I am waiting for apple bisque paint to dry on paper and listening to three seperate snores. It’s allergy season. The windows are all open and neighbors just chunked two fireworks into the sky, exploding over the oaks, hissing sparkling arcs across the driveway. I imagine a handful of boys laughing a few doors down, high-fiving over a six-pack and rummaging the garage for more things to detonate. It’s a window into the Sicore boy’s future, enough to make me wince (Watch those fingers, boys!) but also smile. It’s FUN to blow stuff up!

Damon and I went alone together to the gym this morning. We shared machines and grins. In the middle of the bustling gym floor I wanted to pounce on him. Watching him huff and puff drove me crazy. It was like a shot of Back in College, that undivided attention between us. So as soon as I picked up Chas at childcare, I scribbled down reservations for the rest of this week and next week–pencilling in about an extra half-hour for good measure, each day. Damon did the same. It feels like I’ve found a missing gasket and now I’ve replaced it, allowing the machinery to run smoothly again. This may have been one of those elusive missing things in my life.

We took the kids out on the lake again tonight. Austin is absolutely lovely right now, fresh out of the shower and sprinkled with joggers and children and rowers and hummingbirds. I’ve been dying to bring along a camera, but too paranoid that it might get wet (which it will); the setting sun just gilts everything on its way out. Chas and Ford shared the middle seat tonight, each dragging the little wooden boats that Damon made them, holding graham crackers opposite hands. The way it should be, we just coasted in and out of cypress coves, above illicit beds of Eurasian Watermilfoil and broad mats of Hydrilla, the boys humming Sonic Youth and we, the grownups, chuckling over cold beer. We ran a Great Blue Heron off its hunt five times, tracing its hunt by accident along the convoluted, wooded banks off the lake.

The paint is now dry. I’m daydreaming of graduate studies in painting here at the university. Priorities first, though. I close that window in my browser and step back to the table, dreaming up a series of paintings for a show. ‘Self-taught’ is satisfactory.

I wish I had left the words out. Everything spoke a quiet abstract tongue to me without the embellishment, and the filigree is really grating my ribs of sarchasm right now, as I look at these pages I painted last night. I had planned on doing something completely different to weave the pages together, and then I got all sappy. I had a Hallmark moment. It happens. It might have involved wine, but I can’t remember.

Edited to add: And I have obnoxious waves of sourness, too. Like last night, when I wrote this post.

Christina organized this journal project. I’m #2 in a big group of gals contributing to the book. It’ll be fun to see the book once it nears completion, in all it’s Flickred glory. For now, it’s in a truck on the way to Houston.…

What does ‘home’ mean to you?

I was a free-range child, roaming on foot and bike throughout the neighborhood like most kids did. We were barefoot with scabs on our toes from the Big Wheels, flags forever flapping behind us on our bicycles. We came home for popsicles. There was a corner of the yard where we corralled box turtles, but we were always hunting for more. But we sold other reptiles: anolis were 10 cents; geckos I sold for twenty-five cents in class. I kept them in coffee cans. Back then, I thought the smell of the coffee cans was gross, like metallic urine.

Free-range days continued once we moved to Houston, but the experience matured quickly. I discovered perverts in fourth grade when a man approached me and asked me to follow him to his van. Sitting on the bench opposite me and my brother, he smiled confidently and touched my hand. Asshole. Sadly, he was only the first jerk to taint my adolescence, but I’m still alive and I was never seriously molested as a child. But I read stories all the time about those less fortunate than me.

I can smile as I look out the window at the boys in the backyard. They run half-naked around the house, building mud volcanoes on the deck, lava plumes in the rivulets running off into the woods.
What will I do when they’re able to bike around our neighborhood? What will I do when I can’t supervise them?

I’ve never seen a bear do this in the wild. In fact, I’ve never seen a bear in the wild. For that matter, I’ve never seen a wild beehive, either. But I’ve read The Story of Pooh many times before. This is exactly what I believe bears should be doing all the time: raiding beehives and foraging blackberries and slapping salmon out of the water. Of course, bears eat what they can, because honey and blackberries and salmon aren’t always in supply. Have you seen Grizzly Man?

More Illlustration Friday.

It’s difficult at first, resisting the urge to keep working, but in order to create a smooth surface texture on encaustic paintings, such as these, you have to wait at least two days for the top layer of wax to cure before you can buff it. And these have been stacked and waiting patiently on my windowsill for a week (which, incidentally, is not the best place to cure an encaustic painting in the middle of summer, but it’s somehow worked so far in my home–at any rate, it’s safer than leaving them on a countertop or table, where the kids can reach them!). Now, all I have to do (if I decide each is finished) is take a chamois and buff the surface smooth. The result is so buttery soft and shiny. I REALLY dig this medium. When I’m finished with thee, I’ll share more pictures….

More Studio Friday.

Scanner issues, again. I save my patience for my children.

Illlustration Friday.

It’s really too hot to paint outside during that quiet time of the day when the kids are centered. If I leave Chas to paint alone on the floor in the kitchen, I begin to prickle with anxiety, because it’s never long before paint begins flying across the room towards the wool rug (which, being wool, easily stains. And which, for the record, I refuse to live without.) It’s a high stakes gamble, but one I can avoid if I sit him on my lap at the kitchen table.

So there we sat, yesterday, and I found I was able to engage him for a longer period of time than usual, simply by painting alongside him, on the same page. Normally, I’d discourage this–it goes completely against my teaching style, which is to let them simply create on their own. But he seemed to enjoy telling me what he was doing, which colors should go where, and he thought what I did was funny. He loved sharing the piece of paper, maybe it reminds him of sitting on my lap when we read a story. For this reason, it felt just right.