Pondering...

Laura needs a haircut (so does Emily)

Nasty ends are the price of all the lovely colors.

After her haircut, we went to the Peninsula Flea.

Linda likes to sell a few rugs for a nominal booth fee and overnight accommodations with good friends.

Found them, amidst a dozen booths. 

"Found us!"

I asked Laura to jump in, assuming she would stand behind.

Only skinny little girls can sit on the air between two people.

I love the children. He'll never be three again!

Neither will these two. This is a soap booth, and this particular bar is titled "Cereal Intervention".

I'm too old to follow that.

This fellow is too young to know everything that looks good isn't.

He's already shoved it in his mouth and got rid of it mighty fast.

Now he's checking to see if the texture may have changed from soap to cereal.

Back home, we're working on the problem I'm pondering.

Prom is next week, and Emily's crew is coming here for pictures, "because your garden looks so nice."

Oh, the faith. I already figured out how to get Emily home from school early enough one day next week for a prom hair cut.

Now I need to figure out how to make a garden a backdrop.

Well, the allisium will be in full bloom.

"Hi! Remember us? We're here to help!"

"I have no idea what you find so interesting out there!"

Planting milkweed.

Watering milkweek.

So, I'm thinking the prom crew can be on the sidewalk in front of the flower tower, and I photograph them from the real sidewalk, sitting in a chair to include what greenery I have in the front.

Pete Seeger is still doing well, but I haven't seen Rocky for the last week or so.

I think it's because I've had to leave the house at 7:15 these last many days, not 9 or 10 as usual.

Obviously we kept the same schedule.

I'll be back to it in a week or so.

Getting the rug stuff

That's how early in the morning it was.

I said "rug stuff." For shame.

By the dawn's early light we are off to buy weft for Linda to weave more rugs.

She weaves rugs from many different fibers: wool and cotton fabrics, heavy yarns,

and something called "shag."

"Shag" comes from upholstery mills.

It is the selvage edge of upholstery fabric.

In the modern high tech mills the warp no longer travels across the weaving surface on a shuttle.

The warp is laid in one row at a time by a stream of air.

Each row is held stable by a woven band of dummy warp or loom waste that is cut off at the end of the weaving process.

The black and white strip is a good illustration of the stabilizing strip with the shaggy ends of the single lines of warp hanging from each side.

Here are bags and bags of shag,

Waiting to be selected.

I realize I do not have one picture of Linda at a rug loom.

Here is a picture from the '90's, when I stopped by her studio in upstate New York to see her new 100" loom being assembled.

In the left corner one of her rug looms with the beam full of rugs, and the weaving surface used as a table for tools to assemble the big loom.

(Do note how very 5'6" tall I used to be!)

I went to Linda's web site and picked one rug.

You can go there and see a page full of rugs for sale.

It's a Linda

It seldom happens this way

At six this morning the most awful clangor. In time I recognized my other alarm, the one with the extraordinary noise that will get through to me at the wrong time. Six a.m. is the wrong time.

I am off with Linda to buy rug stuff. We’re leaving at seven. Her ETD’s frequently are imaginary, so I called her at seven, and left a message.

She called back at 7:10 to announce, to her great joy, she really had a phone in the bottom of the twenty pound weight she calls a purse. 

To my great joy, she’s just coming through the toll booth.

It will be a good day.

In the Linda way

My friend Linda called me last night.

In the Linda way, she wants to put pictures on my blog.

"No, no, Linda; that's Facebook. What would you want to put up, anyway?'

"That one of us in Louisville; we were young and healthy."

"I hate that picture."

"Tell me one you like."

"Maybe that one in Indianapolis, your cousin Bruce took. The first year I helped you at Broadripple, and he set up your tent because I couldn't lift the other side any more."

Linda sent me the three pictures she wants posted on my blog.

She has this titled 'Two almost seventy year olds do a show."

She sent this one, too. It was four in the afternoon of St. James Court Artfest in Lousiville. The show closes at five, but it was my last day; I was retired. I sold the canopy, the display, every last piece of hand weaving except a red dish towel, which we still use. My daughter Beth, and Bill, left champagne in a cooler behind the booth before they had to leave for Cleveland.

Ann, my dear friend and right hand support the last couple of years I exhibited, is in the middle. Yes, that's a hand woven shirt she has on. Me, too.

"Ann won't like that picture going up," I said.

"Ann doesn't read your blog."

A picture of Linda getting juiced.

I think she took a look and decided her hair had to be red, purple and orange, too.

And a little side bar.

At least fifteen years ago my daughter Beth was given a pin to wear at work. It said 'Attitude.' I commandeered one and it hung on my bulletin board.

