Stones Stacked and Found

On our long walk on the east river trail this m morning M and I stopped at a little shingle beach-like place along the river to check out the stones and to enjoy the view of the river at that spot.  There are so many flat, oval stones that were begging to be stacked;  so we started making smallish cairns.  Cairn-stacking is a non-thinking activity, and the cairns seem to stack themselves better when we're talking and not paying too much attention to the stones.  

We made these four plus M made a couple of really small ones while I was rustling around finding animal-shaped rocks for fetishes.  (The map here is to help remember how to find some abandoned outbuildings that we found on the edge of the woods, something J might be interested in photographing.) I found a frog, a fish (or maybe a tadpole, which would then be a frog in terms of its medicine maybe), and a turtle.  I looked up their meanings and powers, which you can read on the page if you're interested.  Since I saw a bear yesterday, I looked up the Native American meaning of bear;  and I copied a bear fetish from a photograph.  It looks like an animal cracker bear I think.

Bear

I decided to explore a new way of getting to the river trail from my house today, and it involved what I think of as The Treacherous Trail, a weedy, poison-ivy-infested steep downhill slope at the end of our block that is a sort of slalom run ending in a gravel road with a further descent to a low field on the other side of the road.  It got me where I wanted to be, however;  and after I walk it a few dozen times the so-called trail may actually be a trail.  During the brief distance that I had to be on the main road and crossing a little bridge over the river I noticed so many cigarette butts.  What's the deal with people throwing cigarette butts out of car windows or just on the ground?  People who would never toss a candy wrapper or a drink cup out of the window maybe think cigarette butts just biodegrade like apple cores so it's fine to throw them on the road.  I saw thirty seven of them on the short distance I traveled on the road and bridge.  And they hold up really well in all kinds of weather.

The trail was full of people today, including a funny little boy with his dad.  The little boy told me that there were no sharks in the water and that I should watch for the creek.  There were/are amazingly large, ropey lianas in the woods.  They hang from high up in the trees and drape on the ground, really big enough to climb.  At a rocky beach along the river I reached down and pulled up a stone that looked like a bunny.

 I kept going for a couple of miles, passing a view of my friend Ann's old house, passing a place where I could hear but not see sheep and a rooster.  I passed two women, one of whom said to the other "I didn't HAVE those kinds of criticisms of HIM, ya know?"  I wished I were following them and not just passing.  I kept on going until I came to the big rock formation that has a large monster face graffiti on it;  and then I turned around.  I had gone about half a mile of the two miles back when a woman came up behind me with a large dog on a leash.  Just as we rounded a curve in the path, I heard a loud chuffing sound and then a growl.  I looked behind me and saw the dog barking like crazy and a very large bear standing and waving one paw from behind some bushes.  It was on a section of hedgerow between an electric fence on a pasture and the trail.  The woman and I started walking very slowly away from the bear, headed the same way we had been going, toward the trail head.  The dog finally calmed down, and after we rounded a curve and could no longer see the bear, we both started running and ran about a mile till we were close to the trail head.  She went on ahead because at that point I spotted some sheep huddled by the fence, and I stopped to draw them.

This is a very quick sketch, more of a gesture drawing.  I doubt the bear had any interest in the sheep, but they acted like they knew something was up.  They were huddled together, mostly facing into the center of their huddle.

This is only the second bear I've encountered on a trail.  Exciting!

Bluebirds/Trail Things

On the right, looking like a line of music notes, is a record of two parent bluebirds and their baby on the telephone wires that cross our front yard this  morning.

And here it continues.  The parents would take turns flying down to the ground, picking up some thing for the baby, and then flying back up to the wire where they would poke it into the baby's mouth.  The baby was more of a teenager, well able to fly, but apparently a bit of a late starter and liked to have breakfast brought to him/her.  Periodically the baby would fly up to a different wire or up to the hemlock tree, and then zoom back down to its perch on the bottom wire.

Late this afternoon I walked the old river trail-- perfect 72 degrees and sunny with cool breeze and very few bugs. I practically crawled through a side path that led to the fence line where I could see in the distance a line of sheep in deep grass in front of the white barn.  Further down the trail another side path took me to the water's edge where someone had made a modest but pretty little cairn;  and then I found some rocks that reminded me of Zuni totems:  one looked like two Corn Maidens, a second was a perfectly teardrop-shaped rock--  not a totem, but still--  and the third, over on the bottom right, looks exactly like a fish.  I brought these three home to clean and polish a bit.  The fish even has an eye and gill marks on both sides of the flat stone.

