slowly she turned

Living the Slow life in North Carolina

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  • Wire and paper sculpture at John C. Campbell Folk School, part one

    It’s been a little over a week since I returned from my latest visit to John C. Campbell Folk School. This was my second class with environmental artist Bryant Holsenbeck and my first class with her co-teacher, paper sculptor Nicole Uzzell. It was one of the most exciting and fulfilling classes I have ever taken.

    I have a lot of photos from the last part of this week. Most of the time I was too caught up in what I was doing to think about a camera. The photo at the top shows many of the students’ wire armatures that have been dipped in paper pulp or wrapped with paper to dry outside on a rack. The class exploded into many directions as we learned techniques and possibilities for the materials and tailored them to our personal style.

    Because I have so many photos, I’m going to divide this into three posts. This first one will feature my classmates’ work, in progress and finished. Hopefully I will get their names right! If I messed up, please let me know in the comments. I have to approve comments after they come to my email, so it will be private.

    +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

    This large sculpture by Elaine Bailey was a real stunner. Her shaman wore a possum skull that she dipped in indigo dye. It combines a lot of elements other than bone – wire, wood, paper pulp, stretched paper, strings of kozo, and indigo and walnut dyes. Here’s a close-up of the head.

    Elaine Bailey, artist
    Elaine Bailey, artist

    Geri Forkner teaches fiber sculpture classes at the Folk School. She has made one weaving a day for twenty years! She experimented with many structures and found objects that she brought to the class. I love Geri and her vision of how objects and materials can be transformed. I hope that I can take one of her classes one day.

    Geri Forkner, artist

    Audrey Pinto, a fellow North Carolina book and fiber artist, made delicate forms with the lacy kozo and found wood. And holy moly, take a look at the weavings on her website: audreypintoart.com. Obviously I need to take a trip to Durham.

    Audrey Pinto, artist

    Jackie Mellow’s playful work with wire and wood was reflective of her personality. I enjoyed her company often at meals. I felt that we were a lot alike in many ways.

    Jackie Mellow, artist

    Susi Hall, a local artist, created delicate mobiles. I visited her table at a outside market at The Crown on Friday night, and she is multi-talented – makes books, sculpture, and mixed media work of all varieties. I highly recommend visiting her website: workswithpaper.com.

    Susi Hall, artist

    Julie Pazun focused on one project for the week – an angler fish from the deepest sea. I think that she plans to repaint the eyes but I thought it was perfect.

    Julie Pazun attaches fins to her angler fish.
    Julie Pazun, artist. Those terrifying teeth! Drying on the rack outside.

    I have a lot of photos of Kathy Peters’ work. She brought these dried plants compete with roots that she pulled out of her garden. I was surprised at how tough they were. I will be looking at plants with a more curious eye as potential for art as a result.

    Kathy Peters, artist
    Kathy Peters, artist
    Kathy Peters, artist
    Kathy Peters, artist
    Kathy Peters, vessel in progress

    Some photos were not selected for this post simply because the photographer didn’t get good ones! I thank my classmates for allowing me to post them.

    A lot of paper sheets were also made, and because it was mainly used in sculpture or dried on windows, I don’t know whose is whose. Photos of paper sheets will be in a subsequent post.

    Please see Nicole Uzzell‘s and Bryant Holsenbeck‘s websites for photos of their work.

  • Lake Waccamaw, July 2024

    I’ve needed to go to the lake since mid June. It’s the place I am drawn to when my heart needs healing. Usually I need a few days by myself, but Sandy knows to give me my space when we are there. With Diego’s short life prognosis and Pablocito suddenly being the only mammal at home, I had to tear myself away to get there. Once I did, it was the right place to be. The weather was lovely, which meant that sitting beside or in the water in the shade was comfortable. As long as that breeze comes off the water, it’s good. The wind made breakers most of the time we were there.

    The rainstorms, when they came through, were welcome. This part of North Carolina was in a terrible drought. Besides, I’ve always enjoyed watching storms from the back porch.

