One Year

Today is the one year anniversary of Durwood's death.  Don, his name was really Don and since he's no longer alive I guess I can use it on the blog.  I thought I'd make it through today fairly well.  I haven't fallen in a heap but I have felt like sitting and staring.  I didn't spend the day wallowing in memories but I guess the best way to describe how I've felt is kind of in a fog.

I haven't sat still all day, though, you know I'm not good at sitting still.  This morning CG, the landscaper, stopped by to pick up his sprinklers and to check on the wall and grass.  I asked if the grass was supposed to look like little cornstalks and he said yes, that's one of the annual grass components of the seed he uses, that it'll get crowded out by the real grass.  I said that I plan to overseed it in late October so that more grass grows and fills in the spaces in Spring.  I also said that I can't weed and plant all across the top of the wall and did he know someone I could hire. He said "yes, me", so he got out his little weed sprayer, sprayed the weeds, and he plans to come back next week with lilies, iris, and sedum from a job where he's thinning out plants and if he doesn't plant them here for me they'd get thrown away.  He waved off my assertion that I'd pay him but I insisted on paying for labor at least since he's got a lot of weeds to yank, lots of plants to plant, and he'll bring in wood chips for mulch AND he'll cut back the forsythia.  Wow.  I'm not sharing his name, he's a treasure.


Birds!  Today both the hummingbird and the bluejays came and stayed long enough for me to use the long lens to take their pictures.  The bluejay on the crook to the left is the baby or fledgling.  See how it's fluttering its wings trying to get the adult to feed it?  Lazy bum.

And the hummingbird graciously stayed around the feeder so I got about 4 good shots of it.  I especially like this one of it flying.








In the afternoon I sewed.  I had cut out a Dress no. 1 from a white-on-white striped bedsheet from Goodwill intending to wear it under a pink fringed top that doesn't fit the way I want it to.  Well, that was a good idea that went bad.  The dress is fine but the pink top looks all wrong when I put it on.  It doesn't look bad on the hanger but on my body, it's crap.  Oh well, maybe it'll get hot again so I can wear this thin white dress.






14 August--Barbara Malcolm, Horizon. 

November

            I carried a cup of tea into the bedroom to check my email in the autumn dawn.  In the two months since Aaron had set up my system I had gotten pretty comfortable with it.  Lydie and I wrote each other often.  I missed getting real letters from her, but since I was busy most evenings either with painting or Abel, I had shifted to sending her my weekly letter online.

                       Sam and Mike were happy to get their weekly mom-report online.  Aaron had told me when he installed the computer that he expected to get an email instead of a letter.  I was thrilled that they responded.  None of them had written me back more than a couple times when I sent paper letters.  Too busy, I guess.  But it seemed like we were closer, like I was more a part of their lives since I’d started using email.  Even better, all of the boys had digital cameras so I got lots more pictures online than I’d ever gotten before.  Lisa even scanned in some of their kids’ artwork so my fridge had blossomed into a gallery.

                     Connie and I exchanged almost daily emails.  She sent me the early drafts of her poems and I was, with some initial long-distance tutelage from David, able to open the attachments and read them.  I’d gotten pretty good at making suggestions, if I did say so myself.  At least, Connie was nice enough to say I helped.

                I think the most fun emails I got were from Samara.  The first one brought a real surprise.

    She started with a complicated description of her arrival at the school and wickedly funny profiles of the professors she’d met.  The next part sang the praises of the “incredible hottie” she’d met in her Freshman Comp. Class.  I laughed picturing her lighting up the campus with her incandescent personality.  When I got to the third paragraph of the email, my breath stopped.

“I have a proposition for you,” Samara wrote.  “The Art League here is having a juried show in February and I know you’ve got a bunch of paintings squirreled away because you’re too shy to show them to anyone.  Well, Gail, if you will, I will.  Enter, I mean.  The deadline’s December first.  It doesn’t cost anything to enter and they have a thousand dollar first prize.  It’s a purchase award, which means they buy your work for a thousand bucks.  Wouldn’t it be awesome if one of us won?  I’ll be home for Thanksgiving and we can decide what to enter then.  You can do it.  Don’t be scared.

Love, Samara.”

            I remembered all the positive changes I’d made since my first sweaty-palmed impulse to try watercolor painting.  I thought about how my weeks in class with Jake, the painting Nazi, had honed my skills and how his declaration that he thought I was a real painter boosted my confidence.  How Carrie and the other students at The Clearing had encouraged me.  And maybe the most important of all, how that week up there among people who accepted the “new” Gail as the “real” Gail gave me the courage to stop agonizing over what Clara and my boys thought and live my life to please me.

Maybe I was brave enough to enter a contest.  Maybe I was a good enough painter to have a chance.  Without a fee to enter, the only thing I would risk would be my ego.  I’d learned over the last year that my ego healed pretty fast and that I was stubborn enough to keep doing what made me happy.

            Before I gave it too much thought and talked myself out of it, I fired an email right back to Samara.  It had three words, “Okay, you’re on.”

I forced myself to go to the Y after supper to walk in the pool with KW.  I'm so glad I went; I felt better for the exercise and the chat.  She showed off her new little motorhome that she got last weekend.  It's going to make hospital visits for tests so much easier for her.  More sewing tomorrow; there are a couple more things I want to take to Yellowstone that need making.  Trainer session tomorrow too.  I should sleep.
--Barbara