slowly she turned

Living the Slow life in North Carolina

recent posts

about

About Me

  • Rest in Peace

    My mother, Willye Kate Parham, passed away on June 15, 2014. She was 90 years young. I haven’t known how to post it but I’ve written about her so much here that I thought I should announce it. She left us quickly and peacefully in the hospital at Chapel Hill after a procedure the night before to drain some fluid from around her kidney. She seemed to be fine and the doctors were not overly concerned about the procedure being risky, but it had to be done. The next morning she told the nurses that she had chest pains, then as a nurse held her hand, she said, “I hope you have a good life,” and she passed away.

    Here is one of my favorite photos of her from just a few years ago, being a farmer:

    Being an award-winning artist:

    Being a goof:

    Being elegant:

    Being a bathing beauty:

    Being flat-out gorgeous:

    Being a daughter:

    Being a wife:

    Being a friend:

    Being a sister:

    Being an aunt:

    Being a cousin (and Grace is the other bathing beauty in the photo above):


    Being a Mama and Mom-mo:

    My childhood and adulthood friend, JoJo Hammond (aka Lisa Jo Spivey) sang this song that she composed for her the morning of her funeral at the memorial service. She is working on making a video, which I will post when it is available. Here are the lyrics:

    The thing I remember the most
    Is her pretty little smile.
    She’s been in my life
    since I was a child.
    She loved me just as I am
    She was a good wife, mother and friend
    someone told me the last words she said

    I hope you have a good life
    Sunny days, starry nights
    The one you love by your side
    Just have a good life
    Love your neighbor, be his friend
    Walk an extra mile with him
    I hope you have a good life.

    As long as I can remember
    Her daughter’s been my friend
    She’s been there for me
    Through thick and thin
    I can see her Mama’s eyes
    and that pretty little smile
    I know just like her
    She goes that extra mile

    I hope you have a good life
    Sunny days, starry nights
    The one you love by your side
    Just live a good life
    Love your neighbor
    Be his friend
    Walk an extra mile with him
    I hope you have a good life

    She lived one of the best lives I can possibly think of, and I have been privileged to be her daughter and inherit her genes.

  • Happiness isn’t good enough for me! I demand euphoria!

    The title is a quote from Calvin and Hobbes. It fits for me right now!

    I have entered the kind of good stress that is making me ecstatic and at the same time a bit breathless and wobbly.

    After spending the last ten months or so moaning about needing another fix for my travel/art retreat addiction, I am overwhelmed with riches. Saturday I leave for Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Gatlinburg, Tennessee for a week of indigo dyeing with Rowland Ricketts. I am preparing a lot of skeins from my yarn stash (some are really hideous colors bought cheap for overdyeing) so I hope that he won’t mind me popping them in. I have started the design phase of my next large(r) tapestry and I need a variety of blues and purples and greens. I’ll be there for a week, and I’m driving with Divergent from Veronica Roth in the CD player, hoping that will make the lonely drive shorter.

    On the way, the River Arts District Studio Stroll is happening in Asheville right off I-40, so I get the opportunity to stop and do that right at my halfway point. Chad Alice Hagen will be there, so I get to see my new friend!

    Here’s the biggie, though. This is what is wigging me out. After I finally joined the American Tapestry Alliance, I noticed an ad in their newsletter about tapestry retreats. I emailed for more information, and I have to say, it seemed like it would be too good to be true. I was gathering information in case it was an option for next year, because I already have solid plans to go to Colorado and California in September. However, after talking to Pam Patrie on the phone and to others about the logistics, I realized that not only was this opportunity for real, it is doable THIS YEAR. So I am going to a retreat for advanced tapestry weavers and staying for 5-6 nights in a cabin at a beautiful beach on the northwest Oregon coast in late August. What a generous and lovely woman!

    I’m really swooning over this, y’all. Wow.

    I’ll try to post photos from Gatlinburg next week using my Kindle Fire if I can, but I never know whether it will play well with other wifi routers. If not, I’ll post when I come back.

    Here is the tapestry design and cartoon I am working on.

  • Ick. I hate this. Pbbttt.

