Raven and Sparrow

The house that Ruth built

Although our long and obscure driveway keeps casual passers-by away from our door, I wasn't entirely surprised a couple of days ago to find an unknown woman standing on our patio peering down at the old house. It has happened several times in the years that we have lived here because people who are familiar with this place are drawn back by their memories. The woman who built it, Ruth Penington, was an art professor at the University of Washington. She bought the property in 1940 and used it as a summer get-away until she died in the 1990's. Lots of students and family members were invited here and she occasionally rented it to sailors stationed at the nearby navy base. This most recent visitor told me her husband had helped build the "new" wing in the 1970's and had brought her down then to show her the beautiful place he was working on. She also was a student of Ruth's at UW, and of Ramona Solberg, who was a Ruth protege. I never knew Ruth and the number of people who did is becoming fewer and fewer, so I was delighted to meet her. Her presence reminded me of the first time I was here and the powerful pull the house and the setting had for me.

It was a cold day in February when we learned there was a house for sale in this vicinity. It had been empty for about three years and was about to be torn down and replaced by something much more grand, but the owner, who had purchased the property from Ruth's nephew, changed his mind and put it back on the market. The doors were standing open, the roof was clearly not doing its job, and the whole place had an air of abandonment and neglect. It was hard to tell how old it was because the design was so contemporary, but there were tell-tale signs (like the light switches) that said it was much older than it looked (the original cabin was built in 1942). Even in its sad condition, it was charming. The windows, and there were so many! looked out towards the fabulous view of water and mountain, and let in lots of light even in the dead of winter. The rooms were pleasantly proportioned and rambled up and down over the topography of the hillside. One interior staircase was built into the rock of the island and ivy grew up the wall indoors. I loved it and I could tell that whoever had built it had a highly attuned aesthetic sense and had loved it too. Her hand was so strongly evident that I became quite curious about her and began to research her life.

If you are interested in metal-working and jewelry you have probably heard of Ruth Penington because she was very active and influential in those fields in the fifties and sixties. She was the head of the UW art department and a founding member of Northwest Designer Craftsmen, a large organization of local artists. Ramona Solberg was probably more famous as a jeweler, but she was taught by Ruth and was her friend. I called Ramona, who was then still alive, and another friend who was important in local art circles, Lamar Harrington, and asked them about Ruth and they each kindly spoke to me for quite a while. They both said that the other was really closest to Ruth, from which I gleaned that Ruth was not deeply intimate with anyone. I heard from more than one person (not Ramona or Lamar) that she was terrifying and my most recent visitor echoed that, saying that as a teacher Ruth was very scary. Philip McCracken, the noted sculptor, said she failed him in the one class he took from her. There were some articles in the Seattle Times about her, including one with a photo of her working in the studio of our house (the windows are unmistakable.) The UW still keeps pictures of some of her work, which was also contemporary in style, and incorporated objects she found around her. One necklace features stones from our local beach. She was a serious and lifelong artist who clearly drew inspiration from the setting we are lucky enough to share. She came here as often as she could for decades, but one day went into a local store and said she couldn't find her house and needed help to show her the way. After that she didn't come anymore, but her house still shouts her name. The place she made was a magnet for many people, and they still think about it and occasionally wander by.

 

Northwest summer

In the news I read of severe weather here and there around the country and the world and I feel the weight of fear settle upon me.  However, when I look outside, I personally have nothing to complain about. After a very cold and rainy spring lasting well into June, the weather here in the Pacific Northwest has been consistently lovely. Even when it is quite hot down in Seattle, up here in the islands the temperature remains in the 70's or high 60's during the day, which is very comfortable, and the sun has been shining. We are having a beautiful summer. No smoke so far (knock on wood) and not too much fog. We have been sticking pretty close to home, but why go elsewhere when it is so pretty here?

The crabbing was really good this year....so good that I am sick of cracking and eating crab. Poor, poor me.

We walked on the ferry for a fun day out. This is the approach to Lopez Island.

We celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary and my mother's 90th birthday.

Mostly we just hung out at home. This is my granddaughter Sophie and her uncle Brendan. Its hard to beat being together in the good old summertime.

