has been in her garden here for 9 years.  i love this sign, hand painted, leaning against a tree with ivy growing around it, keeping it in place.  the paint is chipped away now, and faded.  but it says.....weeding wench.  have trowel will travel....and then her phone number.  and off she would go to create gardens for others, sharing her gift.  her genius.

     

 these green spring days will forever make me think of her beauty and her kindness and her talents and her gardens.