goldfinches, there and now

Goldfinch

Mom is slowly, slowly getting stronger after her surgery, there in Florida. Here, the goldfinches are so busy in the fields!

E.E. Cummings's words seem apt for all of us, folks and fowl:

tomorrow is our permanent address

and there they'll scarcely find us (if they do,

we'll move away still further:  into now

No one knows about illness and recovery, about painting and aptness to vision, or about flitting from one--which one?--bloom to another.  Words can come close, especially if you are a poet like E.E. Cummings.

This small painting is gouache, charcoal, pastel and graphite on paper.  Gouache is basically watercolor with white added to give the paint body and opacity.  Usually, zinc white is added.

my summer vacation

Elena's back yard

Two weeks away:  time with my sisters H, N, and twin sister Jt, and with light and ocean, garden flowers and big old cypresses.  We walked a lot, we laughed a lot.  Color all around, carried with us even onto the highways and in the airports.

Coming back in the airplane I watched pools and wafts and points of darkness and lights, moving and changing in and out of patterns.  Fields of night and lights.  A bright crescent moon shone alongside for awhile.

The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald I read, travelled with.  There is a passage about memory reaching back, and forth into the present and perhaps beyond, and that memory meanders, foggy, sometimes clear.  I cannot find the passage.  The book is terrific, a dazzlingly rich field of greys and grey-surrounded points of fact/fiction/memory.  Oh here is the passage, from the fourth and final emigrant memoir, "Max Ferber":

     If I think back nowadays to our childhood in Steinbach (Luisa's memoirs continue at another point), it often seems as if it had been open-ended time, in every direction--indeed, as if it were still going on, right into these lines I am now writing.

This passage goes on for awhile, Luisa remembering the path and the kind of memories of her childhood and adulthood, all within the frame of her son Max's memories, as told to the nameless younger narrator of "Max Ferber" who grows older as we travel with him, we readers.   Luisa is remembering even as her world in her present-day Germany becomes narrower and narrower.  (The passage does not include fogginess; I got that wrong, yet fogginess, greyness are abiding motifs throughout the book.)

What a lot of layers and movement--in fields of color, night, or grey--there are in moments of memory.

flowers moving on a page

Martin's and Ardean's paintings

Watercolor can be like a splash of color-and-light.  Not often, students can newly try it out with seemingly carefree brushstrokes and arrangement.  Martin and Ardean have done so.  Their colors waft in space, as do flowers in a field, don't they!

A wonderful book, The Wild Braid, has in its last poem, "The Round,"  these final lines:

the still-wet words I scribbled

on the blotted page:

"Light splashed . . ."

I can scarcely wait til tomorrow

when a new life begins for me,

as it does each day;

as it does each day.

(The first line of the poem is  Light splashed this morning  .)

Do find the book, find the poem; these lines are only slight enticement for much, in this poem and in the other poems to enjoy!  The book is a collection of poems and reflections about poetry and gardening by Stanley Kunitz, a small, lovely book made at the end of his very long life.

The students who painted flowers in watercolor class with me are not very old; still, they are living in retirement:  and from the long view they have reached because of age, gosh, they were able to see the splashes and so "scribble" and "blot" toward some small, lovely work.  Ageless sparkles.