sometimes you get it right, something you’re making or something you see as you’re making demands attention, a response…so you take a picture. this resulted. i knew i liked it, that lone black walnut floating in the heating up pot of water. but the image resulting pleases me more than i’d imagined.

another photo i took some time ago graced the brochure/report from last year’s international color exhibition and workshop. hisako sumi invited me to participate and I was happy to send some artists’ books for the exhibition, and not so happy about making a video. but that became easy as melissa schulenberg agreed to be the camera(wo)man and recorded me working (boco) paper in the dyepot.

a neighbor, gray squirrel, black variant

the last snowy morning and a canada goose

little river after the rains began, also melting the snow

wake robin growing in a dirt pile in my yard

when i was young I chose wake robin as my out in the world name. once i even had a shop, and the red ones are my favorites. i even love the other names for wake robin—trillium, stink pots, stinkin’ willie is my favorite of them all, perhaps because it sounds like the kind of bar i’d never visit.

at school the paper studio is an old kitchen, and there’s a loading dock with a big outdoor heating mechanism fenced in next door. inside the fence stuff gathers, burdock grows, bits of trash, dandelions, and this. it’s a synthetic paper felt someone had thrown out with the bath water, so to speak. i found it a while back and brought it inside. the other day in the spirit of use and reuse i decided to see if it was cleanable so it went in a bucket of hot water and simple green which i agitated and soaked overnight and drained the next day. it got a good rinsing and then opened out to find that most of the ‘dirt’ was gone but there was a wonderful patch of moss still attached (i didn’t see the moss before). home it came with me and now lives in a shaded damp spot and we’ll see if i can nurture this colony. because, why not?

i’ve been making prints, telling a story of north country springtime. this one was intentional, seed pods from locust trees here with sumac ‘berries’ and other plants, honoring the available dyestuff this may. brisbane artist sophie munns has worked with seeds (as muse, as subject, as hope) and this is my small response. i love that she’s taught me to pay attention to seeds. in the living room on the house’s west side are five trays of japanese indigo seedlings. paying attention is good work. and now i must go to town, to harvest yesterday’s prints, to buy granulated sugar to cook hummingbird nectar, and whatever else is on my list. i forgot to add that the leaves on the trees in my riverside place are out about a quarter of the way, closing in the woods, making the birthing and rearing of animal young a bit more secret.

north country spring, snowing all day with a couple inches on the ground. it delights me, these changes, and it has meant that i’m working inside and the daylight is clear. off into the trees the green haze is softened by falling snow, or is it the other way round? it doesn’t matter, it’s lovely, hopeful, changing.

realizing that this felt i’ve been trying to figure out reminds me of snow, maybe because it looks soft, but isn’t, looks gentle, but isn’t, has it’s own mind so to speak. even cutting it is a different thing. easier than expected, needing a knife, not that damn rotary cutter. anyway, here i sit pondering living in this edge of a place. it’s an odd thing, how this place, only 4 miles from my old farmhouse it so different!

monday’s first task was going to the dump, no longer that dump, but the transfer station. this is on the way, i’ve stopped here several times before…

my hands come away sometimes with a gift from this spot. I grind it up and add that gift to pulp

i’m interested in these soils and rocks and they delight my eyes. they wouldn’t be seen if it weren’t for dynamite and the eagerness of road builders to eliminate bumps, at least on the main roads. here i stand and look, this time it felt right to bring home few pieces to color pulp.

this is what i’m thinking about now that my class is over and grades have been turned in. despite how dreadful teaching remotely has been for me, i’ve been so impressed by my students, the ones who tried despite pandemic. there were some fearless, beautiful books made.

basket came to me along with a kitchen table and a desk and chairs, and three other baskets, but this is my favorite thing. a local auction house doing an online auction, that pleases me; no crazy social interaction or head games that i never get… and once done i go over and fill up my subaru, three times actually, and my house is set.

several days ago, i was enjoying breakfast at my new old kitchen table, not rickety, but very strongly used.

feeling like things are lightening, like there is a way through this pandemic, that social justice might actually become a reality in this country that carries the brutality of history shamelessly, instead of like the evil sickness that it is. there is hope, or the beginning of hope. finally.

a grace note, two toms and four hens here early the other morning, after roosting the night in the tall poplars behind my house.