Nailing down the edges

Lisa's summer tablecloth is moving towards its finish and I have been embroidering as much as I can to get it done. After I did the dragonflies I felt like there was too much of a difference between the heavily worked insects and the slap dashy painted leaves. The foxglove flowers were painted too but seemed too delicate to encase in thread. I did a few experiments and finally settled on stem stitching around the stems and leaves with a thread that matched the background, switching to almost invisible running stitch in the same color around the flowers. The heavier stem stitching helped to integrate the leaves into the rest of the cloth while the flowers were more subtly defined, without creating a clear line around them. The dragonflies and the little white dots are surrounded by three rounds of running stitch, which implies (I hope) the movement of air around them. All that is done now, so I am going around the main body of the cloth stitching in the ditch to nail down the edges before I put a lavender binding around the whole thing and call it done. I'm not sure how I'm going to photograph it in its entirety since my studio has been given over to other uses and my hanging wall is to longer available.

It is sort of exciting to see the end of the tunnel on this project. (I called Lisa to remind her that her tables are coming, and she had understandably forgotten that they were even in the works.)  

Back to dragonflies

 

 

After being wadded into a bag for months and months, I finally dragged my tablecloth for Lisa's summer out into the light of day and began to embroider the dragonflies. It was a nightmare. I had envisioned the wings done in silver thread and was excited to find a couple of options at my local fabric store but the DMC silver that looked the best was hard to work with. No knots could be counted on to stay and the thread frayed badly so I had to work with very short lengths, hence more knots. Aargh. Embroidering the insect bodies in two grayish shades was like going on vacation after the wings. I got them finished and then began to worry about what the silver thread might do under the iron, having forgotten to test this before the marathon struggle. Fortunately the silver behaves very well even when the temperature is quite high. Whew. I used my few remaining scraps of harem cloth behind the dragonflies to stabilize them and I hope they will not pucker the fabric around them too much as the needlework goes on.

The next step is to add a gray and white checked border around the outside. This is supposed to be a summer tablecloth and was intended to be quite a bit lighter in the beginning, but the dyeing came out darker than I meant. I still like it, but I think it needs something to make it more lighthearted and checks remind me of summer picnics, so I've scrounged all the gray and white scraps I can find and sewn them into this alternating ladder, which will then be cut into a two and a half inch strips for the border. Getting the strips straight has led to lots of thread pulling to produce reliable and uniform (eventual) squares. 

Woodpecker New Year

On New Year's Day I was walking the dog when I came upon a dead bird in the snow. It was a medium sized woodpecker with high contrast black and white bars and stripes on its back, wings and tail, a bright red head and chest, and a warm yellow belly....a red-breasted sapsucker. These birds are indigenous to the area but are not common. It could easily be ten years since the last time I saw one. To find a dead one was sad, but to compound my dismay, within five minutes I found another one, also dead. I held the two colorful corpses in my hands and wondered if I would ever see another. So many signs natural, political and familial point to endings and loss. Couldn't red-breasted sapsuckers come to my woods and live? The foreboding that is always lurking in my heart sharpened my grief, but what could I do? It was too late for the woodpeckers.

Within an hour my mood would turn. Looking out the window past the Christmas tree into the snowy woods, I saw the flash of black and white and red and yellow dipping between the trees and then a red-breasted sapsucker perched on a trunk just feet away. Seconds later another joined it, pecking busily into the bark for food. Both birds were puffed up against the cold, wearing their bright feathers like cheerful hats and scarves under their graphic overcoats. They glowed against their wintery background and were very much alive. I felt such a rush of relief and joy seeing them. It was a reassurance that some loss doesn't mean all is lost. At least for now, woodpeckers are still here.

It took a while for it to register having seen four red-breasted sapsuckers in one day. Wow. An interesting way to begin the new year. I looked up woodpeckers in my animal book and found that they are associated with the power of rhythm and discrimination. Words to meditate upon in 2022.

Happy New Year!

Am I back?

 

I don't know.

Its been many months since I have posted due to the face-slapping return of my auto-immune disease. Spring, summer and most of autumn were spent on the couch listlessly waiting for the drugs to help while enduring the side effects of those drugs. My energy level was so low that, on some days, just getting out of bed was the extent of my accomplishment. The physical torpor was matched or even exceeded by mental shut-down and withdrawal. Some of that was part of the illness, but grappling with the implications of what happened crowded other concerns from my mind too. All of my projects came to a complete halt....even embroidery was too hard. I became uninterested and uninteresting. That doesn't make for good blog content.

The good news is that I am improving. My energy is better and I am starting to pick up the fallen threads of my life...literally. I can do lots more things without collapse and I feel more like myself. The bad news is that I have lost confidence in my own future. The onset of this last round of disease (ANCA vasculitis) was so sudden and devastating that I am left undone. I am going to have to come to some new way of being but in the meanwhile I am very tentative and unsure. I am newly asking what is important to me and how I want to spend my time now that the fragility of life has been so freshly and personally demonstrated to me.

