for billie

today we buried our friend billie. she was 56 years old. she had aggressive, treatment resistant breast cancer. after the visitation, we went back to her home on a 300-acre farm in mora, minnesota. she had this image framed and hanging in her sunroom. we will miss you , billie.

swallowtail butterfly

the larch

when you read this i will be on my way to the funeral of a friend who died of breast cancer at age 55.  this tamarack, which is technically a conifer, loses its needles in the fall. it is native to the boreal forests of the north, including minnesota. this unique tree, an oddity of sorts, feels somehow apropos today.

tamarack tree with yellow needles of november (Larix laricina)

more asemic writing

i started playing with pine needles today, and decided the best way to show their beautiful curves and lines was to do some more asemic writing.  before i knew it i was writing a poem about the beauty of november in japanese katakana. well, not quite. but very nearly. it’s a beautiful poem about gray skies, the smell of damp soil, the rattle of leaves in the wind, and the distant call of migrating geese. the writing is as pretty and the words. trust me.

dried pine needles from an austrian pine

sitting yogi

when my days are full–when I’m caring for my mom, for instance, or when, like today, i decide for some reason to make an unnecessarily time-consuming bolognese sauce, i know i can always go outside and find a wild grapevine, any one, and every tendril on the vine will be STILL worthy. tendrils are my most enduring STILL subjects. i never sell prints of them for some reason. designers seem to prefer more lush, busy, or colorful compositions. but i love them all more for their lack of notoriety. the bound-up vitality and life energy in tendrils is so evocative for me. this particular tendril reminds me of a sitting yogi, with his legs in a pretzel, doing seated meditation.

wild grapevine tendril

a single bush puts on an autumn homage

i found all these colors on the same bush beside my mom’s driveway today. the variation is breathtaking and seems to me to capture all of autumn in a single bush.

late fall leaves from one unidentified bush (probably spirea)