Living the Slow life in North Carolina
and treat each other like human spirits instead of labels and numbers.
I don’t really identify with any religion these days, and this whole Christian vs. Muslim thing is not making me inclined to do so any time soon. I’m going to be an honorary Jew for Hanukkah.
I’ve decided to blog every day for the month of December. We’ll see how it goes. Usually this means that I’ll write it the night before I publish it, because of logistics I won’t go into. If nothing else, I’ll post a photo.
I’ve been posting on Instagram lately, and I’m going to pay more attention to my Slow Turn Studio Facebook page, where these posts appear through Networked Blogs. But I just can’t get into Twitter. I’ve tried. I’ll just have to be an occasional Twitter reader. I like the comedians.
Just went to my bi-annual doctor appointment yesterday. I gained a pound, but considering the timing just after Thanksgiving, I’m not very upset. I hope that my cholesterol and glucose readings are better. She gave me a couple of EKGs too to make sure that my occasional heart palpitations are “just” anxiety. I told her about the hellish six months I just went through, particularly with the neck spasms and the teeth grinding, and she asked, “Why didn’t you come in?” Well, what can I say? I wasn’t in a very rational frame of mind. I had it firmly set in my brain that it would be better to suffer through it until my next appointment and be tough than go to her and have to explain it. Thank God I feel more sane and much better physically now.
One thing I know is that I need to embrace is to live in my present instead of constantly daydreaming about moving away. North Carolina is a crappy political place but it is a wonderful place in so many other aspects. I live in a great city which is just the right size and I love my house and my neighborhood and my job. The fantasy that I will be cured of my depression if I move elsewhere is a lie. That doesn’t mean that I won’t move some day, but I need to stop obsessing over it and enjoy my life here and now.
Anyway, the plan for December is to write more, post more photos, and get some art on. Despite the holidays, December is a good month for me. A brief respite before the super busy spring semester begins. I might even listen to some Christmas music.
I’m in the middle of three books right now: Guests on Earth by Lee Smith, one of my very favorite authors, A Visit from the Goon Squad, which I don’t even know if I will finish, UGH, and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell. I’ve read several good novels this year since I discovered the Overdrive app, which allows you to check out ebooks and audiobooks from your local library. I liked The Goldfinch, The Dog Stars, and Station Eleven. My shelves are full of books that I bought at a big charity book sale here in Greensboro on the last day when you could fill up a bag for $10. If I never bought another book, I’d have plenty to read for the rest of my life.
Right now there is “snow” blowing across my page. I don’t know why. I don’t think that I added it. I don’t know if I like it. I don’t know how to get rid of it. Maybe WordPress does it for the month of December. So it stays, and I suppose that it will leave on its own.
Catching up with a few odds and ends here, as far as my journal goes. Sandy and I went to Asheville in October and stayed in a couple of rooms in a home we rented through AirBNB. This is the second time I’ve used that service and this time was a better experience. It was not fancy but it was pleasant and convenient and incredibly cheap for the Asheville area, where everything gets more expensive as the leaves turn red and yellow.
I was there to take a bookbinding workshop on Hedi Kyle’s folded structures from her former student, Karen Hardy. It was held at Asheville Bookworks, a place I’ve been itching to check out for months. I was excited but wary that I might get frustrated, as precision folding can make my blood pressure go up, but I really loved the class. It was one of those workshops when I did not want to stop for lunch. Here are some samples.
This one was done with one of my precious paste papers I made in Albie Smith’s class about five years ago. It can be a cover or bound with other pages like it, and it has pockets! It’s good for paper with one beautiful side. The first photo is the inside and the second is the outside.
This needs cleaning up a bit, but I really see potential for this structure. Karen also showed us a form in which you make little shadow boxes for 3-D objects that swing out.
Here’s a spider book, good for when you want to attach some thicker materials to the pages such as photos or artwork or fabrics…again, a useful structure for me!
I really liked the blizzard book. It takes a very long piece of paper, and there is a lot of room to play with this one. All folded. The cover (second photo) drove me a bit crazy, but it would be worth practicing. I took a photo to help me remember what the creases and folds should look like.
I thought that I would like the fishbone book, which looks just like a fish spine, but it bugged me enough that I didn’t photograph it. I saw some amazing work done with it at the “Hello Hedi” tribute exhibition at 23 Sandy Gallery in Portland in June though.
What I discovered – the set of metal book rules were worth the purchase. It would have made me nuts if I had tried to do these with only a metal ruler.
And I really like Karen Hardy, and I really like the facility, Asheville Bookworks. Another reason I would love, love, love to live close to Asheville. Karen is doing a paste paper/flag book workshop in late January. I recommend that you check it out. I can’t take this one, but I look forward to taking another class with her at some time.
As for the rest of the time, this was good brew:
I liked the decor at the Asheville Yacht Club, which, by the way, is not a yacht club. Lovey was on the other restroom door.
You know, I am NOT a holiday person. I do celebrate Buy Nothing Day and Festivus.