    In the past year or so, somehow I became fascinated with bugs. This golden silk orb-weaver, species Trichonephila clavipes, set up its web next to our front door beneath the eaves. Maybe one of the most beautiful spiders I’ve ever seen. And look at those fuzzy legs! Happily, I had some fabric scraps with me that were just perfect for my stitch meditation inspired by this lady.

    Later, another bug took me speeding back to my childhood – I rescued this click beetle from the galvanized metal tub of water we use to wash the sand off of our feet before we go into the house from the lake beach. He must have been too wet to click away.

    Anyway, I spent a lot of time zeroing in on tiny bits of nature – the mark-making of raindrops, the sweeping clear of sand by Spanish moss, the tiny pebbles not quite pulverized into fine white sand yet, little bits of driftwood, seeds, shells, the circles everywhere.

    We ate well too – unfortunately I came back three pounds heavier. We had a couple of guests and of course my sister for part of the time, and we ate out for almost every meal. As usual I wrecked my stomach by eating a lot of fried food, but Dale’s at Lake Waccamaw has the best fried calabash shrimp, yellow squash, and okra you’ve ever tasted, plus it has a great view of the lake. The first night there was a power outage so we went to The Chef and the Frog in Whiteville, which is much fancier but still affordable for that level of cuisine. We also went to El Juan Mariscos in Lake Waccamaw for Mexican food, which was not the ordinary Mexican-American that we are used to, and they actually had a burrito with mole sauce on the menu that was incredibly delicious. I’ve not found mole sauce in the Greensboro Mexican restaurants so far.

    This sign at Dale’s made me think about all the reasons I love the lake as opposed to the beach. Of course, the biggest for us is the expense…we can’t afford to go to the beach very often and our family place at Lake Waccamaw is a place to go for free. But it has many more charms other than money. Being able to hang out next to the water in a shady spot under Spanish moss laden bald cypresses is definitely one. Generally, the traffic is very light and other than the OCD dude who is in love with his leaf blower and pressure washer a few houses down, the sounds of the waves breaking on the shore and the birdsong is right there with you instead of having to hoof it down to the beach or trying to find a parking space. The variety of birds and wildlife is huge. There aren’t any jellyfish or sharks. There are alligators across the road in the canal, and I know that they are in the lake, but I’ve never seen an alligator in the lake in my 63 years of going down there. They don’t like it in the part of the lake we play in – it is shallow and clear and there isn’t much food for them to eat there. In the summer, it is too hot for them. Same for most of the turtles and snakes – they prefer the canal and the undeveloped swamp behind it. I love to look for interesting pieces of driftwood on the sandy beach and I always bring home a bag of them.

    All that being said, I would not want to live there. The area is rife with white nationalists and neo-Confederates, and the flooding from major hurricanes has been a serious problem. If it was a closer drive, I would visit a lot more often, though.

    Here are two more stitch meditations I made while sitting on this shore:

  • Plans, plans, plans

    We haven’t been to the lake since April and will take a short trip down there with a couple of friends soon. We were going to go this past weekend and stay through the week, but between the heat wave and my reluctance to leave Pablocito alone for the first time in his life, we turned around and came back home, unpacked the car, and have spent most of the last few days inside in the cool air conditioning.

    I need to get over this about Pablocito. I mean, it’s a valid concern because we have always had more than one cat, always. And now that Diego is gone, he follows me around and is much needier for attention than he used to be. I guess this may be partly my fault, since I have spoiled the hell out of him in my own need for a cuddly kitty. I don’t think that Pablocito will ever be a lap cat or particularly cuddly. He hates being picked up and he won’t sit on the sofa between us. He does love to be petted and will sit nearby. He also loves to play and last night I found out that an emery board was a good toy for him. He used to chase and jump up to bat a wadded up ball of paper but now he ignores that. He’d rather play with a shoestring dangling around him.

    Our neighbor who watches our house and takes care of our cats loves Pablocito and I have no doubt that he will get some love and attention while we are gone.

