on the gulf

Today was Robin's last full day. We took off after breakfast on a lark and headed down to the coast at Matagorda. It's been a couple of years since I have been to the beach. We grabbed a tarp, some chairs and a cooler and headed south, about an hour's drive. They still let you drive on the beach at Matagorda and being a weekday, it wasn't crowded. We fashioned a shelter with the tarp off the side of the truck and spent the afternoon. We swam, built sand pyramids, looked for shells. A small blue crab was in the shallows settling itself into the sand and we rousted it out shrieking and dancing and laughing as it scuttled off. The sargasso seaweed was washing ashore. The powers that be used to scrape it off the beaches in the summer because it smelled and people didn't like it. Then the sand dunes became unstable. They've stopped doing that now and the dunes are once again healthy. Going to the coast has great restorative powers for me. It's so calming. I spent many summers and holidays on the beach while I was growing up.

Robin in her new clothes and shoulder bag 

that she made with a little help from me.

The Gulf of Mexico at Matagorda.

Our shelter for the day.

Small bits of shell on their way to becoming sand.

The pelicans patrolled the shore in groups of three to eight, sometimes settling onto the water in their clumsy fashion to fish. The indistinct smudge on the horizon line is an off-shore drilling rig. I counted seven in all, faintly seen.

Robin on the beach.

Sargasso seaweed. This stuff is very cool. It's a little eco-system usually. It's not unusual to see little shells and other small organisms taking shelter on it/in it. The sun was so bright I was having a hard time seeing the image on the viewer so most of the time I wasn't sure it was in focus.

This frumpy little alien followed me around all day.

panting in the heat

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I am bereft. My camera battery has died and I left the charger in Houston. Just when I was trying to get a picture of the crop duster flying low over the cotton fields. Back and forth, back and forth. These two weeks of rain (10” - 16”) we had has raised concerns of boll weevils. They also applied some sort of plant growth regulator to keep the cotton from growing too fast. Who knew growing things was so complicated?

Dirt, seed, water, sun. That's all it takes, right?

I'm learning a lot living out in this agricultural community. My own food garden has been left to it's own devices for now, it's just too hot to be out and I don't get up early enough. Two weeks of rain and being in the city for the second week of rain plus an invasion of stink bugs has left my tomatoes in ruins, rotting on the stems.

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I planted everything too close together. The first two rows of green beans are a total tangle, so thick it's almost impossible to delve into them to find the beans. The second two rows planted later, a different variety, bloom and put on baby beans that then fall off. I've gotten only a dozen or so beans off those. Meanwhile, the first two rows are covered with little beans but they don't seem to be getting any bigger. The squash I pulled up after the squash vine borers got to them. My three beautiful cantaloupes, getting close to ripening before we left for our week in the city, were ravaged when we got back. One was missing altogether, the second was broken open and half eaten and the third looked whole but when I picked it up, ants had invaded it and came rushing out at me! The banana peppers are like the hand mill cranking out salt and I don't know the magic word to get it to stop. This growing food business is harder than it looks.

I've sort of lost my enthusiasm for it now that it's so hot and I'm trying to decide if I should just pull it all out, wait til it's time for a fall garden to start over. Obviously, the garden needs to be a bit bigger and I need to read up a bit.

About the only chore that gets done outside now is mowing and it's never neat and tidy even with a brand new riding mower. We bought a used one last summer hoping it would last through this summer. Ah, foolish wishes. This spring it needed more in repairs than we originally paid for it. And here, mid-summer, it refuses to work again. Clearly our judgement needs some work when it comes to riding mowers. Today we acquired a brand new mower. I don't get it. It did the same half assed job as the old one.

Regardless, the drone of mowers is the summer song and the dog days approach.

sewing lesson

Back at the country house with the youngest g'girl for her week. Robin, 9, wants to learn how to sew so we went out and got a pattern and she picked out some fabric to make a top and some shorts.

It's been a very long time since I did any sewing, much less made any clothes. I made a lot of my clothes when I was in high school and college (1965 – 1971, that would make me 15 - 21). Wild colorful prints with long fringe, blousey sleeves with 6” cuffs, mini-skirts. I made my prom dress, a swirl of blue, purple and orange floor length voile with an empire waist and long flowing sleeves, very 'out there' for the times. I even made my wedding dress the first time around.

