I'm confessing right up front that I didn't do the Friday prompt and I haven't yet done the one for the weekend. Friday was busy getting all 11 poetry blogs for the class set up in the morning, class in the afternoon and the Friday night show-and-tell, plus packing. I will write them today while the laundry is flopping around. Cross my heart.
May 23 & 24--Master of the Louis XII Triptych, Triptych of Louis XII and Anne de Bretagne with Annunciation Scene. Emmaline walked through the galleries of the Victoria and Albert Museum, stopping in front of a sixteenth century triptych showing, she leaned to read the little sign, Louis XII and his wife with some saints. Emmaline liked the dark blue of the background and the gilded edges that framed the pieces, but she wondered who all the people were supposed to be. She thought the people with the gold disks behind their heads were saints and she picked out the king and queen. Who were the rest of them? Angels? But the painter made the wings green or brown. Everyone knows that angel wings are white even if the robes are colored. She bet the queen wasn't happy with the "creative" angels and put the triptych right into the rummage sale pile. That's how it got from France to England in the first place, at least that was Emmaline's opinion.
May 25--Jean Raoux, Modern Virgins. A clutch of women all in white, white flowers and ribbons in their hair, barefoot, at their ease. When does color enter their lives? When they are no longer chaste? They may be robing for a ceremony with their floral tiaras with veils and ribbons flowing down their backs. I like that they are called modern as if they are the ultimate in current fashion in their marble rooms and old-fashioned dress. We are too insular to think we are the epitome of modernity when each age has thought the same since time began.
May 26--French School, Beehive and Bees. The steady hum from the hives were like music that lured Ella into the field every day. She watched the breeze dance with the flowers in Grandmama's garden and push its way through the tall grasses like that bratty Melvin Faber did in the school halls. She liked the soft powdery feel of the dry dust of the path as she went on her way. The squeak of one wheel on the old wooden wagon she dragged behind reminded her that she was on a mission. Her wagon was loaded with fresh framed for the hives that Aunt Sarry and Aunt June were even now checking for full ones. She could smell the smoke and the honey the closer she got and thought happily of fresh biscuits and honey for lunch.
May 27--Hans Holbein the Younger, King Henry VIII. Oh, Hank, you rogue. You'd have had a better life if you'd have had some self-control. All those wives wedded, bedded, then divorced or beheaded. It shows a bit of a problem. And making yourself head of a new religion just so you could get a divorce, well, that's a bit much. I've seen your armor in the Tower of London. You weren't very tall, and that round codpiece so your syphilis-riddled pecker didn't hurt was a real fashion statement. That's sarcasm, Hank, it really looks stupid. If you'd kept that trouser worm in your trousers once or twice you might not have caught the disease and had more children survive. Kings!
May 28--Claude Monet, Tulip Fields with the Rijnsburg Windmill. I never think of tulips as a cash crop. Tulips are one of the harbingers of spring that emerge in front of my house and along the back fence. The Dutch have been very serious about tulips for a long time, centuries if the truth be told. They were the diamonds of their day. Fortunes were made and lost speculating in the bulb market. Thievery abounded. Botanists combed the globe for varieties and scientists watched for new crosses to grow. New colors, now shapes, frills and ruffles, variegates galore. Smugglers carried contraband bulbs across borders, across oceans. Royalty was obsesses, of course. Today for most of us tulips are merely flowers, but once they nearly ruled the world.
Now all I have to do is laundry and I'll have all my chores from coming home done. Well, except for weeding the garden and that will be done in little bits. I'll graciously accept any weeding help offered. I'll even read you stories while you weed.
--Barbara
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