The Truth About Our Living Room #5

I sat in the wicker rocker ice wrapped around my left foot which was propped on a pillow on the ottoman. I set my timer for 20 minutes and started to draw the room around me.

I could get used to this, I thought, sitting around the house at 11am drawing.  I was trying to be conscientious about elevating and icing my swollen foot and felt this was a good start.

When Kitty called it was like a little tea party.  After I finished the drawing and we got off the phone, I sent her a picture of it.

“Cozy! she texted back, “I like that you can see the tea kettle in the kitchen.”

After reading that I knew the drawing worked.

See all the other four drawings in this series here.

The Truth About Our Living Room

My second Truth about our living room drawing.

The candle on the mantle lit up the painting of Lenore that hangs over the fireplace. On the chair next to the couch I was sitting on, Jon was reading using his booklight.  A flashlight stood on the table between up, giving off just enough light so I could draw.

A few weeks ago I got the idea to do drawings of our living room.

The words, “The truth about our living room” came to my mind and they felt significant enough to pay attention to.  It speaks to the idea of the truth being something that is hard to hold onto.  I know that I can draw the same scene in our living room over and over again, and it will always be different.  Not only because small things may actually change in the scene, but because I will represent it according to what I am seeing or feeling when I draw it.

My drawings are not accurate in their detail, but they are truthful in their essence.

Last night, when we lost power, instead of blogging I made my second drawing of the living room.  I chose this scene because it was lit up by the candle and flashlight so I could see it more clearly than any other part of the room.

My first “Truth about our Living room” drawing I did a couple of weeks ago.

Living With A Writer

Jon in his study
Jon writing

I woke up to the glow of Jon’ ipad.  It was about 4am a sliver of a moon out the bedroom window.  I mumbled something still half asleep.  Jon’s response was,  “Last week in New York City a woman was killed by the driver of an SUV, a homeless man was killed by a car in Queens, a 63 year old woman was run over by a cement truck and lost her leg and a 9 year old boy is in a coma after being hit by a hit and run driver.”

Now I was wide awake, what the hell kind of “Good Morning” was that?  “Can you believe it”, he went on, “all those accidents and not one picture or story about them, but a horse falls down then gets up and is fine and it’s  everywhere.”  Now I understood what was happening.  Yesterday when Jon told me about the Carriage horse accident in New York he said he wasn’t going to write about it.  This is something I’ve been hearing for months, that Jon is done writing about the Carriage Horses.  I don’t even bother to respond anymore.

He closed his ipad as if to go back to sleep. But it was like laying next to a whirligig in a hurricane.  “Your brain is keeping me awake” I said, “just go write your piece.”   I didn’t have to say it twice.   When I got up at 6:30 he was still at the computer in his nightshirt.  “Have a look at this” he said.  His latest piece on the Carriage Horse.  The jewel of a sleepless night.

Jon often writes about what it’s like to live with an artist.  Well, this is just a little taste of what it’s like living with a writer.  And I have to say, it’s never boring.  Conversation and new idea do not lag in our house.  And I never know what I’m going to wake up to.

Everyday Anxiety

Fanny and Lulu didn’t want to come out of the barn this morning. So they ate in.

(It’s 3 pm and we just got our power and internet back)

Jon was already awake.  “The power went out again last night,” he said, “but it’s back on now.” It made no difference to me, I slept through it. 

Since I went to bed last night I’d been planning my day. Yesterday I didn’t get into my studio at all.  The power and Internet were out for the whole morning.  By the time it came back on there was still so much to do around the farm as the snow and wind picked up. 

My plan was to finish sewing together Ellen’s quilt, take pictures of my latest batch of Cool Cat Potholders and post them in my Etsy Shop.  In between, I’d blog and I’d get everything done before it was time to leave for Bellydancing. 

But when I looked out the window and saw the two-foot pile of snow that fell off the roof overnight., I felt a pang of anxiety. The belief that  I never have enough time to do everything I need to is an old source of anxiety for me.  I’ve never been able to figure out where it originated, but I know it well. 

The snow from the roof was heavy and packed.  I used my shovel to cut it into blocks then scooped each one up and tossed it over the side of the porch.  The sheep and donkeys were at the gate braying and baaing.  They’d been holed up in the barn all day and night and weren’t happy about it.   I cleared just enough to get down the steps and left the rest for later. 

But when I got to the gate it was frozen and as I walked back to the house to get some hot water to defrost it,  Jon was standing on the back porch with only a pair of shoes on.  “The power is out again,” he said and there’s no estimate of when it’s coming back on.”

Suddenly my anxiety was gone. This changed everything, I no longer had control over my day the way I thought I did a moment ago.  

I made myself stop for a moment and slow down.  There’s no hurry I told myself, I will get done what I can and it will have to be enough. 