    Here’s some great news: I was on a wait list for Bryant Holsenbeck’s Sculptural Papermaking class at John C. Campbell Folk School in August, and I got in! I really did not think that I would get in, and I had already decided that if I had the chance I would have to turn it down. It was bad timing, because in June we got hit with our bill for the Scotland tour, an unexpected expensive air conditioner repair, and Diego’s vet bills. Then I had to pay for Edwina’s week long workshop coming up at Wildacres in September, which I committed to months ago and I would not miss for the world. So onto the credit card it went. When I discussed it with Sandy, he thought for a minute, and then said, “It’s only money.” He’s been writing me checks every couple of weeks since June.

    Maybe I should explain that Sandy and I have had separate bank accounts since the second year of our marriage. I think that it has been one of the major reasons we have been married for 37 years. We divided up the bills to be equitable, and it has worked out quite well since neither of us are ones to be told what to do with our money. But I do consult with him on big expenses since we ARE married and legally that has consequences. Certain big expenses we split. The major thing we agree on is staying out of debt. Sandy was in charge of the mortgage and he paid it off early. Our cars are both over 15 years old, but we have been vigilant about taking them for regular maintenance since I had to junk my 1996 Chevy at the beach during the pandemic. I hope that we might get by without having to do a car payment for another long period of time.

    Anyway, I’ve studied with Bryant before, and this class description presses several of my joy buttons, and god knows I need some joy making after the past several weeks. I plan to get out the unfinished stuff that I put away from the last class I took with her and make some more wire armatures. I think that I need some instruction to do this better, though. Working with wire feels so awkward to me. I need active encouragement.

    I am a bit wary of the uptick in Covid cases around us. It seems like every time I open Facebook one or two of my friends announces that they have Covid. When you consider that not everyone tells about their personal lives on social media, this is significant. We went to Walgreen yesterday to see about getting boosters, and I talked to the pharmacist. Turns out that there hasn’t been a new booster since our last one in October, but they are expecting the next one this fall. He said that getting another of the same one would still be helpful, but the issue is that if we get it now, and the updated one comes out before our trip, we would have to wait three months before we can get it. It is less than three months before we fly to Scotland, so we decided to wait.

    It’s hard to believe that our trip is that soon! This is definitely another bucket list item for both of us. We will spend extra time in Edinburgh, and probably take an extra bus tour to northern England (I want to go to Northumberland and Lindisfarne) but for eight days we will be with a group taking trains, buses, and boats throughout the Highlands. I won’t be responsible for any of it!!! It will be chilly for sure, but considering that the heat index outside this week has been over 100 F, that sounds refreshing to me. I much prefer cold to heat.

    Anyway, I will be doing a lot of things that I love most in the next three months, and that is the best treatment that I know of for my depression and agoraphobia. Now, my anxiety is a different matter entirely and I have gone back to therapy for that. I will be driving by myself into the mountains TWICE. Agoraphobia is a sneaky little bastard and I’ll do whatever I can to keep it at bay, except maybe go out into this heat today, ha ha. But you have to push through it. You can’t let it win because it will make a lot of plausible excuses and and little by little it will corral you into progressively smaller cages.

    I’ve been doing a lot of stitching, and I recently added a lot of the photos to the slideshow on my gallery page. I’ll do an art post pretty soon.

    Also reading: “Shuggie Bain” by Douglas Stuart, a well written, gritty, and potentially sad novel set in late 20c Glasgow, and “Penmarric,” an oldie by Susan Howatch set in Cornwall. I finished “The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store” by James McBride, and any book that I read now has to be a damned good one to follow that. I waited for it for almost a year on my Libby app. I also “finished” (quotes because I know I’ll go back to it again and again) “Come Walk with Me” by Roberta Wagner. Perfect for keeping my art mojo alive during this tough emotional time in my life.

  • Saturday afternoon catch up

    Pablocito keeps an eye on me.