Before the Arts 'n' Apples show where we froze for three days, I snatched that pin off the wall and took it to Linda. 

"It's all about attitude," said the person who was not facing six months of chemo. What arrogance. 

"Put this on and kick butt."

Linda put it on and wore it everywhere for weeks. In the middle of the show, it was gone. Fell off.

She turned her booth over, retraced her steps.

It was gone.

I told her it wasn't necessary any more. But she thought it was. Nevertheless, you can see she made it to month six, with attitude.

Beth got on EBay and found a new attitude pin. Linda can wear it to meet with the oncologist.

Once more, with attitude

I spent last Friday with Linda, my friend of three decades and change.  The crazy rug weaver I occasionally accompany to shows. Friday I showed up for lunch, and since I won’t eat chipped beef on toast, we went to a breakfast all day diner, and took a booth for the afternoon. We stayed so long the pie delivery came, and I had coconut cream.

Last July, while I was at Ann’s house, I found a missed call message from Linda. “Be in touch.” She’s cryptic at the best and worst of times, so I dismissed it. When I returned, several attempts to get together, including a trip to buy weaving supplies, fell through. In August she called me. “I really wanted to tell you this in person, but it seems that’s not to be, so...”

That was six months ago. Friday I leaned back in the diner booth and said “Can I tell Blogland about you, now?” This from the blogger who has spilled it about everyone she knows, generally without their previous knowledge. I figure by now everyone knows it could be their turn any day. “Cannot believe you even asked,” Linda replied.

Linda and I were friends long before she became a widow. It often turned out she and Dick were staying in the same motel as I was in, and she would come over to “talk shows.” Actually, we smoked the air blue and talked every subject on the face of the earth. I know she went back and blamed the aroma on me. I doubt her former smoker husband believed it.

You could not imagine two more unlike people than Linda and me. Politically, she is right of conservative, believes in guns, but not in taxes or welfare. In her defense, she came by it honestly. She grew up on a farm, where her parents worked hard for their living and put their faith in themselves and friends, not the government. The only person I know who solved an offensive street light problem by shooting it. So, for thirty odd years, we simply agree to disagree. We even don’t talk about it anymore.

That phone call six months ago…Linda has lymphoma. Stage four this, Stage three that. It was discovered during another routine exam. The good news, lymphoma aside, she is a very healthy woman. Her only symptom was tiredness. Her oncologist said that though her insides were a cloud of encroaching disease, she was healthy enough to be aggressive in treatment; he felt he could put her in remission, probably for another ten years.

Linda, formerly a nurse, married many years to a physician, now an artist who works the colors she always heard and smelled and tasted…would you believe is a skeptic. Side effect of rabid Republicanism, but I’ve never told her that. “It’s ATTITUDE!” I preached. Get your attitude on!

She embarked on six months, six rounds of lymphoma kicking chemo attitude. Three or four days one week pumped full of drugs the rest of us hope we never encounter, or never encounter again, then one week of never waking up, except to be sick, then a week of feeling reasonably social, then a good week, then back again to week one.

At the end of the third month Linda had a CAT scan that showed every little lymphoma bastid half its previous size, or smaller. “Woo-Hoo,” from friend Joanne, who announced it half gone. Think about that—within weeks of its final assault to over half gone.

She’s down to the last treatment, in another two weeks, then a PET scan to survey the bodies all over the field of battle. I see all those little dead grey lymp lumps, expired. They used to be big grey balloons, squeezing the bejammers out of her insides, and now they are little expired, pea sized lumps. Ha. Take that.

Linda doesn’t have that confidence. Maybe because she sees everything in color, and cannot imagine grey lumps. Maybe it’s the chemo. “Poison,” she says. Five months on, it’s taken a toll on her body. Worse, on her brain. The stuff banishes color, she says.  She has not made a wild and crazy rug in months, but she has a full show schedule this year to stock for.  What will she do with a full inventory of boring rugs?

Her daughter has been her main support all these months, there that evil first week and checking in the next three weeks. In truth, Linda has a small army moving her down the road. But a few more cheers will certainly help. Linda reads my blog, and frequently comments. You know, the one with the opinion. It would be nice to see thirty comments: One More Time, Linda, with Attitude.

I could not see how to weave in these pictures coherently, so here they are, the attitude sidebar:

Linda, her daughter, Cara and me, thirteen years ago. Linda was month one of defeating breast cancer.

Now, this is the kind of attitude that kicks breast cancer in the butt, wouldn't you agree. It will work on lymphoma, too.

