boys

because i had a daughter before my son, for most of my life as a mother, there was either a majority of estrogen in the house (mother + daugher + father) or an equal amount of estrogen and testosterone (mother + daughter + father + son). now, however, my daughter is in california, and the household hormone balance has shifted. now it is two boys and one girl. and so we make things like this. stacking flat rocks as high as they will go without falling, and by-the-by imitating the shape of a phallus. we do that when we are not wrestling, throwing food at each other, swearing like longshoremen, smelling like a horse barn, missing the garbage can with three-pointers that we do not later pick up, leaving dishes on side tables, leaving clothes on the floor, leaving bait in the refrigerator, leaving wet clothes in the washing machine, tossing recyclables into the garbage, plastic into the glass pile, and glass into the plastic pile. and we will not discuss the bathroom at all. but every once in a while, i get a sleepy sixteen-year-old boy who puts his head on my lap and asks for a head rub, and then slowly falls asleep, and all, for the most part, is forgiven.

cairn of beach tumbled roof tiles from sète

no beginning and no end

a wreath is meant to symbolize continuity and the everlasting circle of timelessness. “look at this book full of pressed flowers,” i thought to myself today. “they’re not going to last forever, but they’re going to last a pretty long time.” and so here is your wreath of pressed mallow, olive, laurel, fig, and rosemary. i hope you enjoy it endlessly.

wreath of pressed mediterranean flowers and leaves

solstice

i love this day of the year–the winter solstice. i love it because it is the darkest day of the year and there is something about settling in around a fire or a candlelit hearth on the shortest day of the year that is familial in an old fashioned way. i also love it because it is the darkest day of the year, and that means that every day for the next six months gets lighter and lighter. i am a glass half full person who can be ok if the glass is sometimes half empty.

languedoc solstice tree (salvia, fan palm, dogwood, rosemary, pepper tree berries, pepper tree leaves, dried sloe berries, clary sage, seeded eucalyptus, driftwood)

perfume

i inadvertently snapped this clary sage stem after i photographed it, and not surprisingly, a little puff of sage scent soon reached my nostrils. it reminded me of a book i just started reading called perfume by patrick suskind. the hero/villain of the book is a sort of human monster, born in 18th century paris, who decodes the entire world based on scent. he is a mozart-like prodigy in the realm of scent, and like mozart writing his first opera at age 12, this character begins before grade school to create new forms and combinations of scent, sometimes only in his head. i don’t know where the book is going although he has already killed a girl whose scent he was able to track on the wind, like a polar bear, from the other side of the seine, down several streets and an alleyway. it has been fascinating to read a book so steeped in smells, good and bad, and to realize how little smell is incorporated into so much writing.

clary sage flower stem in winter

order spilling into chaos

i was going for richly textured detail today, along with tonal harmony, but i think i spilled over into chaos. by the time i was done, the sun was low on the horizon and it was too late to start over. knowing when to stop is one of the hardest things for me when i am creating.  i was aiming for something that would be on first glance engaging, but that would also reward the viewer upon closer and closer inspection. this doesn’t have an open enough structure to invite a closer look. instead, the busyness of the surface keep the eye at that level. oh well. it is pleasantly distracting, if maybe not quite layered and thought provoking. the good news. there’s another still blog image waiting to be made tomorrow. see you then.

dried bits of languedoc nature