Of course, I am not alone in this place of shifting sands. The shock of a bad diagnosis is all too common and I now have heightened compassion for everyone who feels like their life has been stolen from them by things beyond their control. "Stolen" is the give-away word, of course. We all make complacent assumptions about how our lives are going to go because recognizing our mortality is just too scary, but we don't own our time so it cannot be stolen.

My life continues. We'll see what happens now.

 I very much appreciate the on-going concern of my blog friends through this long absence. Nancy, Marti, Grace, Jude and Liz especially have been so kind with their continued comments and check-ins. Thank you, thank you.

In the deep midwinter

Although the rest of the country has struggled through some nasty cold spells this winter I thought we might get a pass this year after three months without even a serious frost. Nope. No longer. A week ago my fuchsia was still blooming, now it is blackening under a foot of snow. We so rarely get snow that it becomes a wonder and delight as long as it doesn't last too long. This storm is expected to pass tonight so tomorrow we will be slogging through icy slush on our way back to our usual gray normalcy. We have to enjoy it now.

Unfortunately I am at complete leisure for contemplation of the weather as I have been weathering a storm of my own. Ten days ago I went in for a routine blood test and within a few hours found myself in an ambulance on the way to Seattle with acute renal failure. It is a return of the auto-immune vasculitis I struggled with a couple of years ago, this time centered in my kidneys..... a real slap upside the head as I had no idea I was sick and still don't feel any symptoms but fatigue, and now the effects of massive doses of steroids. I am lucky not to be suffering and also to have so far avoided the kind of damage that would result in the need for dialysis or other horrid interventions, but there has been some permanent scarring and I am back on the steroid/chemotherapy treadmill it took me two years to escape the last time. I find it devastating to again be swept over this waterfall without warning. How can I prevent it in the future if I don't even know it is happening? I am going to have to cultivate radical acceptance to reach any sort of equanimity, but getting used to things is what humans do best so the outlook is bright. I am very fortunate and I am trying to remember that.

In the meantime....snow. Oh yeah, and Valentine's Day. Happy Valentine's Day everyone.

The nativity scene

I have been hugely enjoying the comments on my last post about trimming the Christmas tree! Thank you so much! Your responses have been a real bright spot in our restricted, quarantined season. In the midst of this on-line camaraderie I was surprised to receive a comment from a stranger on a similar post I made in 2011. (Wha???) It was our first year in our new house and we had a ten foot Christmas tree (never again, that thing weighed a ton) to celebrate the high ceiling in our living room. I also went around and documented a few other decorations that had been in storage for seven years and were newly on display again, including this cardboard nativity scene from Mike's family. Still stored in its original box, it is made of flat printed pieces that get held upright by fold-up tabs in the cardboard base. The hole in the stable ceiling was meant for one of those old, large Christmas tree lights that I don't think the structure could support anyway. The star on top has fallen apart and is now only made viable by propping the fragments of its former structure behind it. Apparently my commenter had an identical nativity scene in his childhood and ferreted out my image through Google...(again, Wha???)  He noted the probable fire hazard of sticking one of those old lights into a paper decoration and we agreed that the position of the "colored wise man" (so described on the appropriate tab) outside with the camels was a good example of the generally unnoticed racism of the fifties. To be fair, the kneeling wise man also has dark skin, and the designers of this scene could have used only white people with no one being the wiser (ha ha), but still, in these fraught times the apparent political incorrectness is glaring. It is a reminder of the ways ideas change, often for the better. Having someone reach out of the ether to engage gently on this bit of nostalgia reminds me also of how closely connected we are. Merry Christmas to everyone on the internet.

Trimming the tree

Its funny how small decisions made without much thought can create continuing patterns as life goes on. Every year I am reminded of this when I trim our Christmas tree. In our first year of marriage Mike and I got a tiny tree for our apartment and went in search of cheap ornaments at our local chain store  We immediately disagreed about colors. Mike wanted multicolored lights and multicolored ornaments. I was influenced by the then new trend in white lights and wanted a more subdued color scheme. Our compromise was no white and no multi colors....we went with all red. We bought red lights and plain red ball ornaments and that was it. We still have that same color scheme after all these years. The lights have been replaced over time, but the ornaments are still in their original boxes, much the worse for forty eight years of wear.

