more art cards and Object #8

I suppose I’m due for a post since it’s been a week. What have I been doing all week? Just the usual; yoga class, SHARE, dinner on my two nights, errands around town. The AC is out on the car again so it’s been hot going anywhere. 

I got the two little watercolors framed. The small frames were just too tight, too crowded. 

The larger frames I had bought I discarded because the opening in the mats were smaller than the paintings. So I changed my mind again and used them after all, cutting the mats to make a larger opening. I took the zucchini painting to Hesed House on Friday but had to have a new mat for the pomegranate cut at the frame shop here because I cut the one that came with the frame too big. So here’s how the pomegranate looks in its new frame (the zucchini flower/fruit looks similar, just in a rectangular frame). Much better.

And I’ve done 3 more of the watercolor note cards and am almost finished with a fourth so I guess that’s what I’ve been doing this week.

Speaking of note cards, I got my first check from the Market at Hesed House. They sold three packs of the note cards of my colored pencil drawings. They also sold one of the framed prints but I guess it will be on next month’s check. 

------------

My Life In 100 Objects - #8

The staghorn fern.

After my father retired he acquired a small staghorn fern and turned his interest to some plants, gardening, but not gardening like flower beds and all that, just certain plants. Roses, the staghorn fern, plumerias. The staghorn multiplied and multiplied and multiplied until it was a huge ball, so heavy it could not be moved and he had a structure that he hung it on. After he died my sister acquired it. At some point she cut it up, gave away parts of it, kept some, and gave me one of the individual ferns. I had an old wire hanging basket, got one of those coconut fiber liners and put the fern in the basket and hung it under the magnolia tree, bringing it in every winter. That was, I don’t even remember, eight years ago? Maybe. Maybe more, maybe less. It was finally too heavy for me to lift and carry in and out last fall so now my grandson moves it in and out for me. 

I did not have a good relationship with either of my parents for different reasons. There were several years in my 20s when I refused to get a phone for the simple reason that then they couldn’t contact me. This isn’t the place to go into the history of my relationships with with my parents but my father had a stroke when I was in my early 30s and it changed his personality. He was forced to retire and he sort of disappeared into himself. When he emerged again about a decade later we began to have a more cordial relationship. Anyway, having this stag horn is a small connection to the short time when we weren’t always at odds. Few things make me think of him but this is one, every time I walk past it.