This year will be the first year in many that I have not spent at least part of the long Thanksgiving weekend at my mother’s house. She passed away a year and a half ago. Today was supposed to be the day that we closed on the sale of her house. I’m very attached to places (my grad mentor described me as having a great sense of place, which I never even knew was a thing) and this sale has been difficult for me, even though I knew that I’d never want to return there to live and it was too time-consuming and expensive to hang on to the house. Well, the closing didn’t go through, but I assume that it will happen soon. It’s not a lot of money but I’ll pay off my home equity loan and put the rest into my rainy day account.
At least the clearing out of the stuff is finished. There were surprises and treasures along with every piece of paper that she ever touched. We left a little over half the furniture there for the next owner to use. Much went to the thrift store that supports the Boys and Girls Home in Lake Waccamaw, which was her chosen charity. Much went to the dumpster, burn barrel, and recycling center. A lot went to used bookstores and recycled art supply stores such as Shelf Life in Greensboro and the Scrap Exchange in Durham. I brought back a lot of crystal that I will never use, and I donated about half of it to the history department to use for receptions. There’s a possibility that we might have an exhibition of her paintings at the Pecan Festival in southeastern North Carolina next year. We couldn’t get it together in time for this year when my sister was asked about it.
With the pending sale of this house there are many mixed feelings. A huge sense of relief mixed with disbelief. We have worried about and dreaded inheriting this house for years before Mama died. The dread didn’t even prepare us adequately for how many garbage bags or boxes we would need to clean out just one stuffed and overflowing closet. We would go in with the determination that we would knock out most of it many, many times, and we always vastly underestimated what needed to be done.
I do not want one of my relatives to have to do this when I am gone. I have to get myself together and my clutter and hoarded boxes of stuff OUT.
The disbelief comes in because we can’t quite process the fact that we are done. The relief won’t be complete until then. And that the only home that together my sister, brother and I have ever known will be out of our hands, although I’m sure it will not ever be out of our hearts.
But there were treasures too.
No one ever accused my daddy of being shy and unassuming.
My mother was a real looker and she knew it. This is one of the houses she grew up in. Country girl. Learned how to take care of herself and made sure that we all did too.
There’s no doubt that I have much scanning and cataloging of photos to do. There are photos going back to the mid-19th century. Unfortunately, nobody thought to write on the backs of them. Some of them are tintypes.
Anyway, I’m heading to Lake Waccamaw to have Thanksgiving with my family at my sister’s new home. I’m going to try to finish up this little weaving while I’m there, tentatively titled “Migraine Day.” The sides are a mess, so it might be a sample. This is the first time I’ve used twill and wedge weave in a tapestry. I did have a warped perspective the day I designed it.
(This post is the final one about a trip to Colorado/Utah we took in September, written two months later, because LIFE.) After crashing big-time at my Awesome Aunt’s apartment on Thursday night, we drove to the Denver Art Museum with Aunt DeLaine to see the big tapestry exhibition there, Creative Crossroads. It spanned centuries and world cultures. I know that I took photos but they must not have turned out well because I can’t find them. My poor camera was probably worn out. The museum website can be your source for those.
Since I was there a few years ago, they opened a permanent space for fiber arts, the textile gallery, along with an education space that had terrific displays and covered just about every fiber art technique I could think of.
David Johnson was demonstrating soumak tapestry on a frame loom there. I was really happy to meet him.
See that shimmering curtain behind me? Handwoven with a fine copper wire warp. Amazing.
Then that night, my cousin Cherie, Sandy and I went to Arvada to see the Kenny Perkins Band play at Jake’s Roadhouse. Ken is Cherie’s husband and he can really rock it. Wow.
I left Colorado with the hat that Sandy bought for himself, but then got shy about wearing. That’s not really a problem for me anymore.
There you have it. Another wonderful trip, and one that made us hungry to continue exploring the west and scout out the area where we would like to retire.
We had seen some petroglyphs at the Swelter Shelter site, but there are many more in the park. Looking at these on the east side of the Green River off Cub Creek Road, we definitely understand why this art evokes the idea of alien visits.
The first set was easy to get to and they were so amazing I thought that they might be all on that road. But noooooo…we had some climbing to do. It was getting hot and Sandy is not that fond of cliffside heights so I decided to see how far I would get before I chickened out. But I didn’t chicken out. I yelled down at Sandy not to climb up because it was scary. He thought I said “Come up here!” So we both hung out on the cliffside with a beautiful view around us and ancient art on the cliffs around us. The trail wound up gradually and was very pretty too.
There was a flute player and many lizards, painted and real, at this site, along with a ham-fisted fellow.
If only we had food and some more water and time, we would have loved to explore this area more. But in our enthusiasm, we had only eaten a couple of granola bars that day and we were getting a bit shaky.
We drove out to see Josie Morris’ cabin, the homestead of a very interesting woman, but due to hunger and our cameras being out of juice, we headed back to Dinosaur, Colorado, ate at a little diner, and drove six hours back to Broomfield, near Denver.
