spidey senses

okay, okay, enough about my tossing (i hear you). but it is all going so very badly that it is becoming absurd. case in point: this photo of leaves from tiger lily stems. i picked the stems last fall for the seed pods (which i am keeping, naturally), and when i went to toss the stems, i was suddenly struck by all the shades of brown in the leaves. so i had to make a photo. naturally. so, here i am, two-thirds of the way through another day of tossing, and i have only gotten rid of two stripped lily stems. that’s all. what’s gong on? as ginny mentioned in the comments, perhaps my spidey senses are telling me that spring is not actually right around the corner, that i had better hold on another week or two. something is definitely up.

tiger lily leaves

out with the old, in with the new

i am trying mightily to toss out all of last year’s flotsam and jetsam. but i am having a hard time of it. there was a reason i saved each of those bits. so every time i pick up a pile to toss, i see potential. but i have to remind myself, that i am more motivated by the clean desk and the blank page, than i am by piles. i not a thrifter, nor a garage sale goer, nor a junk market shopper. i don’t want to sift through lots of stuff to find the one hidden gem. my only exception to this is beach combing. i will happily sit on a beach for an entire day sorting and sifting through the sand to find one perfect beach rock or shell. i digress. all of this is way of saying that we will be jumping willy-nilly through the seasons here for a few days while i clear out my stashes, and i wait for the snow to melt enough to make walking my trails doable.

dried leaves in fall colors

same, same, but different

remember that windowpane grid of pampas grasses i made the other day? this is the same subject, composed differently. i went to throw the leaves away, and caught myself mid-stride toward the garbage can. some day i should challenge myself to make as many compositions with the same subject material as i could in one day. there are infinite possibilities of course, but if i constrained the experiment to one day it could get really interesting. i would not be surprised at all if the first few, and then the last few wouldn’t turn out to be among the most interesting compositions. that’s just a hunch. now i’m really curious and looking at the calendar for an entirely open day…

woven pampas grass leaves

april fool’s day

mother nature played a little april fools joke on us in the twin cities today. we woke up to 5 inches of fresh, sticky snow. ha ha. not funny. the snow was so wet and heavy that we have been snowed in all day with none of our vehicles heavy enough to push through it.  it appears to be melting fast enough that we should be free by tomorrow. in the meantime, i am sorting and purging all my little caches of set aside flora and fauna in preparation for the new season of gathering which is right around the corner, right? right? promise me it is just around the corner. hidden in one of my stashes were these three anthurium stems looking like supple leather. as pretty dried as their were fresh.

dried anthurium flowers

what is normal anyway?

my husband and i have a debate about whether i am normal or not. it’s an entirely loving and joking back and forth we do. i will make some kind of declarative statement or express a frustration with something, or other people, and he will reply “that’s because you are not normal.”  and i always reply “i am so normal, i define normal”. neither of us really believes either extreme, but as in all generalizations there is often a kernel of… truth something to be considered. one night, during one of our “i’m normal”/”you’re not normal” exchanges, he decided to take the discussion public and texted a dozen of our friends asking simply “is MJ normal?” with no other explanation. interestingly, he got back 12 replies–6 saying “hell no, she not normal”*. and six saying, “yeah, pretty normal”. so, the jury is still out. but, i have to admit, while i was laying out my tendril collection today to make this photo, it did occur to me “most people don’t have tendril collections…maybe there’s a grain of truth in steve’s opinion.” and yet, the answer hardly matters, because the older i get, the less normal  i care to be.

tendril collection