I not only made this one, I wore it...out in public...more than once. It barely covered my ass. I might have been wearing this one or another one just as short with my long hair walking to art class one day when I heard a crash behind me. A guy had rear ended the car in front of him. I turned to see and another student, male, was walking toward me and as he passed me he says...'that's your fault, you know.'

I learned to sew when I was about 9 or 10. My mother had a sewing machine and she made a lot of my and my sister's clothes when we were small. I know she made our Easter dresses for many years and I always wanted mine to be just like my big sister's and our mother would make us matching dresses. It used to make my sister so mad because the last thing she wanted was to be wearing matching dresses with her little sister. She was three years older than me. One summer I decided to make some clothes for my Barbie doll. I rummaged around in my mother's scrap drawer and set about to fashion these clothes. One of the things I made was a felt coat with sleeves. Set-in sleeves. My mother was pretty impressed with that.

In junior high school back in those days all the girls had to take homemaking which consisted of a semester of sewing and a semester of cooking. By the time I was required to take it, somewhere around 13, I already knew how to sew, had already made some simple skirts and things. I ended up helping a lot of the other girls and threaded a lot of the machines.

These three are the only items I have left of all the clothes I made in that 5 year period. I didn't give up sewing altogether til after both kids were born. Well, that's not entirely true. When they were small, I would buy their clothes at Weiner's department store and then sit down and re-stitch the major seams or else they would start to fall apart after a few washings and I made all our costumes for the Renaissance Festival and I made the kids Halloween costumes til they were out of junior high themselves. Bunny suits, clown suits, tree suits, big bird, superman, vampire, witch doctor, barrel of toxic waste. barrel of toxic waste? Yeah, one of my better efforts.

 

I haven't even had a sewing machine for at least 10 years. I have always had one of my own since I was 15 even if I didn't use it. My sister has had mine all this time. Hers broke down so mine went on permanent loan. I finally got it back after she bought a new one and mine's been cleaned and oiled. It took me a while to remember how to thread it.

I've got Robin practicing sewing in a straight line. She doing pretty well so she is working on her first project which is a lined bag with a shoulder strap. I'm doing the starts and stops for her since reverse on this machine is a pain even for me, but she's doing all the other sewing. Oops, well, the little minx just did it herself.

I still love going in fabric stores. I could spend hours in one just looking at all those bolts of cloth...cottons, linens, voiles, brocades, velvets, flannels, batiks...running my hands over them. When I was young though, I was sensitive to the sizing they would put in the fabrics and by the time I left my eyes, nose and throat would be burning. It didn't stop me from looking at every single bolt of cloth in the store though.

13. starting over

It's been a while since I posted an installment of 'becoming a glass artist'. You can review, or if you haven't read it you can catch up here. Be sure to read from the bottom up for chronological order...

In 1994 we started running out of money and had to go back to work. I found myself making cold calls and trips to designers’ offices to promote our work and studio again, trying to reconnect with or forge new relationships. Designers who I had done work for in the past had moved on to other vendors. Designers who I had pissed off in the past gave me the cold shoulder. The folly of focusing on architects to spec work in the past came home to me. We made new contacts, re-established some others and begged trolled for work. Now that we were not supporting employees our income needs were different and slowly work started trickling back in but still, we teetered on the edge for several years.

The best thing that came out of that time was that we decided to learn how to do the pate de verre technique of casting glass after seeing pictures of the work done in the late 19^th century in France and also the work of Doug Anderson in the 70s. We wanted something to do for ourselves, something where we had only ourselves to please. We learned that Dan Fenton (a very knowledgeable fellow on glass casting techniques) was in town doing a workshop at a local stained glass supply, he had a week to kill til his next commitment so we arranged, with a friend, to have him do a private workshop for us and a few others. Mostly what he taught us was how to make frit (crushed glass that is essential to the pate de verre technique) but he also allowed us to connect some dots in our own knowledge. There is a detailed tutorial/explanation of this technique on this page of our website.

