Unfinished self-portrait with left hand

Trying "watercolros" and "pastels"

Switching to trying "oils"

I was using a brand new program (app?) (new to me), "Fresh Paint," and my left hand.  I got so frustrated my right hand kept trying to take over for my left.  I had to give up.  The reason I was using my left hand was for a challenge for Daily Challenge/Me/You health.

It made me think how frustrating writing and drawing must be for little kids who don't have much manual dexterity.  Seriously difficult stuff!

Updates on progress on my current painting.

After a week of work I still haven't got the first layer of paint down!
This is with a different camera!
Getting the colors right without a good scanner is a pain!

Day 8 on this piece
Still not finished!

New Art in process, Moleskine, June 2014

I am sorry to report that my scanner is still not working, so I have tried to photograph the pieces I am working on.  The first one is a collaboration with Andrea.

Collaboration with Andrea,
PITT Faber Castel pigment pens and colored pencil

The second piece is the one I am currently working on, showing two stages of work. It is for my book, Frankie and Noah have a party.

Collaboration, 1st half, for Mike

The last piece is a collaboration for Mike to finish.  My intention was to do a simple graphic black and white but I got carried away and colored it.  "The owl and the Pussycat went to sea/ in a beautiful pea green boat."

Mike, feel free to change the these, paint or color over or change any part of what I did, etc.  You can erase the lines of the boat and the ear of the owl if you want to do something entirely different--it could be a scene in the daytime.

Click images to view larger.

Pinery

We're leaving tomorrow to go camping at the the Pinery in Ontario Canada.  I haven't been around much anyway, unfortunately.

But if you try to contact me, I won't be able to respond.  No internet.

Have a wonderful week. :-D

Still a Girl at Heart!
(Girl at Wilcott Mills,
photoby me, Mary Stebbins Taitt)
click image to view larger.

May 4, 2019

Dear Younger self,

I know you think you’re getting old and may never finish or publish your books, but I have some great news for you!  Your health efforts have paid off in spades and I feel better at almost 73 than you did at almost 68.  I am vibrant and healthy and amazingly energetic and lean.  No one believes I’m 73.  No, I don’t look twenty, and never will again.  But we’re a rocking 72 and 11/12^ths! J

And I have more good news.  Your ADHD and other issues have reconciled themselves to the point where you have completed several of your novels, including Frog Haven, and two are published and one will be soon and another is getting close to ready.  Not only that, but you’ve had a chapbook and poetry book published and a novella!  You had so many close to being ready that putting effort into them one at a time did the trick.

Love, your happy, healthy older self!

Feeling Like Myself

Reflections
by me, Mary Stebbins Taitt
a digitally altered photograph
taken and altered by me
click image to view larger.

Feeling Like Myself

                I need to write a narrative poem for class.  Every time I try to think about it, I think of the hummingbird grove in my dream.  But that seems more lyric than narrative. And besides, how could I communicate the thing that made the dream special, the joy of it, without sounding clichéd or maudlin etc.?  Everything about the dream shouts cliché   But the feeling of the dream (or the vision, since I wasn’t actually sleeping) was anything but clichéd to me.  The twisted fairy trees on a hill that looks like a print, a perfect arc of circle with the magical trees and their bright saturated glowing colors.

I am at Pier Park.  They are predicting rain and thunderstorms, but it isn't raining yet.  The sky is dark, cloudy, with thunderous looking clouds and it's windy and cold.  And am not dressed warmly enough and may have to go home early. 

                Again, I think about the narrative poem, the rainbow trees, the humming birds.  About the very dark horizon.  Ships going by, cold wind batters me, the water that seems opaque rather than transparent, a kind of pale grey green.  My hands are cold in this big wind.

                I am interested in the detritus that collects in the corners, balls, water bottles, dead fish, lakeweed, driftwood, trash.  Two geese hiss at me.  I hiss back, circling around them to give them some space.

                I see rain at a distance, clearly visible against brighter clouds behind it, grey streaks of rain slanting in the wind, pretty, but I'm already cold and not eager to get wet. 

                The rain comes closer and all seems to be coming from a single cloud that is almost over me.  I wonder what makes one cloud rain and another not rain. The water at the edge of the beach as the waves retreat almost seems to be glowing and I realize it is the pinky beige clouds behind the rain cloud.  On the beach I find the breast bone of a large bird, very light and dry, like the keel of a ship.  I find a plastic rake and a bobber and an empty snail shell.  I see a bleached pail, a chartreuse plastic cup and trash. 

