Was I There?

The Back Forty...A Birthday (again)

Well, I had another birthday today.  And here is another photo of me that I like.  Isn't it interesting that all the photos I will accept to be put on the internet are of me as a child?

This rhubarb one I particularly like because I so vividly remember that day.  My best friend, Andrea Hurd (aka Teeny) and I were living it up.  It was summer and we were in the high country of Colorado near Steamboat Springs.  It was the late 70s.  We had dressed as Indians (note food coloring war paint on my face and, yes, I know it seems weird, but at the time I meant it with the greatest of admiration.)  The only victims of fright, alas, were her sisters.  

But then we all took a hike to a literally fallen-in log cabin from the turn of the 20th century, the one with old-timey rhubarb growing near it.  We picked some, hauled it home for my mom to make a pie.

Here's then to when it's your birthday and I hope you remember a perfect day, a time when you felt so good in your body or felt good to be in the world, at peace with yourself. I can still smell the wild mint that grew along those old paths, see the sunlight through the aspen trees.  I can still taste that bittersweet summer pie.

Pumphouse in the Mists of Time...

Long ago, before the new studio, I worked in a pumphouse.

 A 6' X6' pumphouse, uninsulated, with the pump still in it.  

When I decided I'd like it for a studio, I spent countless hours removing the junk piled up inside and putting in a couple salvaged windows for cross ventilation.  The door wouldn't shut, so I found another one with a window in it, and painted the door bright red.  With blue-green dragonflies.

I traded some of my initial lopsided bowls for the work of a carpenter friend, who boarded up the ceiling.

Then I had a lean-to shed built to the side so my tiny kiln would be somewhat protected from the weather.  (Oh those days of trying to glaze while the rain poured down, or the sun sizzled down, or the icy wind flew sideways through the lean to opening.  I was actually learning how to mix my own glazes then and would often stand there motionless, ignoring even a light breeze, staring at an old metal scale, which I desperately willed to stay motionless so I could get a measurement of this or that exactly right, down to the last gram.)

Inside the pumphouse I wedged my mom's old wheel; this wheel actually sports a stone for the kicking stone along with a seat that looks like it came off an old tractor.

A couple shelves, a 3X3' canvas board atop an old kitchen cabinet (my platters were smaller then), some wooden boards to shove in the gaps in the floor where the squirrels crept in at night.  And I was ready.

I worked in that pumphouse seven years.  I had a lot of failures and a few successes.  But I knew I was on to something when the weekend would come and, no matter how bitter or blistering the weather, I'd find myself there.

The door to my current studio now gazes across the land at the old pumphouse.  And this is a true confession: the new studio is like a cream puff of a place compared to the old pumphouse, which has now been turned into a tool shed.

But I like the view.  I think it's good to remember where you came from, what you did for love.

 

Snow Day

After two weeks of "Influenza A," mention must be made of the snow day.

In Oregon, the snow is usually sparse and wet, but this snowfall was light and deep, canceling schools and making us seize the moment and play.  (We knew it was ephemeral.)

It lasted two days...

And then of course the sun came out and the bathtub was a little too warm...