    Moving forward on getting the new bathroom put in by getting contractors (and such) to give us estimates this week. Praying that the estimates will be reasonable. Praying that the whole process won’t end in the job not being finished and/or me being talked into spending my savings on something else to do with the house. Praying that it will get done this summer. Praying that it will at least get done before I sit on the toilet in the existing bathroom with the cracked floor and fall suddenly into the crawlspace. Praying for patience and wisdom. Praying that all sharp objects are out of reach when my husband decides that he is against doing this after all.

    Praying that I can stop thinking about this long enough to get my supplies ready for my week of indigo dyeing at Arrowmont next week.

    The critter(s) did a lot of damage to my garden last night, so I also have to put protection back on the snap beans. The sunflower and the little rudbeckias are beyond help. I miss my feral kitties. I knew that I should have piked that rabbit head I found on a tomato stake.

    In a effort to feel more positive, I have included kitten photos in this post.

  • Visual journal

    An aphorism: “If you are going through hell, keep going.” – Winston Churchill

    A naturally dyed print on cement by nature:

    Woven words:

    First peppers:

    Surprise! I think that I remember tossing some unidentified seeds here. Cucumbers? Will separate and transplant elsewhere.

  • Art update – Tapestry studio space!

    I’ve been known to say that I can only do two of these three creative pursuits at a time: art, cooking, and gardening. I may have to correct that because lately I seem to be down to one at a time. I reached my goals with my gardening. Yay for setting attainable goals! My passion for cooking was lost somewhere around 2009 or so, although my passion for eating is still here. What’s left? Time for my art mojo to come back.

    Part of the problem this year was the little assholes pair of kittens we adopted last August. The older cats are terrified of aluminum foil and I found that putting foil over my weaving on the loom was a good deterrent. However, Pablocito and Diego aren’t afraid of anything. Guess it comes with being orphan kittens at the shelter. I’ve had to limit myself to either working when they are napping, which is usually when I am at my paying job, or figuring out a way to keep them away from my stuff in a studio without a door. It doesn’t help that they love to climb the curtains and so my wall hangings are just another toy. I’ve had to take down a few of my weavings to protect them. I’m not really interested in clipping their claws, although it may come to that.

    Is it worth it? Yeah. I do love the little… felines. They are very entertaining and their personalities have developed. Diego is so much like Guido in looks and coolness and behavior. Pablocito reminds me of a puppy, more than any cat I’ve ever adopted.

    Anyway, I finally figured out a way to have my tapestry loom in a small space where I can protect my weaving from those little… animals. We just put carpet down in this room and I got rid of a lot of stuff and rearranged things. We have a beautiful room divider that we bought a long time ago and there wasn’t a good place for it until now. It is very heavy and it leans up against a board against the bookshelf, making a protected space behind for this tapestry loom I bought when the Center for Creative Arts eliminated their weaving program over a year ago.

    Because it is already warped and has a dog on the loom, and I’m having a hard time getting started, I decided to make a journal tapestry for the month of June and use the already woven part to embellish with whatever. Probably small samples from my indigo workshop coming up in a couple of weeks. Right now I’m using cotton thrums. I like finding uses for things that would be discarded, and I have a LOT of thrums. “Crumbs are the thrums of bread, and thrums are the crumbs of thread.” I believe this quote is by Barry Schacht of Schacht Looms, but can’t find the source. It has always stuck in my mind. In other words, thrums are the wasted yarns and threads from weaving when the fabric is cut off the loom.


    I’ve been inspired by Tommye Scanlin’s tapestry diaries and I just discovered Janette Meetze’s gorgeous woven diary on the Tapestry Facebook group. I think that mine will end up as a mixed media piece or even a book cover, and I won’t be able to weave on it daily. I’m going to let it take me wherever it leads, I guess. That’s been my way, lately.

    I can understand why the original weaver gave up on this project. I can’t think of anything more boring than weaving a large section of plain weave by hand with a white weft. If you want to learn to weave tapestry, please don’t make this mistake. Pick some colors and mix it up.

    I’ve gotten so excited that I finally joined the American Tapestry Alliance. This is going to be a good summer. Yes.

  • Back Forty Update

    The paths are mulched, the seeds are planted, and the seedlings have been transplanted for the summer. I put wire frames and ag-cover fabric over my beds this year. I am determined to win the battle after losing miserably to the critters last year. Now that the mosquitoes are out, I’ll only be out there for short periods of time with organic repellent/long sleeves and pants on.