The beach has grown, accreted.  People have been dumping trash here, which is sad.  The natural trash, the flotsam and jetsam, is bad enough, but black bags of crap, parts of an old trunk, things like that, have been brought and deliberately left.

                On the beach, I see lots of tennis balls.  A dead goose, a live starling, a pink action figure (toy), tons of zebra mussel shells, driftwood, trash.  Multiple bobbers.  Red and white, da-glo yellow and white.  Two geese are honking at me.  I want to walk the length of the expanded beach.  The pink action figure is an ape with its mouth open.  There is a yellow plastic pistol, a squirt gun, I guess.  Large clamshells, too.  Mints, touch-me-nots growing.  Black peppermint.  Grass and sedges.  A fishing pole with a reel still attached, half buried in the sand.  Plastic bags and cups, beer and soda cans.  My feet, with brand new sandals, sink into pockets of rot.  Rope, yellow and black nylon rope wound around some wood.  I get zebra mussel shells and crud in my sandals.  A colorful beach towel, half-rotted.  Wow!  The beach has really accreted (grown) since I was last here, much more than I thought. It is so much lonmger than it was! A soccer ball, clean and good looking, and more tennis balls, good and bad and half buried.  Lots of birds flitting about.  A fishing net (seine type, with big holes for big fish).  I find a dead bird, maybe a grebe (black head, long beak, grey feathers, partly rotted.)  I try to photograph it with Fiona, the W3, but cannot see it on the view screen, so I try again with Pandora.  But Pandora can't get far enough away.

                I walk to the very end of the expanded beach.  There are more dead bird and live bird and mussel shells and sand and something that looks like a collapsed pup tent and I walk until beech disappears under the water and head back to look for a place to climb up.  For no particular reason, I pick up a faded, once red plastic thing that looks like a spring, but isn't.  I put it in my pocket.  Then I pick up a snail shell, but when I can't determine if it dead, I put it back.

                Small succulent plants grow in the rocks.  I can't remember their names.  They have yellow flowers, but are not flowering yet.  The dandelions are. The birds I on the beach so far were starlings, grackles, robins, ducks, geese.  Now, however, I see a tern.  Between the beach and the lakewall, there are ponds and phragmites.  I see another dead bird.  I walk down onto the lakewall to try and see it.  It may be a pigeon or a gull, difficult to tell, half buried as it is.  In some spots, the ponds between the wall and beach are very black.  The older back parts of the beach have common evening primrose and willows growing on it.

                Even though I am cold and alone, I feel happy here in a melancholy way.  Out on the stormy windy lake are three of those 4H sailboats, looking forlorn, clinging together, with a man shouting orders.  And here comes the rain again.  And, there it goes.

                My new sandals are now full of sand, mussel shells, crud, and sludge.  That's how I know they're mine. I am really really really glad the rain stopped and I was able to walk on the wild beach in the wind. I feel like myself, for a change.

I can't let go of the dream in order to imagine another subject for a poem, so I decide to write it and see what happens.                  I sit on the lake wall and write a poem from my dream.

*A Promise of Apples*

You walk all day in the rain; the wind beats against you,

reddens your hands and face, dries your eyeballs.  Your legs

feel like concrete, hardening in its molds.  You want to sit

to lie down, to sleep, but you haven't arrived yet. You must continue,

step after step after step.  The soles of your feet ache.

You approach a hill that rises in a round hump toward

the setting sun.  Fire rims each of hundreds of ancient

twisted apple  trees.  Each blossom

explodes into flame, and hundreds of hummingbirds

glow with ethereal light.  Your hair, loose, and floating

around your face, burns and burns without turning to ash

The humming bird hang suspended, then flit from flower

to flaming flower.  The colors deepen in the sky and the trees

and blossoms and birds take on impossible hues.

You forget your fatigue and stand staring.  The hummingbirds

have tiny voices, but so many of them sing that the grove

reverberates with the sound and color and smell of joy.

You taste the promise of apples.

1st draft 2014051-1500

*

This is the first draft.  I have now written 7 drafts.  I don’t want to post it again until I finish it.  I’ve changed the name, the time of day and other things—it’s almost turning into a real poem.

Wading,
by Mary Stebbins Taitt,
digitally altered photograph (taken and altered by me)

Fun and Games, Variations on a theme

Fun and Games IIIe (Insomnia)
by me, Mary Stebbins Taitt
digitally altered Photographic composit from my own photos
click to view larger

Fun and Games IIIeb (Spring Sprung)
by me, Mary Stebbins Taitt
digitally altered Photographic composit from my own photos
click to view larger

This post is dedicated to Tyree Gyton and KT Lowe.