We spent the next two or three years making frit, experimenting with mold materials, casting small hearts and other shapes, learning to work in wax. We used cheap crystal from K-Mart, we made frit from fusible sheet glass, we bought cheap fusible frit from a company in California but their supply was iffy. We tried out kiln schedules and kilns we borrowed or built. We bought any books we could find that had even related material to what we wanted to do. We dedicated Fridays and weekends to this pursuit. Eventually we felt accomplished enough and started making small bowls, 6” x 3”, using the lost wax technique, reproduction molds and two part press molds. Fortunately around this time, Bullseye Glass, who made the fusible sheet glass we had, started selling fusible frit. I say fortunately because if we had had to continue making our own frit we probably would not have continued to pursue this technique.

noble house

When we first bought the country house, and even before when we were just contemplating moving, I thought I could never leave my house, the one in the city. So much of my life happened there. I bought that house when I was between, between one marriage and the next, and I was just starting out on my life as an artist. I had already met my real husband when I moved in though we weren't yet living together.

It was a beautiful house in an old inner city neighborhood. An old house, nearly 100 years old on pier and beam but well kept up with it's little porch on the front, it's hardwood floors, it's 10' ceilings, it's diamond pattern double hung windows with weights, it's claw foot tub in one of the bathrooms and the single wide porcelain sink and tile counters in the kitchen, it's deep eaves that shaded us in the summer.

I bought it from the widow of the man whose father had built it way back when. During WWII, she had divided it up into a duplex straight down the middle, turning the one big bathroom into two and making the kitchen smaller in the process and adding another bedroom on the back of one half, off the kitchen. The utility room/mud room became the second kitchen of the smaller side. I had two back doors then. It had been converted back into a single dwelling by the time I bought it.

It had it's charm but it also had it's quirks. Like really old plumbing and really old electrical wiring. It was not uncommon to blow the breaker when I vacuumed if too many other things were on. Like the shiplap and molding that was so old and hard that you couldn't drive a nail into it without drilling a hole first. Like no closets except for a very small one in the most recently added bedroom off the kitchen and a storage closet also off the kitchen. And if you were in the back of the house on one side, you had to go all the way to the front of the house to get to the other side, unless you wanted to go out one back door and in through the other. Oh, and it was drafty in the winter with no insulation. We spent a lot of time huddled around the space heater.

Eventually we made our own changes, enclosing the small back porch to make a hall that connected the two halves of the house in the back. We took out the more modern tub in one bathroom and had it replaced with a tiled stand alone shower. We got rid of the the storage closet, making the boy's room a little bigger and giving him a way in that didn't include having to go through his sister's room. We laid insulation in the attic. We planted the magnolia tree in the front yard.

So much life. So many memories. We got married in that house. We raised our kids in that house. We made art in that house. It was our home and our studio. It sheltered us and our kids and sometimes our friends. We buried our pets there. We loved and fought there and fought for our love there. We welcomed our grandkids there, their other home. It was a sanctuary for all life, a no kill zone inside my fence.

Eventually, the kids grew up and made homes for themselves, the grandkids were growing up and making lives of their own that didn't revolve around us. The neighborhood we knew and loved was changing. And we, we were older and realized that if we were ever going to do something new, something different, now was the time to do it. So we cast about until we found the country house.

Pulling up my roots was a slow and painful process and set adrift we bounced back and forth for nearly three years. We sorted through all our stuff, took most, left some behind. Now when I go back, when we go back to do the fabrication on jobs, it's depressing. It only contains the left behind stuff and I see how run down the place had become, something that was well hidden when it was full of our life. The paint is stained and peeling inside and out; the wood floors, so beautiful when we moved in, are now worn and dirty. The cords holding the weights in the window frames have all rotted and the weights have fallen so that now the windows need to be propped open. The skirt on the outside of the house, removed when we had it leveled, was never replaced and shows the foundation on the piers. The plumbing is so clogged now in the kitchen it backs up quickly. And termites are slowly eating it up.

This once beautiful house that has stood for over a century is slowly crumbling, fallen into such disrepair. This house that sheltered us from storms and gave us refuge needed more care than we could give it.

surprise balls

When I was a little girl growing up, my parents had friends in New Orleans. They would go visit several times a year and my mother would always bring back two things...pralines from The Green Orchid and surprise balls. Well, she only got the surprise balls once a year and they were always in our christmas stocking. It was always one of my favorite thing to get.

When my mother finally needed 24 hour care and moved up to Washington state to live with my brother, my sister and I were left to sort through all her belongings. One of the things we found was two of these delightful little toys and we had fun remembering all the ones we had torn apart. I still have them.

