Eight years later. Eight.

 "Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind." -Nathaniel Hawthorne

In 2014, I wanted to revive this blog as a place to share whatever it was I felt like sharing. I have long wanted to get back in the groove of creating and using all the stuff I've accumulated over the years in the arts and crafts realm. I get going for a bit, then it all sits. Months sometimes pass before I step foot in this space. Often, the scraps of the last project from months ago greet me to be put back in their places. I've toyed with boxing everything up and finding somewhere to donate everything so I don't feel like it's being wasted. I've struggled to find purpose in creating just for the sake of occupying my hands and mind. I mean, shouldn't I DO something with the things I create? Where does my style fit in? What IS my style? Can I even create something that isn't guided by a sketch or video? Shouldn't I make money? Do people still want handmade things? What's going to happen to all this stuff when I leave this world? 

Paper and ink have always been the places I go back to, where I feel at my crafty best, the place that has fed me creatively for over 20 years. While I had periods where I would get back into the groove, I've dabbled in other things. After my grandmother passed in 2015 Time and Trees I made a quilt to focus my mind on something besides how much I missed her. She was who I would send random cards to the last several years of her life, just to connect and make her day. I've art journaled, painted, continued to do an annual digital family album, taught myself to crochet, sewn a few things, and now trying to knit. I even made an Instagram account dedicated to paper things. (User: papergirl1974) I've bought new things in an attempt at finding some inspiration, only to get minimal joy or use out of those new things. 

In our household, we are approaching 12 years almost to the day of moving here. I have a dedicated room for all my stuff vs the basement or den downstairs. We graduated our daughter from high school and will soon graduate her from college. I didn't go back to work after the nest emptied. Too much time had passed that kept me out of the real world and I simply didn't want or need the stress in my life that workplaces often bring. We bought an RV a couple years ago and it has become my happy place. 

We've endured a global pandemic and all the challenges and change in life that has brought, and I can honestly say that during 2020-2021 when spreading joy through cards and other things was likely needed and welcomed, I was in no head space to do so. 

I have all the time in the world, yet I've fizzled hours of the days scrolling meaningless stuff that neither fed me nor inspired me. (Quite the opposite, actually. ) Social media is a chasm of comparison and illusions of perfection that don't exist in the real world, yet we are sucked into believing it all. Comparison truly is the thief of joy. 

So here I am back in my own digital and physical space where I can hopefully find a shadow of the joy I used to derive from spending hours just playing, learning, and engaging with the creative community in whatever way happens. 

Thanks for coming along. 

 

Trash Day

I'm sitting here on yet another cold February day listening to the squeak of the brakes of the recycling truck. Later, the trash man will come with his loud music piercing the crisp air..by the trash man I mean the driver of the trash truck with the automatic arms that empties the non recyclables. I've been saving this picture for a couple weeks and the inspiration and thoughts finally came together today..
   Recently, the Mr. helped me focus on some household tasks that needed taking care of...particularly the Goodwill donation pile and the dump run.
   One Saturday this month, we loaded the truck with stuff that just needed to go...disintegrating patio furniture, some chairs that just spent too much time in the pool house in Indiana and kept growing mold, extra items that are either worn out or broken, but can’t just keep around anymore. We try to find homes for things we wish to discard, but sometimes things just have to go. We're all familiar with the drill.
   As we made the short trip to the county dump, where we can dump all we want for free, I recalled going along to the dump in Ohio with Grandpa Buster as a very young child. Any field trip with Grandpa was special so when asked, I went. And it didn't matter where. ( I particularly liked the trips to the 'pretzel guy' then 'Angie's Diner', but that's for another day...)
    It’s a image that stuck with me...I remember the smell hitting you when you approached the dump and it was a sea of trash as far as I could see. Not just ‘large item’ discards like this, but trash, actual kitchen type waste. The sound of backhoes and bobcats bobbed along the pile moving things around, for what reason, I didn't know.  Grandpa, and others, just backed their trucks up to the pile. Then they just tossed the stuff out of the truck drove away. Every time I take the trash bins and recycling out to the curb I think of this experience and figuratively throw my hands up in surrender, because what do you do?
   Like everything else, we’ve been softened by clever marketing to the reality of what we are doing....my experience as a child is a sharp contrast to what I saw this day. We drove up the winding, somewhat manicured hillside to a pattern of construction size dumpsters that almost looked like a neighborhood street, none were overflowing, labeled with categories and/or numbers. The attendant politely directed us to number 10 after assessing the items in the truck. We pulled up, waited our turn, politely said good morning to our fellow dumpers, as if we were having morning coffee greetings at the mailbox. We took out turn, emptied our items, and drove away.
   Just as our taking the bins to the curb separates us from the reality of the mountain of waste we create, the rather pristine conditions of our county dump takes the sting out of tossing aside items we had to have at one point but no longer want. I kept looking for the sea of trash I remembered as a child but it was not visible. There was no foul smell, I thank February for that, and as we got ready to leave I grabbed my camera to preserve the images of this new way of going to the dump. The impact of this experience likely doesn't stick with many people because it ISN'T impactful. It's just life now and we are conditioned to put it all out of our mind once a week when the bin is rolled to the curb and every so often when we toss things into rather clean bins at the dump.
   I will point out that making the dump more appealing to the general population probably serves the adjunct purpose of encouraging people to keep their properties more tidy. If it's a negative experience, people don't want to go, so, particularly large items, would clutter yards and sheds. (Some people still must not realize the dump is so nice!!!)
  I'm glad, through tagging along on a routine errand with my Grandpa, I have that image in my memory and I can share it with my daughter sometime. She was writing an essay recently when applying to a summer science program. One of the questions she was asked was to name something you want to know more about. She came up with pollution...ie, what happens to all that trash we create? Perhaps we need to take her to the dump and satisfy a little curiosity about the step just beyond the curb, pairing Science with History a bit.