I got one of the reserve cans of gas from the barn (Jon had filled up three the last time we had a storm) and filled up the generator.  Then, I switched on the battery, pressed the start button, and flipped the breaker switch. I pulled the lever down on the box on the house that switches our electricity source from the grid to the generator.  

When I  went into the house to make sure it was working and saw the light on in the kitchen I felt like a superhero.  “You want power,” I said to Jon.  “You got power!”

Later, as I mucked out the barn, I thought about that old joke about making God laugh by having plans.  I’d always known the truth behind that joke intellectually, but it wasn’t until the pandemic, when uncertainty became the norm, that I learned how to make those quick shifts between what I’d planned to do and what was possible without getting upset about it. 

So I wonder how it makes sense that I’m less anxious now, sitting in the living room, with the generator roaring outside, writing this blog post on Apple Pages to be cut and pasted onto my blog once the internet comes back on.  

I think it has to do with giving up control.  In understanding that I can control how I react or behave in a situation, but can’t control the situation itself.   

Now I just have to figure out how to bring this idea into my everyday life and maybe then, I’ll be about to deal with that anxiety a bit better. 

“He Had It Coming”

Jon took this picture of me before I went to our Bellydancing Hafla last month. When I saw it, I said, “ I want to be like her!

I don’t know who started it.  

There were seven of us standing in a big circle getting ready to practice zilling.  Julz was looking for the right song on her iPhone and suddenly we were in a conversation about body image and weight. 

A couple of the women who have young daughters talked about how they never spoke negatively about their own weight or food in front of their kids. Someone else said how when she was in school the other girls always talked about being “too fat” but she wouldn’t join in.  “I was always a feminist,” she told us. 

As I listened I felt myself being drawn back in time to my childhood. I didn’t want to bring up what I was thinking, I wanted to leave it in the past where it lived. But it was almost as if I were in a trance, overwhelmed by the feelings of a lifetime. 

“Every day my father would call my mother from work and ask if she did her sit-ups,” I said. 

The amazing thing was that I didn’t have to say another thing.  Everyone understood the impact of it.

But I had fallen into the dark hole of my past.  I was in the living room where I grew up listening to that daily phone conversation between my mother and father.  Then a voice broke through and I heard someone ask, “Why didn’t she tell him to mine his own business?” and another voice, “or go fuck himself?”

“No,” I said quietly from a distance, “she never did, she couldn’t.”

That’s when Julz looked up from her phone and as if declaring a well-known truth announced, “Some guys just can’t hold their arsenic.”

Then she started singing… “ he had it coming, he had it coming…” And Kathleen, who was standing next to Julz, sang with her…

….”So that night when I came home from work I fixed him his drink like usual. You know, some guys just can’t hold their arsenic.  He had it coming, he had it coming.  He only had himself to blame….”

I imagine I laughed, maybe too loud. But I don’t really know.   What I do remember is that while they sang, it seemed to me that they were surrounded by a glowing green light, and between them, they were stirring a pot, or was it a caldron?

Whatever was really going on, they broke the spell I was in.  

Suddenly I was back in the moment, back in our Bellydancing class and part of a circle with seven other women wearing long skirts and cholis, with bare bellies and bare feet, while Julz and Kathleen sang an incantation from a Broadway musical that shook me from a memory which has plagued me my whole life. 

This all took place four days ago, and I can’t stop thinking about it. 

The thing is, something changed for me that night when Julz’s response to my memory was to invoke those magic words.

My first thought was to wish I had grown up around women like this.  Women who knew their own power.  But then I knew that didn’t matter anymore.  I had gotten myself to a better place.  

I now surround myself with women who are strong enough to stand up for themselves.  Who do not tolerate being controlled.  And I am one of them. 

For the past four days, when I think of that daily phone conversation between my mother and father, which is really a symbol of the dynamic that I was taught a marriage should be like, I no longer cringe.  

Instead, I hear those magic words, “some guys just can’t hold their arsenic” and depending on my mood, I either smile a knowing smile or cackle.

(The song Julz and Kathleen sang was Cell Block Tango from the play Chicago,  You can see it here.)

The Pages Of My Sketch Pad

 

A Truth About Our Living Room (#8) Drawing I did while listening to live music in our living room.

I did a few drawings while Jon and I watched and listened to live music from Caffe Lena this weekend.

I just ran out of pages in my sketch pad so decided to use the backs of the paper too.  Sometimes the drawings from the other side show through, and sometimes the pencil will smear when two pencil drawings are facing each other.  So I’ve avoided using the backs in the past.

But it’s not as if I’m taking the drawing out of the sketch pad so it doesn’t really matter.  In art school, we learned to always try to preserve our work for the future.  But I was never into keeping my art, even back then.

And now I feel like, in terms of my art, now is my future.

So I will fill the backs of the pages of my sketch pads.  And maybe I’ll even go back to some of my older sketch pads and fill them up too.

The second drawing I made that same night.
Full Moon Fiber Art