After leaving the quarry, we only had time to take a scenic drive up Cub Creek Road. You can see the layers undulating through the hills. The park is huge and there is much more to see, but this road was a good choice for a day trip because it had a variety of features that were historical and beautiful. The first stop was at the Swelter Shelter petroglyphs and pictographs. Petroglyphs are carved or incised into the stone. Pictographs are painted using natural pigments on the stone.
If I go back, I’d like to hike on the trail going up into these rocks, the Sound of Silence Trail. Doesn’t that seem refreshing? On a cool day, anyway. I like quiet.
Then we came to the Split Mountain Campground, which is where I’d definitely want to camp after taking a guided raft on the Green River through its canyons.
Sandy was just ecstatic over this coyote that trotted along the road beside us, while I lost my mind about the semi-tame bunnies on the trail near the Quarry.
On to the main show, more petroglyphs!
(This post refers to a trip we took in September.) Picking only a few photos from Dinosaur National Monument is a difficult task. We got there reasonably early in the morning, and when Sandy presented his ID with his credit card to the ranger for the entry fee, he was informed that he could get a senior lifetime pass to the National Park System for $10 that covers anyone in the car with him. So THAT was the first great thing.
We headed up a little ways to the Quarry House, where a cliff with embedded bones has been preserved in a building. In the parking lot, we found that we were just in time for a ranger-led hike down Fossil Discovery Trail, in which she explained the great variations in the geology of the park. There are twenty-three different rock formations exposed in the area dating back hundreds of millions of years. This area was once a shallow sea, and we saw clam fossils and rippled stones from the water.
The heavy rains from the day before made some of the trail slippery and we were advised not to go past a certain point, but we did get to see some bones out on the trail walls. An enormous number of large dinosaurs met their watery end in a flood here. Small dinosaurs too, but mostly they were swept downstream. They are making new discoveries constantly in this park.
There’s a vertebra under that little ledge there. Most of the bone fragments are brown and heavily worn on the rock surface.
In the Carnegie Quarry, the rock face is pretty amazing. You have to wonder what is left under there.
Anyway, at the risk of having to turn in my nerd badge, the dinosaurs were not the most exciting part of the DNM for me. Don’t get me wrong, they were fun and if I had actually been able to find some on my own, I would have been out of control. The landscape and the petroglyphs were what made me fall in love with this place.
Next: Dinosaur National Monument – The Landscape
(This post refers to a September trip to Colorado, written much later.) The next day we set out for Dinosaur National Monument, which spans the Colorado/Utah border. The visitor center and the quarry exhibit were on the Utah side so we aimed for the western entrance in Utah, a state that we had not visited yet.
I loved the long straight roads through the sagebrush plains. I could see myself as a ranch woman there, although in reality you wouldn’t catch me on a horse or slaughtering cattle or chickens! Nice fantasy, though, cowgirl hat, leather chaps, lariat in hand and rifle on shoulder. When I came back I subscribed to a classic Western channel on Roku, since that is the closest I’ll ever come to it! After talking with locals, we understood that people who worked in the towns that catered to tourists couldn’t afford to live there. We spent some time in Steamboat Springs, and then drove through smaller towns that seemed very sparse and poor. We saw very few cars on the long road to Utah.
We stopped at Yampa River State Park on the way for a quick nature walk. The colors were beautiful. It would be nice to go back and raft this river. When I just checked the website, it was 16 degrees there, brrr!
It had rained on and off all day, but as we approached the Utah line the clouds grew very dark and became as interesting as the surrounding landscape. Then we were rewarded for the rain.
We got there just after the visitor’s center closed, so we found a cheap motel in Vernal, Utah, had dinner and beers at Vernal Brew Pub (very good!). I recommend the Allosaurus Amber Ale.
Next: Dinosaur National Monument.
(This post refers to our Colorado trip in September.) On Wednesday, Sandy and I set out on our own road trip. We stopped in Estes Park where we wasted too much time and money. (In my opinion, anyway, Sandy is the shopper in the family. I am all about getting a refrigerator magnet or a used book and then moving on.) Then we set out upon Trail Ridge Road, which crosses the Continental Divide over two miles above sea level, above the treeline. It was wet and very cold. I think that we just made it before the park closed it for the season.
I loved the tundra and the wide open spaces. The wind was wicked, though. The slick road down made Sandy more nervous than I’ve seen him since Ireland.
There was an elk couple beside the road at the bottom of the mountain. I might have had a good shot of the big male from across the road if three foolish humans hadn’t run in front of me and blocked my view. Fortunately for them, he chose to fade back into the trees, but I got a photo of Mrs. Elk, as well as a long shot of a herd when we were at the top of the ridge.
We had drinks and a bite to eat at Pancho and Lefty’s in Grand Lake, then found a great little retro motel in Hot Sulfur Springs, and ate a good breakfast at the Glory Hole.
Next: on to Utah!
slowly she turned 