Raining diamonds

Today brought 72 degree temps, a strong breeze, bright sunshine and a crisp blue sky. As I stood drinking my coffee looking out the open screen door I was drawn to the patterns last night's rain left on the patio. It looked like mother nature had rained diamonds.... The contrast of shadow of the stair railing against the water pattern was just...pretty.
     It's hard to believe we are expecting significant snow in less than 48 hours. In the valley though, it could end up being nothing, which is just as well. We'll see.
 

Rainy days

"Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there really is no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather." -John Ruskin     

I often stand in this spot with my morning coffee. Some mornings, when I'm up early enough or season is right, I catch the sunrise over what we call in the neighborhood, "Mt. Wakeland". It's a man made berm with trees between two phases of our planned suburban community. Not at all a mountain by local standards, but it's all we've got in our back yards. The back of our house faces several other homes, and toward the east and the sunrises are usually beautiful. Today, I just look at the mud that remains from a patio installation (ahem, reinstallation) this summer, the withering remains of a cherry tomato plant among other hodge podge plant items, the patio furniture that needs to just go, and the soon to be minor stream that will present itself in the corner of the yard. I also remember that the cleaning people came on Monday and by days end their work on my kitchen tile will be for nothing what with the dogs' paws tracking the gunk inside. 

     Fall has descended on the Shenandoah Valley and daily the palette of color changes around us.   It is by far my favorite season here and one of the reasons I immediately fell in love with this area when we moved four years ago.
     Today, it's a dreary gray color with steady falling rain. Too much rain. This is the type of day that I always think of my grandmother, Adele. I often call her on days like this, thankful I still can, but a week from today I'll be visiting with her, so I forego the call. When I was little these were the days that the electric bill be damned, every light in her house was on. I sometimes do this myself to brighten things up a bit, to attempt to ignore the blah.
     Today though I'm just listening to the steady drip drop on the siding and windows and enjoy the peace it brings. I notice how green the grass still is and has remained most of the mild summer. I like green. I hear the occasional starting of the sump pump in the basement, which is music to the ears. I process through some emails, look at some creative stuff online, pay a few bills, pour another cup of coffee, and get ready to tackle the mess I created for myself in my guest room when I moved furniture to the den for my craft stuff. Kent's parents are coming Friday, and the current state of the guest room is well, not conducive to guests.
     I could complain about the rain, but why? It's just another kind of good weather.
Edited: Guest room put back together. I'm glad to have comfort in the fact that my normal rotation of house  guests don't really care too much if there's a few things lying around or things are put in the closet out of sight. It's tidy and functional. 😄
   
   

Welcome.

     Some of you may be returning because I let you know I was restarting this blog thingy. While the name is the same, none of the old content is here because, well, it's old content. If you are really that interested, I can figure out how to grant you private access to the old blog. I read through it last night and this morning and it was some good stuff, but I just couldn't click the button to reactivate it and editing things that were very out of date was too daunting.
     I shut it down several years ago because I just felt too 'out there'. Social media has evolved to such a degree that it seems like you always have a window into your life and something had to go. I'm a different person now, in a different place in my life, with different things to share and the purpose of restarting the blog is to, well, restart.
     For those of you who are new, welcome. Originally I blogged to share my paper crafting (cards, scrapbooking, etc) with the folks I interacted with in that circle, and EVERYONE had a blog. I still interact with a few of them and I hope they visit again. I plan to do a little of that again, plus photography, writing, etc.
     Over time, the 'Old' Watercolor Garden evolved into a place where I could discuss the random stuff that went through my mind and satisfy that writers urge. Facebook became the preferred method of sharing randomness, but it and other social media are just not fulfilling something inside me that I'm needing right now...I guess I need to flesh things out more. I don't know...We'll see where this ends up...