Category: Grandmothers

As you know, if you’ve been reading along, we moved a lot when I was a kid. According to family gospel, when I learned that we were moving from Cleveland to Pittsburg, I had questions.

Did they have corn on the cob? And, did they have Romper Room?

Assured that they did, I agreed to go. (Yes, you can laugh!)

Miss Whomever must have done her job well for I survived, in our next move, from Pittsburg to St. Louis, a world without Kindergarten.

It’s true. I never went. There wasn’t a public option and the private choices were all filled to their over-running waiting lists.

My mom, who professed to believe I needed a teacher, signed me up for dance lessons. The teacher had royal blue eyeshadow that extended above her eyebrows and she scared me.

Mom, who probably really thought she needed a couple of hours here and there with only one small child to chase, finally relented when I was given a beat up used bicycle, complete with training wheels, and insisted on staying home to ride.

By the time I reached my first day of first grade, complete with painful, slippery new shoes, a plaid dress with a Peter Pan collar from Sears, and a too-short haircut that closely resembled the mixing bowl-on-the-head do’s so popular in those days, I was way past ready to learn!

Sally, Dick, and Jane rocked my world! In a matter of weeks I was ready to make the leap from, “Puff is on TV, ” to the complexity of Betsy & Tacy, eating supper on the bench at the end of their street, while I made up the words I didn’t know.

I have been blessed with much learning to do since then. And, like the artist known as Michaelangelo, I am still learning.

It’s been a big week for learning! I suspect that’s because I spend a great deal of my time hanging out with a tribe of women, connected by a red thread, and bravely learning, too.

You may have heard rumors of my unintended learning experience with an enormous pot of gorgeous bird bones and a stove that quit working during the step of the process known as simmer, with bubbles gently breaking the surface, overnight.

I was heartbroken. And frustrated. Those were lovingly roasted, local chicken and turkey bones, sustainably raised by farmers with whom I’m on hugging terms which, in these days more than ever, isn’t a bad way to get food! At least they were until they became trash.

Enter the need to learn a whole lot about buying a stove, as we own neither microwave, nor toaster oven. Thankfully, I was already in possession of categories for success on that decision and the new, improved version should arrive late this week.

That done, it was back to the business of art. Literally, for I am engaged in several conversations about how to do healing art in the world where we now find ourselves. Here’s a short list of what I know now that I didn’t know before:

How to get the very skippy new email signature in my laptop to also work in my phone.

New uses for adjectives in writing invitations… and ways to decide which ones!

How to get my toys to work together so that I can lead a Zoom workshop demonstrating an art process while still seeing and being seen by others on the journey.

And, possibly best of all for empowering the future, a link between the name my parents gave me all those years ago, and the medicine painting on my easel just now, which looked, in the early phases, like it might have come from Romper Room!

The answer to the tech-y questions is, on the one hand, YouTube videos and, on the other hand, whatever changed inside me such that I believed I could figure it out.

The name thing is a story for a different day.

If you click here, you will be magically transported to the place with the videos mentioned above and a photo of my new tech-y miracles!

For now, I’d love to know what you’re learning in this place we’ve never been before which may actually be the place we’ve always been… a world that changes. There’s a place for comments if you scroll down a ways. I hope you will!

To talk of many things. Of shoes and ships and sealing wax. Of cabbages and kings.

Well, sort of. The things on my list are different than those on the long gone list of Lewis Carroll. But, the time has, apparently, come.

This is a good thing, in the way that newness often is. And a challenging thing in the way that new things often are. You see, on this particular Wednesday, I am even more conscious than usual of being my own Work-in-Progress!

As you may have noticed, one of the owl eggs in the painting on the right is beginning to hatch!

But first, a bit of reflecting on a couple of other art forms. The massive bone broth cauldron is enthroned on the stove. No heat yet. Just raw bones bathing in very cold acidulated water. Bird bones, in this case. But no owls!

And, in addition to the beginnings of a pot of bone broth, quilts.

Last night I dreamed of the endless hours I used to spend, staring at quilt fabric strung across the back of my couch, trying to feel which ones belonged in a particular project and which ones needed to return to the stash for a different moment in the sun.

It seems I am doing that internally at the moment. And the scraps for the project hatching inside me are books and symbols and stories, collected over the last couple of decades, interesting individually and increasingly fascinating as they jockey for position in the mental quilt I am composing which will be called something along the lines of Making Sense Out Of The World.

Perhaps you are hatching such a project as well!

I hope so. I find comfort in the notion that there are many of us at work, creating new patterns and perhaps even comfort in the face of – well – current events.

And I’m really grateful for a host of brave and brilliant teachers through the years. I’ve shopped, in a sense, through classes and books and experiences, for just the bits of knowing that feel so much like brilliant scraps of quilt fabric in my heart.

There will be more to come about all of this.

Soon!

First, I need to learn a bit more about Zoom and what happens if my new project thinks it needs two cameras at once. Right after I ship some art supplies to Texas and Tennessee.

Should you happen to be a wise soul with knowledge of such unquilt-like wisdom, PLEASE leave me a comment, below, or email me at suesvoice@gmail.com

If ever there was a time when we’re all in this together, it seems to be now. Blessings for you and yours. And for the symbolic baby owls hatching in your heart.

ps… A very, very happy birthday to Kelly who “hatched” my favorite owls!