Galls/Forks

I've been finding lots of galls on the floor of the forest.  Obviously it's hatching time for these guys.  They must stay attached to the tree twigs all winter;  then in spring the larvae eat their way out (see the hole in 4814) and the gall itself detaches and falls to the ground.  A few of these had been opened so I could see the very feathery insides.  I've never seen a larva though.

And here are some more cutlery challenges:  three forks and a pusher, which assists the fork.  I had a pusher when I was very little.  It's one of the first things I can remember, sitting at a big table pushing food around with my pusher, like a miniature bulldozer.  It always seemed so sensible to give these to children;  but when my own children arrived, pushers were not to be found.  My own had passed through the rank of siblings, probably ending up thrown down a garbage disposal by one of the twins.  Years later I found one at a flea market and bought it.  But it was of very thin silver and too soft to be of much use.  But here it is on the left.

The other three are odd forks from our silverware drawer.  The one next to the pusher is a crab picking fork;  the splayed tine one is a lemon fork from one of my grandmothers;  and the last one is a fish fork in Danish Modern.  Someone actually gave us one of these, back in the days when I expected to be hosting elaborate dinner parties like my grandmother did, that involved all these different forks.

And Another Collaboration--

This morning Jacob decided we had time to do another collaboration;  so we climbed up to an area of campus where a pine forest had been planted many years ago in straight rows on a hilltop deep in the forest overlooking some of the farm fields.  It was so beautifully geometric, quiet, aromatic, peaceful in there.  Then we spied an art installation attached to some giant grape vines hanging from one of the trees.  It had hanging bundles made of translucent fabric and pine cones and strange objects showing partly through the fabric of the bundles.  A string of large pearly beads hung down near a bundle made of crochet.  I loved this intervention of something wild in the very tame and orderly forest.

Here on the left is a detail from the bottom of the art piece-- a cream-colored felt flower hanging with two pine cones from a piece of black nylon mesh.  To the right is a quick drawing that I did of some fire pinks, while Jacob photographed them.

We walked around up in the orderly forest for a while, saw a bird blind, a lean-to made out of pine branches, and a small remnant of an old barn.  Nothing struck Jacob very much, so we headed down the hill to a hay barn on the side of a recently- mown field.  And here we struck gold.  I drew the piles of hay that had burst out of their plastic wrappings and were gradually composting at the edge of the woods (on the left).  Then I went and stood just outside the barn where J was photographing and I drew the enormous rolls of new hay in their slick white wrappings.  For our collaboration Jacob photographed the exact scene I had been drawing.

Then we raced out of the field and over to Greenlife for a very late lunch and a little Photoshopping while we ate, putting our work on the same canvas and giving my line sketch the golden tones and mysterious darks that it needed, giving his photograph the graphic punch that the plastic hay rolls gave to the soft and glowy barn scene.

Bull in the Cow Pasture and Other Scenes Along the River Trail

Jacob and I set out along the west River Trail late in the day today.  First off, some astonishingly large trees.

Then I drew J as he picked up rocks to skim in the river.  Then he took out his camera and got some shots of the water.

Finally we landed at a spot where white water rushed over rocks and the sun was slanting through the trees-- seemingly perfect.  But just not quite.

And then as we were heading home, we came to a perfect hillside with dramatic shadows and puffy little clouds.  So we unpacked everything and stood by a fence and took pictures and sketched some more.

 But the best was last:  as we came out of the trail, we found a bull sitting down next to the fence in a field of cows and staring right at us, about ten feet away from the fence.  He wasn't in any hurry, and we got to take many pictures of the field and do sketches up close of the bull.

 We came home, ate dinner at nearly 9:00, and spent a lot of time playing around in Photoshop, and we came up with our second collaboration.  And now it's after 1:00 in the morning and I am heading to bed!

Maya's Bluebird

 This afternoon I picked Maya up from school, and we headed over to the fabric store to do some research for a few things we wanted to make. Maya wanted to make a bluebird, her current favorite animal.  We also wanted to get material to make a golden bug for her cousin N, who is coming to visit next weekend;  and we need to start planning the chuppah we're making for her Dad and stepmother-to-be's wedding this summer.

We left the fabric store with many ideas and possibilities as well as samples of materials for the chuppah.  For the bird Maya picked out teal blue crushed velvet as well as apricot brocade for the breast and some teal blue crocheted fabric to use as an overlay on the wings.  Above is her initial drawing for the bird.

Once she had drawn the bird she decided which pattern prices we needed, based on some other creatures we have made.  It took us three hours of trying things out, stitching, ripping, restitching, experimenting with unhemmed edges in places to add a feathery look, and responding to unexpected results that drove us to the final bird, which we both like very much.