Remember last fall, when we nearly froze to death in our Dollar Store hoodies at Art 'n' Apples. It was the next to last show before chemo began. The oncologist was not pleased, but that didn't stop Linda. I had a long list of possibilities; if any one occurred, I was to shove her in her van and drive straight back to Cleveland. My personal plan was to hire an airplane.

A couple months ago Linda put the color on her head. Whatever works.

By last Friday it was fading. To everyone who wonders what Linda will do next, you heard it here first: red, purple and orange won't be on top of her head, they will be all over. But, will it be back to front or side to side? 

Reverie

This morning I set myself the mind boggling task of filling in the 2016 township calendar on the website. Before I started on the calendar, I put up a picture of the road super, retired after thirty three years. I found the perfect picture, don’t you think. 

Trustee and zoning meetings on the calendar are fairly straightforward, but when I get to brush and leaf pick-up, I boggle, my mind and my eyes wander. I looked up at a picture that has been on my wall for twenty years. Everything in this house is old, me not the least among the detritus.

I love that picture, Stalking the Wild Yarn. My friend Nina presented it to me one winter, the seasons I set up shop in her antique gallery and waited for the spring to arrive.  Below that, exhibitor buttons I accumulated over the years at the big fall show in Louisville, St. James Court Art Show.

I loved that show, and never did it alone. I always took Ann or Beth, or both, who did more than help set up, tear down and sell. Both of them could keep the map of Louisville in their head and knew how to get to the restaurant and the motel, even if we were lost.

Did you wonder about the ostrich head? The speech bubble says “They’re how much?” Linda came across that, an ad for a long forgotten product. She presented it to me shortly after we both exhibited at the Letchworth Park fall show. It’s actually a fall color weekend event; the exhibitors are an afterthought; the sort of show where artists stand outside their booths and declare to the sky “God strike me dead if I ever do this show again.”

I was behind my booth on a smoke break and walked back to the front past one of the millions examining the jacket from hell and saying to the world, “They’re how much!?” “They're obviously made of solid gold, you fool,” I said on my way by. From the other side of the sidewalk Linda’s husband Dick looked up from their booth, crossed, patted my back and said “Take a break, Joanne.” So I went and looked at leaves for fifteen minutes.

The postcard came from Laura, in the mail, more than ten years ago. The front door picture—Nina, again. She set herself the project of photographing every front door in Boston. They are famous in the community, and displayed at most events. That’s Angus, the best Cairn terrier who ever lived, looking out the front door. The only Boston door with a dog, Nina said.

You all know Toby, the spoiled cat. Good lord, how much stuff can I accumulate? Back to the cat and the yarn and suddenly I saw the dust. All of it. I dusted down the wall and went back to work.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...

It's not snowing at my house, and probably won't, but that does not stop the calendar. The snow will not be missed and Christmas cannot be missed, so all is right with the world.

A few weeks back, in November, John Grey wrote a bah humbug post about hating shopping, especially for Christmas decorations for family to hang on their respective trees. 

I thought at once of my friend Linda, and her ornaments. She began making ornaments for friends and family, probably as far back as 1965. She's still making one every year. It's never too late to start.

I wrote on John's post that day of the ornament Linda made a couple of years ago, after Alberta moved to Florida to live with Marcy. I remembered Linda cleaning out Alberta's apartment, looking at all the downsizing that was left behind. "What am I going to do with these?" Linda  sighed over a box of Alberta's collection of salt cellars. One showed up at my house, months later, with a red ribbon tied around it, a tree decoration.

How about a post of Linda's annual ornaments, I decided, and called her.  "They're all in the attic," she said, and not coming down this year because I'm going to Cara's." I am so rude. "Go look anyway," I wheedled, not to be deterred.

Later that day I got emails, loaded with pictures. A dear friend of Linda's did a downsizing move this year, and not bearing to dispose of any of her collection of Linda's ornaments sent a box full, which Linda laid hands on immediately, and stood in her attic and photographed a few. 

I asked if she wanted them attributed and she said no. You see a cute picture, she explained, and throw it in a drawer and later on make it. Someone else does the same thing. These projects just go round and round, anyone can do it. I know Linda, she'll be explaining some of them. The little bird house goes back to 1985; her dad helped with those.

The star is Linda's ornament for 2015; hanging on our tree.

And here's an ornament my sister thought of earlier this year and made one of for each of our brother Walt's children. Sawdust from a board the old cornmudgeon master wood worker never used. Those stickers are a mystery, but there was a roll of them on his drafting table, so Jan added one of them, too.

To all my kind and lovely blog friends,

wonderful holidays to you.