If you don't know what these are, and as far as I know they were local to Metarie LA, hand made by Charles Gregor Creations Inc. (a google search turned up only two references, both auctions for these rare toys on ebay), you are missing out on a delight. These hand wrapped hand painted decorated crepe paper balls concealed small toys inside that were revealed as you unwrapped it. As the label says, 'the toy you destroy to enjoy' which is why they are so rare. (oops! I just did a search for surprise balls and see that there are many available, although not the Charles Gregor ones).

Several years ago, I made some for my grandkids for one of their holiday gifts. It was as fun for me to make them as it was for them to unwrap them. So while my g'girl Jade was here, she wanted to make some for each of her siblings and her parents. We went out to the dollar store for toys and crepe paper and to the grocery store for the quarter toy machines to get our prizes. It wasn't a great selection of prizes, Wharton is a very small town after all, but she was happy with her selections and so we came back to the house to put them together. We both wrapped them with me doing the last final wrap and then Jade did the faces with stickers she had made herself from the sandblasting stencil tape and rafia for hair.

So here is how we made our surprise balls.

start with a slinky, wrap with crepe paper

next, two balloons and a different color crepe paper

pencil erasures

necklaces (or skeleton ring)

foam animal in gelatin capsule (as you can see, we change the color of the crepe paper with each surprise)

candy

initial stickers

the final wrap with white

the face

the hair and their names

the finished surprise balls

They took us several hours to make and were unwrapped in less than five minutes.

*picture of the toys via http://blackeiffel.blogspot.com/2009/08/surprise-ball.html

serving us

When my granddaughter was here we went over to my sister's house so Jade could visit with her great aunt. My sister and I started talking about the books we are/have been reading when she said she had finished The Help by Kathryn Stockett. This book is about black maids in the South and their relationships with the white families they worked for in Mississippi in the 60s. Her daughter had given it to her saying that she thought her mother would like it seeing as how she (we) had grown up with maids. My sister didn't especially care for the book because she thought the author wrote the black characters' speech in that particular uneducated vernacular that is typical of a racist white person's view of the way black people speak. She felt like the author was portraying these women as uneducated when they were not. Also, though we did indeed grow up with black maids, south east Texas is more West than it is South. And so it got us to talking and remembering our own growing up and the maids that our mother employed.

The first maid I remember was Mattie. She worked for my parents when I was little, up to about 7 or 8 or so. Mattie was mean, at least that's how we remember her. Once she had cleaned the house, she wouldn't let us come inside to play, always running us out. I remember especially Saturday mornings. If you had to get up and go to the bathroom early, before you were ready to get up you had to be sneaky because if she heard you get up, she would make the bed real quick and then wouldn't let you get back in again. My parents built a house and we moved across town and Mattie quit because she didn't want to have to travel that far to work. My mother's maids also had to cook and so there followed a short series of maids that didn't work out for one reason or another until she hired Leila.

I guess I was about 11 or 12 (that would be 1961/62) when Leila came to work for us. I'm fuzzy on the actual timing of a lot of my life. It was a long time ago and since both my parents have died, I have only my own memory (and that of my sister and brother) to rely on. I'm pretty sure though that it was before my parents' personal life fell apart and that was when I was around 13 or 14. She worked for us until the early 70s, somewhere between 1971 (my first marriage) and 1974 (my divorce). During that time my parents sold the house on Briar Hollow that I had grown up in and built a new house farther out. My sister doesn't think Leila moved with them, that she retired when they moved but I seem to have a picture in my head of her standing in the kitchen on Broad Oaks so perhaps she did for a year or so. Regardless, by 1974 or '75, she had died of cancer.

She worked five days a week, having Thursdays and Sundays off. She got to workaround 9 or 10 I think and stayed through dinner so she could clean up afterwards. She had a ride to work in the mornings but evenings one of my parents would drive her to the bus stop. This was usually pretty late in the evening because my father didn't get home til about 7 PM. It wasn't enough for Leila to cook our dinner and have it ready to be put on the table when my father was ready to eat, for us to pass the dishes around and serve ourselves. Leila didn't just cook our dinner, she served us our dinner as well. Starting at my father she carried each dish around to us clockwise. As I got older, this little ritual came to bother me, even embarrass me.