    Here I sit at the computer, with Pablocito in the chair next to me that I put there for Diego to use months ago. Otherwise he would have annoyed the hell out of me. Pablocito is very good at annoying the hell out of me as well, but he has been behaving much better in the past few weeks. Maybe because when he demands attention, he gets it? Anyway, we have spoiled him badly. It’s going to be hard to leave him alone in the house for a few days, even though we have a great pet-sitter who loves him and lives two doors down, so he pays many visits. I hope that we will be over this anxiety by the time we leave for Scotland in late September for two weeks.

    June was the driest month on record for North Carolina, and it has been hot and humid in July, but with very little rain. I’ve had to water my little front garden almost every day. I didn’t do it yesterday because we were under a flood watch and there was supposed to be heavy rain. Nope.

    Mostly I have Juliet tomatoes that I planted from seed using the winter sowing method, in upcycled plastic juice bottles. I also used this method for the “bird and butterfly” mix of wildflower seeds as well as two varieties of snapdragons and coreopsis. Unfortunately I think it was the snails and slugs that got the coreopsis. I also did black hollyhocks, but then I realized that I really had no good place to plant them. (Fact check: she did, but she didn’t want to do the work of cleaning out a space in the back.)

    What I am doing here is cutting down the large rosemary bush in the center of what used to be an herb spiral. I have rosemary elsewhere. In its place will go the clay totem sculpture that I’ve been working/playing on in a class at Creative Aging Network with Jennifer Donnelly. This class and the stitch meditations and therapy are the things that have kept my mental health functional in the past month or so.

    evidence of rain

    I cleaned out a lot of the hellebores that had taken over the front shade yard and were hosts for a huge invasion of aphids. I’m still working on taking out as much of these as possible and I’ll find other plants to fill in. Probably native ferns and more hostas. I’m going to research native plants. We put in a lovely birdbath and I mulched around it with landscape fabric and pine needles. I like pine needles because they don’t move much, and they remind me of the pine forests from home. I still need to do the part of the garden next to the sidewalk, because the one big rain we had washed the topsoil down the little slope there. I’m moving stones from the back yard gardens to the front, little by little, and will terrace the bare area.

    Another thing I did to lift my spirits is that I bought a solar fountain for the porch. Originally I planned to put it in the birdbath, but the birdbath is too shallow and it dries out very quickly. So I put it in a big bowl on the front porch with the stones and sherds and shells that I brought back from Cornwall.

    Okay, I’m going to move over my Substack posts from earlier in the year to here, and back date them. I think that I’ve finished by Substack experiment for good now.

  • Diego O’Neill, July 2013-June 24, 2024

    The one second purr video

    Diego left this world about three weeks ago.

    Diego and Pablocito came to us as fosters suddenly after we visited PetSmart just before they closed on August 20, 2013. They had just been brought in from the animal shelter and never even made it to the cage in the adoption room. We brought them both home that night in the carrier, when they immediately started destroying everything!

    Destructo kittehs

    We immediately had to take them in for medical care, since they both had ringworm and conjunctivitis, plus Diego was put on antibiotics. So it was a challenge from the start, especially dealing with the shelter. We shut them away from the other cats and bathed them every day. Finally, with the vet’s help, the shelter let us go ahead and adopt them so we could provide the medical help that the shelter wouldn’t offer. In fact, the shelter told us that if we brought them back to their clinic again they would euthanize them.

    sitting in Sandy’s lap

    When you nurse kittens like this, they really dig deep into your heart.

    Not that it was hard to love Diego – he charmed everyone who met him. He was a handsome fella and he knew it.

    His first foster parents named him Winnie. He was found in a ditch when he was about one week old. Sandy wanted to name him Wolf. I finally talked Sandy into naming him Diego, after Diego Rivera. (He turned out to be a chonk, like Rivera!) I just like names that end in “O”. Sandy called them Trouble One and Trouble Two (Diego was #2) and I often called him Chunkybutt and Stinkybutt for an unfortunate reason – sometimes I had to run him out of the room because his stank could have been used as a weapon of mass destruction.