    Blueberries are on the left and purple snap beans are in the center. That is a potted Meyer lemon tree that we bring in for the winter. We have gotten a few lemons from it. There is a potted habanero pepper to its left. Behind that row is a black netted cover over Cherokee Purple tomatoes that I planted from seed. Bronze fennel from last year is coming up everywhere. The swallowtail butterflies like it. Behind that row, the butchered fig tree is reviving and there are Whippoorwill field peas and yellow crookneck squash under the white fabric. I’m pleased that the peas came up because I have saved the seeds over the years from the first packet I bought at Monticello about ten years ago, and these were about three years old from my last crop. Their germination rate was amazing, considering!

    About half of the Back Forty is still under foliage, and I promised Sandy that he can do with the rest as he likes. The original idea was to have compost delivered and we would build up the beds over the cardboard cover. Hardwood mulch was delivered instead. So the compost will probably have to wait until after the first freeze. At least it will have to for ME to work on it. These half barrels used to be my rain barrels until they started to rot and spring leaks and clog up. They looked great but weren’t as practical as I would have liked. These two barrels have a Sun Gold and a Juliet tomato plant from Handance Farms.

    Above are before and after photos of the herb end of the bed. There is French sorrel, English thyme, borage, parsley, bronze fennel, pineapple sage, stevia, and hopefully some basil soon. I have more culinary herbs in the front garden.

    The butterbeans along the fence were my only success last year so I planted more this year. There are a variety of pole beans that I’ve saved over the last couple of years and so they have probably cross-bred. They range in color from white to red to black/purple/white speckled. Sweet peppers from Handance Farm are in the pot and planter, and we are eating lettuce right now from one area. Spinach and turnip greens did not do well at all and those seeds were new! Bull’s blood beets and basil are coming up along side the beans and there are some more purple snap beans in there somewhere too. Jalapeno, Thai hot, hot banana peppers and an eggplant are in an unseen planter to the right of the path.

    The seckel pear tree is full of little pears again and I’ll have to think about how to save a few for ourselves from the squirrels this year.

  • Random thoughts at lunchtime

    Wow – this may be the craziest spam comment I’ve ever gotten: “I looked inside portable vaporizer and I was in a perfectly and there
    is no disturbance due to the future king. I adore, but, like wind, during the
    upward motion. You can follow any responses to the Earth’s magnetic field,
    we were talking about. I can’tjust sleep with noisiest sheep ever in a corner and talk to anyone,
    portable vaporizer they might be turned on and or enhanced.
    So, it’s when the pull from behind portable vaporizer the store.
    There is less and less opulence.”

    What do you suppose he was selling? 😀 Well, I hope that you’ll be able to find a portable vaporizer if your search brings you here, but I ain’t selling them, sorry. However, that is close to poetry.

    I think of so many things to put on this blog but I just can’t get inspired enough to type on my tiny Kindle keyboard and my laptop is dead. Then by the time I get to use a real keyboard, the thoughts have vanished.

    One thing is that I miss the mulberry tree on our street. It was cut down last year just before the berries were ripe, for no reason that I can figure out, in the church parking lot redo. There were no parking spaces put down where the mulberry tree was. Maybe they didn’t like the birds bombing their cars with purple splats? Oh boy, maybe I will let all the pokeweed grow to fruit stage for the birds (and dyepot) this year. I figured out something after picking mulberries from the trees along the creek at the Greensboro Farmers’ Curb Market on Saturday. Mulberries are delicious eaten straight off the tree, but they lose their magic when you put them in a bag to eat later. I miss showing up for work in June with mulberry stains all over my hands.

    I’m getting all jiggley with anticipation for my workshop at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in two weeks. I went to Value Village thrift store on the last Wednesday of May (half-price on everything) in search of natural fabrics to dye in the indigo pot. I scored with a new-looking white cotton muslin sheet set and 6 shirts of cotton, linen, and silk with a grand total of about $12.50. The problem is that I have to wash them so many times in Charlie’s Soap to get the perfumes out. I understand why they use such strong detergent to wash used items but jeez Louise the scent was killing me! The third wash in hot water finally made it tolerable but I would love it if anyone had some tips for me to solve this problem. I am terribly allergic to many fragrances.