I think my parents treated her well. I don't recall they ever talked down to her, she got regular raises, they paid her social security and I believe they helped her out in some personal situations now and then. Towards the end, they gave her my sister's car to drive when she went off to college. My mother never let us treat her as a personal servant. On Saturdays and during the summers, we were to get our own lunches and clean up after ourselves in the kitchen as well. We were supposed to tidy up our own rooms so Leila could vacuum and dust, change the sheets.  We were never to take her for granted, expected to thank her each night for our dinner.

When I think back on my life between those ages when Leila worked for us, she is the one I remember. She was the one who was there when I got home from school, she is the one I talked to, she is the one I played my little prank on. She always wore a half apron and I loved to sneak up behind her and untie it so that it would fall to the floor, sometimes making her laugh and sometimes irritating her if she wasn't in a playful mood. She is the one I learned most of what I knew about domestic stuff from, she was the constant reliable in my life. When I got home from school, my mother was always in her room taking her nap that lasted til shortly before my father got home.

I don't ever remember feeling any resentment from her but that could be because I was clueless so I was a little surprised when my sister said that now, when she thinks back, she doesn't think Leila liked us kids very much. When I asked her why she thought that, she said it was because after she got married (at 19), she called Leila a few times for advice on how to do or cook one thing or another and she said Leila brushed her off every time without giving the asked for help and after that she quit asking. So maybe so. I mean, really, there was no reason for her to have any kind of emotional attachment to us, her employer's kids. We grew up, went away to college, got married and made our own lives and Leila drifted out of our consciousness.

Now, as I sit here trying to think of what I knew about her, her life, about her as a person, not just our maid and the answer is...not much really. I know she had a daughter, Juanita, and I know she didn't have a husband. I don't know for certain if she never had a husband or if she did and he ran off. For some reason, I think he abandoned her or perhaps she kicked him out. I know that Juanita got pregnant when she wasn't married. I know she went to church. These are little bits and pieces I picked up because while she confided some to my parents she never talked about her life to me. Why should she? I was just a kid and Leila definitely had her notions about was proper and what not. The question I have and can't really answer is, did I ever ask her about her life? Probably not. I don't even know for certain how old she was. She seemed ageless to me.

When Leila became ill and was dying of cancer, my mother called me and told me I needed to go see her and say goodby. I don't know if that was how she put it exactly but that was exactly what it was. I was in my early 20s, older than 21, younger than 25. I made my way to her neighborhood in a black part of town, found her house. It was the first time I had ever been to her house, to her neighborhood, to any black part of town, an experience all in itself. My sister remarked on this, that the only time we had ever been to her house was when she was dying, but really, why would we ever have been before. Would you really expect your servant to invite you as a guest into their home? Anyway, she was bedridden by then. I visited with her. I don't remember what we said, how long I stayed. Not long. Probably I didn't tell her what was in my heart. Her daughter was there tending to her and I felt waves of hostility coming off her. Could have been my imagination, probably was, probably she was just grieving her mother's imminent death.

We went to the funeral. It was the first time I had ever been in a black church. She was laid out in front. Not just an open casket but one with sides that folded down. There she was, laying out in full sight. We sat fairly close to the front, the only white people in a sea of black. Black funerals are very different from white funerals. After the pastor gave his eulogy, he asked if anyone else had a few words to say. People stood up one by one and spoke about Leila. Finally it seemed as if everyone had had their say and the pastor asked if any of us, her employers, would like to say a few words. My parents sat there silent and stone faced, clearly uncomfortable at being singled out. I fully expected that one of them would stand and say something. I was shocked and embarrassed when I realized neither of them was going to say a thing. So I stood up.

I stood up and spoke about how much she meant to me, that she had been the one there for me, that she had practically raised me and how much I would miss her. I was crying so hard that I'm surprised anyone could understand what I was saying. I sat down. My parents never said anything to me about my unseemly display, the words I said. I wonder, now, what all those people must have thought about this young white girl, standing up in their church, crying about the passing of her black maid.

Back home while we were making cookies, after visiting my sister, my granddaughter asked me something about Leila, about what my sister had said about her not really liking us. We talked, I told her what I remembered and when I got to the part about the funeral, I choked up. I had to stop talking until it passed. Surprised me that that emotion welled up after all these years, decades.

Maybe Leila didn't have any attachment to us, to me. I will never know. But I think I can truthfully say that I loved her.