    His favorite place was on the front porch. My bed was absolutely his territory and if he caught Pablocito on it, usually within five minutes there would be a fight if Pablocito didn’t run first. He jumped up and meowed when Sandy walked into the room and then would follow him to the sofa or the man cave.

    It has been an awful time of loss for both Sandy and me, but Diego stopped eating after a little over a week past his cancer diagnosis on June 10, and we made the decision to let him go on June 24. It was especially hard, not only because he didn’t act sick, but because he was a cuddly lovey bear who spent roughly equal amounts of time with both of us. We had to let him go because the cancer in his throat spread quickly and he could not eat and could barely drink.

    I try to think of some of the lucky things, such as that when I left on my trip to the United Kingdom, he was being treated for an infection and for asthma. I was anxious enough about leaving him, but if this had happened before or during my trip, it would have been utterly ruined. When I returned, I saw that his lump had gotten bigger, but the vet had told me that they might have to try several different antibiotics before finding one that would work. Being told that he had inoperable cancer was a real shock for both of us, and then being told that he wouldn’t last the summer, but we thought we had more than a couple of weeks!

    The other lucky thing, and this is the most important one, is that he did not seem to suffer much. He would have if we had hung onto him, and that would have been wrong. I wish that we had the option for humane euthanasia. After watching loved ones suffer, I’ve considered moving to a place where it is legal.

    Pablocito (named after Picasso) seems to be doing okay. This is the first time in our lives that we’ve had only one cat. Diego bullied Pablocito so he might be happier. He is certainly getting an enormous amount of attention. We had planned to go to the lake this weekend, but canceled, partially because we couldn’t bear to leave him alone just yet.

    Now that I’ve made myself write this post, I hope that I can move on a little more easily and write about some happier subjects. I felt like this and the trip to the UK had to be addressed before I could write about anything else.

  • Let Freedom Ring

    We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

    (In memory of Terrilynn, who posted this on her blog every July 4.)

  • Honestly…

    I really don’t know why I can’t get myself to catch up on my blog posting.  The thing is that I love  to look back on my travel posts, and I frequently refer to my search and category functions when I don’t remember a date or a name. You would think that with all the extra time on my hands that I’d be motivated to blog more. Instead I find myself on social media platforms.

    Anyway, I have at least begun editing the photos from my fabulous UK trip with my sister and my friend in May, and I hope that I will get around to writing the posts before I forget half of it. I have also edited and uploaded my 100 stitch meditation photos, a project which has captured my creative spark.

    Right now my heart is with my buddy boy Diego, who got a diagnosis of malignant, aggressive salivary gland cancer a week ago. I’m spending as much time as possible with him, and I am now glad that I did not plan any trips this summer. It is making it doubly hard to leave my bedroom, though, and that’s something I have to push through. Right now he is having breathing issues but is still eating, although there are times I really have to push it. He started a liquid med on Friday night that seems to be helping him.

    Here he is with my newest reading material.

    I started writing this on my phone to prime the pump so I guess I’ll head to the computer to work on those photos and travel posts.

  • Bath, May 25, 2024

    On Saturday morning, the crowds were lining up at the Roman Baths and the Abbey. It was a bank holiday. We decided to skip seeing the Baths.

    At Square Grill House, I had smoked salmon benedict, and Susan and Lisa had a full English breakfast. I think that was the only time any of us went full English. The bottled water we ordered for the table was interesting.

    Sign on our apartment building. It was modern on the inside. I thought this was funny.

    At this point, I think that all three of us were limping toward home after a night of little sleep. Trying to walk back to the train station with our luggage was frustrating since we had to dodge waves of people walking toward the center of town. It would probably have been fine earlier in our vacation. I wouldn’t mind returning – maybe combined with a trip to Wales or the Cotswolds.

    There’s not really anything else much to say about this trip. We took the train to Paddington, then the Overground to Heathrow, then a taxi to our hotel nearby. Dinner at the hotel, breakfast was at the airport, and then we flew back to North Carolina with a stop at JFK on the way back the next day. Customs was basically nothing to go through either way – just a quick passport check since we filled out a simple residency form online before we left. We did have to exit and re-enter through regular security at JFK.