    About to head out to my first Moral Monday rally of the year in Raleigh. I’d promise photos but I think that my battery is almost dead. I don’t volunteer for civil disobedience but every single body there in support of our civil rights and against the devastating extremist legislation coming out of the Tea Party government in our state capitol makes a difference, especially now that they have passed new laws to try to take away our First Amendment rights.

    Feeling pretty good and I’ll have both an art and a Back Forty update up within the week.

  • Lake Waccamaw etc., May 2014

    Sandy and I spent a couple of days at Lake Waccamaw at my cousin’s house last week. It was a busy week despite being on vacation. We spent one day reading and playing in the water and the next day we went to Wilmington briefly and I did some eco-printing inside because of the rain and the midges and mayflies. When the workers began cutting back the bushes at the house next door on Friday morning we both decided to split and go to Marietta with Mama.

    The full moon was beautiful the first two nights. The third night there was a tornado warning for a few minutes but most of the weather shifted to our northwest. Thank goodness, since there is no good place to take cover in the lake house.

    I walked around the yard between storms and collected as many different fresh leaves as possible, combined them in a folded accordion book with some metal pieces that I’ve collected, and steamed the book, then immersed it in a dyebath with privet leaves and flowers and bald cypress needles in lake water. I figured that the bald cypress needles and lake water would provide enough tannin to create a mordant.

    The problem was that I used too much metal and to me it spoiled a lot of the individual prints. The ones I like the most are simple. Also, part of my goal was to identify which leaves made the best prints, and for the most part, I couldn’t tell you. The Virginia creeper and Rose of Sharon leaves made nice prints:

    There were other vines that I liked and the oxalis stems and bald cypress needles made nice lines. The flowers on the shrubbery and privet flowers worked well too, but very subtlely.

    Mama transferred from the rehab center to my sister’s house for a week, and then we met my brother-in-law halfway on Friday and took her home. It’s been about a week since she went home and although she is still weakened, a physical therapist is coming to her house three days a week and she has a little more paid help to assist with light housework and yard work. She also has an amazing community around her that supports and loves her. I’ll go back down there this Saturday and stay the night.

    I hate all the driving but I’ve found that books on CD makes it much more bearable. I decided to listen to Newberry Medal winners that I never read, because they are a little easier to follow while driving. Anything more complicated causes me to skip back to see what I missed, IF I missed something, when I am distracted by something on the road. Last week Sandy and I listened to Hatchet by Gary Paulsen and this week I will listen to Holes by Louis Sachar.

    We came home to a huge pile of hardwood shredded mulch in our driveway. The problem was that I ordered compost. We are using part of the mulch to put on our paths but it was disappointing since I thought that I’d be planting more in raised beds this month. Oh well. Actually, last week really sucked for the most part. A friend died, my sister’s cat was bitten by a poisonous snake and died (I loved that cat and everyone is wrecked over his death), my laptop got a bad virus and didn’t come back intact after wiping the hard drive, and our basement flooded. I’m looking forward to that week in June in Gatlinburg, studying indigo dyeing with Rowland Ricketts at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts.

    However, even though the kittens are almost a year old, they are so much fun. We put carpet down in my bedroom and it looks and feels so much better. Still reorganizing and getting rid of stuff and it feels good. We celebrated our 27th wedding anniversary and ate a delicious brunch on Sunday at Sweet Potatoes on Trade St. in Winston Salem. Best shrimp and grits that I’ve ever eaten and I do not made that statement lightly.

    Will try to do better with the blog posting but between work and Mama’s illness it was all a little too much.

  • Sunday morning coffee pot post and Back Forty update

    I enjoyed my gardening yesterday and this morning in the Back Forty and the front shade garden, after being on an emotional roller coaster ride earlier in the week (see below the photos if interested).

    Bees are busy on the blueberry bush.

    After weeding out the violets and digging up the dead rosemary bush I found what I think might be a blackberry volunteer.