Thwarted! (Dream)

The Forest at Night IV
by me, Mary Stebbins Taitt

“Ya cain’t get they-ah from Hee-ah!”

I am going to a personal retreat at a rented cottage that seems to be (in my mental map) south of Syracuse (Tully, Pompeii?) in the hills.  I am driving my normal little silver Cruze headed down there, happy and excited.  I start feeling a little confused, like I’m not total sure of the directions, but I think I can find my way there.  I come to a construction site and the road is totally torn up, the pavement is gone.  I consider continuing on the road past the ‘closed” signs until I see ahead huge earth moving equipment.  Then I become a little nervous about continuing and decide to turn around.  It appears from the tracks that other people have done the same thing and I follow the well-worn tracks of a U-turn that takes me onto a different road that seems to be heading the way I want to go.  But a little while later, the road diverges west.  I keep turning on other roads trying to head back south, but every road takes me in the wrong direction. The next thing I know, I am walking south, determined to get where I am going.  I run into other people also trying to get to cottages in the same area and we talk about the cooks that will be preparing our meals.  The cooks are fat.  The other people are younger than I am and walk faster.  The trail we are following takes up over what appears to be a mountain pass.  It gets progressively more difficult and dangerous.  The people ahead of me enter a mass of huge, pointy rocks and boulders.  I follow, but a few minutes later, they return.  “You can’t get through?” I ask.  “No,” they say.  I consider going to look for myself, but they are younger and fitter than I am, and if they can’t get through, I probably can’t either.

I wake up distressed.  Dream, Thursday, April 24, 2014

How does this make you feel?  What does it remind you of?

“I consider going to look for myself, but they are younger and fitter than I am, and if they can’t get through, I probably can’t either.”  I need to remember that that statement is not necessarily true—think of climbing Seward, Donaldson and Emmons, when I was only one out of 26 people, all younger than me, who made it to the top.  (Speaking of which, a “secret” inner goal of mine is to be able to climb again, but I feel very discouraged about that happening [which is why it is secret].)

I am feeling confused about where it is that I want to be going.  I want to be healthy (physically, mentally, emotionally, socially and spiritually), I want to deepen my relationship with Keith and with Frankie and my kids and I want to publish my books.  I want to be lean.  But there is also the feeling of something deeper.  In the dream, I seem to be going to a personal writing retreat (not an organized one, but one I set up for myself, like the one at 7^th Lake.)  But since this dream theme is constantly recurring, I need to explore it a little. I would like to do some special work on it, including writing and journeying, as well as talking to Brian and friends).

I feel as if I need to pick ONE project that is the most likely to succeed and try to keep it on or very near the front burner until it is finished.  But meanwhile also look at the trajectory of my life and deep goals and see where I might be failing or headed wrong, or how I can remove the roadblocks.  I also feel that for me, it is OK to work on more than one project at a time, because they act as mind cleansers and feel each other and give me a break when I feel mentally exhausted from.  But not more than 2 or 3 on the front burners.  (A regular stove has four burners, so maybe that’s a good symbolic analogy-2 on the front burner, two on the back burners, the rest in the fridge and freezer.)

In the dream, I feel sad and thwarted.  In my phenomenal life, my health, my writing and other aspects of my life (tidiness, cleaning) seem to meet with one obstacle after another.  Some are internally generated and some are from outside myself, or seem to be.

The Forest at Night III
By me, Mary Stebbins Taitt
click to view larger

Frankie and the lumpy bumpies

I was going to do this book for Frankie in the traveling Moles, but I haven't had one in a while, so I decided to use my really BIG Mole:

Frankie and the Lumpy Bumpies
watercolor by me, Mary Stebbins Taitt
for my book, Frankie and Noah have a Party

This is the tentative layout for the page in the book.
Click images to view larger.

The Lesson and the Game

The Lesson and the Game
digital composit of images harvested from internet
click image to view larger.

The Lesson and the Game

My first round of practice teaching occurs at a mixed-race, inner-city school.  Most of the kids are black and the teacher is also black and male.  The two student teachers are my friend and classmate, Hank (Henry Phalange) and me.  Hank, biracial, is equally at home with whites or blacks and can switch speech and mannerisms in the blink of an eye.  I, on the other hand, in spite of having been here for some time, have trouble making out the speech of some of the children.

