new theme, crystals, and why is my subconscious dragging up my mother

I’m going to try a new recurring content in my posts, My Life in 100 Objects, the idea taken from Rosemary Murphy of Share My Garden. She has a separate blog for this but I’m just going to scatter them through my own future posts. So here is #1.

This painting, 47" x 37", by William Anzalone hung in the breakfast room of my childhood home directly across the table from where I sat. It’s what I looked at during breakfast and dinner. I have claimed this painting as my own almost from the time my father first bought it though I don’t remember what age I was. Anzalone would, in the future, have a big impact on my artistic ability. I took Drawing from him in college at the University of Houston during which I learned not only how to draw (as opposed to just sketch or scribble) but how to see the thing I was trying to draw and other rules (who knew there were rules for drawing) like how to render a curved object and perspective among much more. I remember the first class when he told us the hardest thing to draw was a straight line, not because it was so hard but because of our fear of putting pencil to paper. I didn’t get possession of this painting until after my father died and my mother went to live with my brother in the PNW. It currently hangs above my bed. 

Sunday I finally hung all the rest of my crystals that I've been accumulating. They look great. What took me so long! Well, beside the fact that my desk is up against that wall of windows and it’s a tight squeeze to get back there.

I took the screen off the window first which I had been planning to do for some time now so I would have a clearer view of the bird feeder since the screens are old and cast a gray filter. Also I don’t ever open those windows (see above) and they won’t stay up anyway, have to be propped up. I just leaned the screen up against the bank of windows on the outside, hadn’t put it away in the garage yet, and the next morning a little green tree frog and an anole were taking shelter behind it.

The frog was still there when I put the screen away.

Every day when I go out there’s another branch or two or three that has fallen from the oaks and the pecans, ones that were broken during hurricane Beryl but not fallen. I’ve just been piling them up next to the magnolia tree during the burn ban instead of putting them in the truck which pretty much makes the truck unusable for anything else. 

As you can see I also pulled the kidney shaped small pond out of the ground since it was finally light enough with all the water evaporated and the water plants dead. Now I have this big hole to fill. I may set the pond up elsewhere in the future but I won’t sink it in the ground as before.

I had another weird dream Monday morning. I was in the kitchen of my childhood home and it was a mess with dirty dishes and empty food containers strewn over all the counters. I was shocked that no one was cleaning the place up or providing decent food for our old senile mother who I suppose was in her bedroom (where in real life she spent much of her time sleeping her life away). She wandered in and got a box of dry cereal from the cabinet and started just eating handfuls out of the box. When I tried to take it away from her telling her to at least put it in a bowl with milk she grabbed it back and wandered back out of the kitchen. When I walked into the family room and looked out the sliding glass door into the backyard, there were three men digging up bulbs and plants. I opened the door and yelled at them to stop and to leave and then I went back into the kitchen and out the back door to get the license plate number of the car they must have come in but it was a police car and there was no license plate and as I was writing down the name of the police department the men came around from the back and tried to drive away. There was more to the dream before I woke up but the rest of it is murky now.

Today is the day. I am not going to watch any election returns and plan to stay off social media, preferring the shock or awe on Wednesday morning but hoping to greet the day with jubilation.