Although our first tree was extremely simple that didn't last too long. Every year we accumulated decorations. All kinds of birds, animals, santas, etc. joined the red balls, and the increase really picked up speed when we had children. I was always on the lookout for new ornaments to amuse them, and of course we had the deluge of handcrafted objet d'arte from school. I also tried additional trimmings like bead garlands and dried flowers. In the eighties dried baby's breath was everywhere and I still think you can't beat it for pulling a tree together, but it only lasts a year or two and it is not so easy to find now that it is out of fashion.

Our last big influx of ornaments came in the nineties when Mike's dad gave up his house and moved into assisted living. He had no interest in Christmas decorations so we got all the old things from the forties and fifties that Mike had grown up with, also still in their original boxes. The scotch tape holding them together is older than we are. My family had many of the exact same ones (my parents are still using theirs) so it was very nostalgic for both of us to add these childhood memories to our tree. 

There were other "specials" that collected one by one...engraved silver and pewter ornaments to commemorate important occasions, blown glass from Venice, and a few more modest bits that carry history and memories. The little bird in the middle box is completely ordinary, but has gained pride of place at the very top of every tree, often mirroring the birds sitting on branches outside the windows. The golden pine cone/hand grenade came from my mother's childhood. Her family used to spend Christmas at a resort they ran in the Mojave Desert a couple canyons over from Death Valley. One year they went back to town leaving their Christmas tree for their caretaker to dismantle. He was a grizzled old miner without much appreciation for ornamentation, so instead of taking off and storing the ornaments he just threw the tree fully decorated into a gully behind the house. The golden pine cone is the only survivor according to my mother, so it has been officially designated as a family treasure.

All these years later our tree is a combination of that original red decision, and all the accretions that have followed. I still use the reds to anchor the color scheme, but welcome the variations that I think add interest and history to our tree. It is above all a family tree more than an artistic statement. 

In these anxious times it is comforting to return to this symbol of home and holiday. The days are very short here in the Northwest as the solstice approaches and the glow of the red tree keeps the darkness at bay. I hope your holidays will be filled with the warmth of tree lights and the smell of evergreens as we all await the return of the sun.

No thanks

I have a large family so Thanksgiving and Christmas are often crowded, noisy events with thirty or more people. The weeks between are also full of smaller get-togethers, plus the work of creating a festive atmosphere at home for the more immediate family. Every year as the holiday crush begins to bear down I have wondered how it would be to just skip a year... to let the cooking, shopping, decorating, party planning or planning for party attendance go and have a vacation from the demands of the season.

Well.

Now I have my wish. As the pandemic stats escalated and the governor called for more and more distance, the four people I invited for a pared down Thanksgiving dinner politely withdrew and left Mike and me alone here as we almost always are these days. I am a little surprised at the grumbly feeling this has brought forth in me, even though I applaud the caution shown by my erstwhile guests.  I have decided to act out my yearly fantasy and give the whole holiday a miss. There will be no turkey. I have baked no pies. Bah humbug.

In this contrarian spirit I have also made a list of things I am not grateful for:

Getting older.

I know, this is tricky because what is the alternative? Still, the physical changes, the loss of strength, vision and energy, the joint pain and the hovering worries about possible larger health issues I could do without. Also, everyone I love is getting older too and the season of funerals will be upon us soon. I am not grateful.

The degradation of our political system.

Four years of watching the decline of our democracy has been torture. The election of Joe Biden has slowed the rot, but the refusal of Republicans to accept the result and adhere to the norms of peaceful transition is deeply depressing. One of my friends said that we are now through the looking glass....it is impossible to see what will happen or to depend on the institutions we have relied upon in the past. I am not grateful.

The human propensity to fear the other

This worked for us in the past, but now it is standing in our way. We can only effectively address the problems of our time if we work together, but our instinctive fears of people different from ourselves are being cynically manipulated to keep power in the hands that currently hold it and only for the benefit of those few.  I am not grateful.

Our hunger for status

Again, our innate tendency to form hierarchies is an instinct we need to moderate. Slipping down the social ladder is apparently as scary as death. We (white people) can't let those Others up for fear that we will lose our divine right to the top rung. Actually, I think white people are afraid they might be treated like they have treated others, which would be something to fear. The only antidote is to cling ever more thoroughly to the American ideal of equality for all. In the absence of that, I am not grateful.

Covid-19

Stupid pandemic. I am not grateful.

Climate change, nuclear annihilation and human short-sightedness

Aargh. 

Okay, no one likes a whiner. I am a profoundly lucky person and most of the time I remember that. I am deeply grateful for my dear family, both immediate and extended, my general good health, my adorable pets and the chance to live in the most beautiful place in the world. From this bounty I wish you all a most happy Thanksgiving, whether together or apart. I am also grateful for you.