    I know that I won’t be able to achieve cleaning up the entire yard this year so I have changed my goal to concentrating on this part of the yard and the front yard. I’m going to put pine needles around the fig tree and the swing. Growing in this area now: alpine strawberries, borage, parsley, bronze fennel, red violetto artichoke, French sorrel, red sorrel, blueberries, garlic from last year. I still have some weeding to do. I think that I will plant some green beans or shell beans here, and field peas. I bought chicken wire to protect them from rabbits this year.

    Along the fence I planted three colors of butterbeans (lima beans), turnip greens for Lucy, Bull’s blood beets, and a few purple bush snap beans.

    The big surprise this week was the morel mushrooms I found growing next to the house. There are now three of them.

    Front shade garden: the fern that I thought was dead came back and had a baby. The edge gets more sun so I planted dill and parsley to join the sage and thyme. The rosemary sprig I rooted here last year is actually alive. I moved more foxgloves and bloodroot and hostas to the front. If you are curious how bloodroot got its name, see the last photo.


    In other news:

    Life has been a wild ride the last few days. A couple of days seemed like a week. Mama got very sick last Saturday night with what we thought was a stomach virus. Lisa went back to her house on Sunday and by Tuesday decided to take her to her family practice doctor in Dillon, SC because of her pain around her kidney. He did a CT scan and before the test results were even in told Lisa that he was sure it was cancer. It wasn’t. He wanted to admit her to the hospital in Dillon, but we decided that the hospital in Lumberton (not far away) would be better since her upcoming procedure was scheduled there with a GI surgeon.

    That turned into a nightmare because they had no rooms and the ER had a seven hour wait, even though her doctor had called ahead and supposedly got her clearance to be admitted right away. After three hours we had told the nurses that if she wasn’t moved to a bed in 30 minutes that we were taking her home and finding another hospital in the morning. They finally put her in a bed in an exam room, where we stayed for the next 16 hours.

    To shorten this story, we were told that she had a very rare kind of kidney infection with abcesses around her kidney, that her kidney was no good, that antibiotics would probably not work fast enough, and the other three choices we were given were invasive and most certainly would result in sepsis and she would be very sick in the hospital for weeks if she survived. He told her, “To be brutally honest, you may not ever leave the hospital.”

    We had her transferred by ambulance to UNC Memorial Hospital in Chapel Hill which is an excellent teaching hospital near my sister’s house. She was put in a bed in the ER and the entire experience immediately turned more optimistic. The interns and doctors were puzzled at our general freak-out because they didn’t see it as a grave situation. She would have been put into ICU and then operated on that night if we had left her in Lumberton. At UNC, she was put into a room around midnight and they decided to continue her on antibiotics and fluids.

    Lisa and Thad and I were able to go to bed around 1:30 that night. Lisa and I had been up for 41-42 hours straight and Thad was not in much better shape. It had taken us 29 hours and two hospitals to get her in a room.

    Now the diagnosis is that she has a hematoma and it is blood surrounding her kidney. There is not an abcess to drain but she did have an infection and a couple of kidney stones. She is much better and began sitting up in a chair and physical therapy began yesterday. Once the blood is absorbed they will do another CT scan to try to determine the cause of the hematoma, so she is not out of the woods yet. However, the plan is to release her on Monday or Tuesday to a rehab facility for about a week, then she will probably stay with my sister for a little while, then go back home to live independently again.

    Everyone has been impressed with her strength and appearance and general health at 90 years old. She is being flirted with by good looking male nurses. Things are much better than they were a few days ago. We are dismayed and angry at the doctors in Lumberton. She might be dead by now if we had stayed there.

    So. Life goes on. We never know what may change from one minute to the next, so enjoy this minute, in this place, in your body, right now.

  • Nat Greene Trail Hike

    Here are photos from our Nat Greene Trail Hike yesterday evening. It begins/ends at Lake Brandt Marina parking lot. Parts of it are hilly. Sandy and I went with a member of the Triad Hiking Explorers meet-up group and her rat terrier, Daisy Duke. We were exhausted afterward which proves that we need more of this kind of exercise.

    Looks like “home” (SE North Carolina) in the above photo.

    So often we don’t notice reflections. There’s always a spark of joy for me when I remember to really look at a still water pool.

    Another trail winds around the woods above the lake-edge trail.

    Maypops.

    Cool textures.


    One day I’m gonna build me an awesome fort in the woods again, just you wait and see.