Tantivy

One night at the end of last week both Dean and I were awakened by a clap of thunder. No, not thunder - THUNDER. A barrage of thunderclaps - majestic, booming, rolling, rumbling, percussive, accompanied by flashes of lightening. A fireworks show in the middle of the night. I lay there and listened in awe then drifted back into sleep. I like the night. I like to go walking at night, although I don't wait until the middle of the night but am usually home by 9:30 or so and I only walk around our neighborhood where all is familiar to me. Being outside at night is different from being there during the day. Don't get me wrong, I like to be outside in the sun also, but the night has a different tempo which seems to suit my own  slow tempo and heartbeat. It feels to me alone but not lonely. People are all around, they are just in their houses, doing dishes, watching TV, getting kids ready for bed, finishing up the chores that never end, doing quiet things, slower things, homey things...

When Dean and I moved to Cleveland, we bought a new mattress. It was a good one, made with the new technology of the time "memory foam". After a while, we realized that what the mattress remembered was the places we slept and each year the impressions of our bodies recovered more and more slowly and were deeper and deeper. Comments by our children made us realize that we were sleeping in what amounted to hammocks. Pillow top mattresses can't be flipped, of course, so of to the mattress store we went. Our new mattress is rather old school. It has no memory and no pillow top but it can be flipped and turned. Old-fashioned sleeping -- all through the night. All this made me think about beds through the years. If you look at wills from the 1800s, "beds" were often passed along in wills. Strange, I thought, but then I realized that what was passing was what we would call the mattress. They called the wooden part the bedstead, and the mattress part the bed. What mad...

One of the things we did to study the effects of differing lighting situations was paint this stem of broccoli. It went like this: First the broccoli is strong light. Then we blocked in the pecan tree.  then the tree painting I did mine on a gray day and did not get the colors as intense as they should have been.  It leans a little too much also, but if you pretend that it is a bonsai....  All will be well,  XOXOXO, Caroline

 I posted in November  now February is almost over. It is hard to believe and yet so much has happened. I have been rocked by deaths of both famous and not famous at all but very dear to my heart and memories. I have been in online classes and an in-person workshop which I enjoyed immensely but which took time and concentration. A rat (yes, a RAT) set up in our house and took lots of planning to catch and days of cleaning and hours of being upset. (He is gone, never to return. Turns out there are rats around many houses here in town). There have been birthdays and family gatherings and regular life. Regular life. Is there anything regular about life that we should take it so for granted? And every day at all hours the politics of the time. I know that Presidents are often disliked by the opposition party but with Clinton, Bush, Obama and now Trump, the dislike has taken on more and more anger. Now anyone with a computer or a smart phone can tell the world (or FaceBook) how a...