    And that’s it. Next big trip is scheduled for Sandy and I to go to Scotland this fall!

  • Port Isaac to Bath, May 24, 2024

    We had learned our lesson about taxis in Cornwall and booked Annie’s Taxi ahead of time to take us back to the train station at Bodmin Parkway. I mean, yes, a bus was an option back and forth to Port Isaac, but it was a two hour ride compared to a 30 minute ride in a taxi.

    I liked the door at this train station.

    This train would take us to the very large station in Bristol, where, once we found the platform, we switched to a short train ride to Bath Spa. We were only staying for the night. Since I was not able to add another night on at Geranium Cottage, I thought, why not stop somewhere else on the way back to London for the flight home?

    A repurposed telephone booth in Bath.

    I rented a penthouse in the center of Bath, overlooking the ancient Roman baths, for one night. And thank God it was only for one night, because although the views were amazing and the apartment was quite posh, the football playoffs were going on and MAN, WAS IT LOUD! Also, the instructions I was sent to get into the building were confusing compared to the instructions on the buzzer, and I couldn’t get anyone on the phone, so it took a while to get into the building. Once we got inside the apartment, it had not been cleaned. I told the guy on text that I would wait to post my review until I heard his response to my complaints, but I never heard from him and I chose not to leave a review on Booking.

    While we waited for the cleaners to come and finish up, we wandered around the Bath Abbey area and had drinks and ate dinner at a place called Bill’s Restaurant. I don’t know why that name tickles me so much. I guess because it seemed so out of place in the center of a UNESCO World Heritage site.

    I had the eggplant (aubergine) parmesan and it was excellent.
    In front of Bath Abbey
    Lisa is looking up at the figures climbing a ladder sculpted on the facade of Bath Abbey.
    “Water is Best” – a fountain (?) donated from a temperance society beside Bath Abbey
    Looking up at the side of Bath Abbey

    Views from the apartment.

  • Port Isaac, May 23, 2024

    The view from my third story bedroom window.

    Another day of chilly weather, but I’ll take that over heat any day.

    For lunch, we returned to the Mote Inn, which is in a building that dates back to 1547. There I had the St. Austell mussels, which are topped with a kind of seaweed called samphire, which looks a bit like asparagus. And that sauce, oh my god. They were so good.

    We wandered around Port Isaac today, and Lisa and Susan took a hike up the other side of the Coast Path, up the hill that you see in the photos above. I puttered around on the Platt (what the locals call the beach at the harbour), picking up sea glass, pottery sherds, and interesting stones.

    Workers were pulling the chains and ropes around on the beach.

    Since it was low tide, I took the opportunity to walk up the trail on the right side of the harbour, which is covered quickly with water when the tide rises, to look at the rock pools.

    Textures and colors, oh my

    Looking back

    And what did I discover? A great cave to explore.

    No not this one ^. It was just an interesting crack in the cliff.

    This one! I had to navigate some shallow water with shifty stones across it. It’s a wonder that I didn’t fall in. Once I got there, I wanted to stay for a while but I was worried about the tide coming in and having to walk through the water to get to the beach.

    Going in.
    Coming out.

    I am quite frustrated that I seem to have deleted the video that I took walking inside the cave. Until I find a way to post it, here’s a link to the Facebook video post. The video turned off when I tried to turn on the flashlight, but it didn’t go back too much farther.

    Over the course of the day, I walked around the town’s narrow streets and alleys, including one called Squeeze Belly Alley, that goes under a building. I decided to include the photos of Geranium Cottage, our rental, in this slideshow below.

    That evening, Lisa and Susan made a big effort to find a restaurant downhill that would do takeout, but it turns out that after 4 pm your choices are limited to fish and chips and pasties. So we ate pasties and crackers and cheese and salad and fruit and drank libations that we bought at the grocery in Boscastle while we watched “Doc Martin.” We were reluctantly packing for the next morning and cleaning out the fridge.