The lesson for the day is trees, tree ecology and tree identification.  We study trees in math, social studies, reading and science.  During science, Mr. Hollinger passes out leaves to each student, and to Hank and me. The leaves seem to be hand-carved out of ebony or some other dark expensive looking wood, but they also feel very strong.  Each leaf is on a black chain and can be worn around the neck.

Hank’s is an American elm, Mr. Hollinger’s a white ash and mine a sugar maple.  Mr. Hollinger’s looks fragile, with its separate leaf-lets, but I finger it, and it seems sturdy.  Chantelle has a big-tooth aspen, Tyrone a cottonwood, Egyptia a red oak, DeShaun a white oak, Jonas an American beech, Micah a chestnut and so on.  We talk about the characteristics of the trees and walk in the new school arboretum so that each child can find his or her tree.  We learn three things about each tree, as we go around, and then, when we stop at the end, the kids each recite the three things about their own tree and the other kids repeat them.

My three things are that we can make maple syrup and candy from the sugar maple, that they are used as shade trees, and that they are part of the beech-birch maple hemlock climax forest in this area.  Also we say the Latin name, for me, Acer sacharum.  I didn’t learn the Latin names of trees until I got to college, so it seems strange to be teaching them to these kids.

When we come back in, the girls in the class are sent next door to Miss Johanna’s room and her boys are sent to our room.  Mr. Hollister pulls down the room-darkening shades, leaving only a slit of light visible at the bottom of three of the shades.  The room falls into darkness.  He directs our class sit on one lab table and the other class sit on the other.  Then he says we’re going play a game called pickpocket. I am immediately concerned, and wish I had been sent over to Miss Johanna’s with the girls.  I am guessing they are not playing pickpocket.

The object of the game is to acquire as many leaves as possible.  He does not say if the leaves will be returned, and I feel fearful of losing my own leaf and of other kids losing theirs and being sad.  I think that this is an inappropriate game, and I am unhappy about it.  However, I am the student teacher, and at this point am only observing, so I keep my opinions to myself.

When Mr. Hollister blows the whistle and the game starts, I back into a corner and hope that everyone forgets me.  The room falls into pandemonium, kids dashing everywhere, hooting and laughing.  Unlike me, they seem to be happy.  At one point, a whole crowd of them sweeps past me, and someone grabs one my arms and I twirl helplessly into the running mass of kids and bang against a lab table, not hard enough to hurt, but I am surrounded by bodies moving, thumping and laughing.

Then I realize my leaf is gone.  I pat myself down and I definitely don’t have it.  I feel a sense of loss and grief and also anger and something akin to hatred for being forced to play this stupid game. It seems to go on and on and I make my way back to the corner and sulk.  I have no desire to touch male students in the dark searching for hidden leaves.  The whole idea seems ludicrous and inappropriate to me.

Finally, Mr. Hollister blows his whistle and the game stops.  Kids turn on the lights, pull up the shades, and hold up their trophies—the ones who have trophies.  The others stand back, but they don’t look sad.  They look surprisingly cheerful.  Hank comes over to stand by me.  He is grinning ear it ear.  “I got your leaf,” he says, and holds out his hand.  I stare at all the stuff in his hand.  “Here,” he says, “take it,” and pushes his hand closer. 

Hanging from his hand is my leaf, my camera, my necklace, and laying in his hand is my cell phone, my wallet, a pen, a paint-brush in a metal tube, my glasses.  Everything is intact.  I look in my wallet and my money and cards seem to be there. 

Hank looks pleased with himself, and happy.  He seems to think I should praise him. But I feel violated and sad.  I wonder if he or anyone else has taken anything from me and not returned it.  Something I will miss later, when it is too late.  We stand staring at each other, our face inches apart.  When he leans and gives me a small kiss on my cheek, I steel myself against drawing back, not from Hank, who I love, but from this terrible game and his acceptance of it.

Dream April 5, 2014

Sugar maple leaf by me,
Mary Stebbins Taitt

How does this make you feel?  What does it remind you of?

It may have been influenced by Reality TV, movies and books, such as Hunger Games.  I have fearfully been avoiding seeing or reading any of them, but they leak into my consciousness anyway.  I guess I am a big wimp.  I hate even the idea of them.

I worked for a number of years teaching in inner city schools, but never played a game called pickpocket.  I have no idea where that came from except perhaps because I have jury duty coming up and worry about the pickpockets downtown.