this one was a group effort on a cold rainy day. we do evergreens pretty well up here in minnesota.

a collection of evergreens from this morning’s walk: white pine, red pine, austrian pine, spruce, red cedar, white cedar, juniper

vadnais lake, saint paul, minnesota

after celebrating the romanian side of my family in yesterday’s post, i realized as i sat down and looked at today’s assemblage that it reminds me of some of the swedish folk art on my mom’s side. especially those little curved balsam needle “stems” sporting bittersweet berry “flowers.” which is sort of the impulse behind folk art, isn’t it? to stylize the familiar and beloved little bits of nature that surround you?

dried bits and pieces; horsetail, bittersweet, locust leaves and stems, hasta flowers, cedar, balsam needles, pinecone

saint paul, minnesota

i love order, but i love almost-order even more. a perfect birthday cake is beautiful, but a perfect birthday cake missing a big fat finger swipe of frosting tells a story. i don’t know what the story is behind the random extra square on this grid, but something in me said it needed to be there. i think i learned this growing up in my big, rowdy family, where perfection was distantly admired, but imperfection was celebrated. The beautiful flower arrangement was nice to look at, but it was so much more interesting when the dog knocked the vase off the counter and it shattered on the floor. tomorrow is my family’s annual sausage making event, where we will all get together to make 80 pounds of romanian sausage, and celebrate our imperfections, and laugh when the dogs steal food from the perfect appetizer trays, and the wine glasses get dropped on the kitchen tile.

striped beach stones and reed stems in winter

stones from bretagne, france,  stems from saint paul, minnesota

i had an idea this afternoon of an arrangement of feathers from the most striking birds in my collection, including yellow shafted flickers, blue jays, and woodpeckers. i played with three or four possibilities, eventually calling my husband in for moral support. he got very quiet and thoughtful, as he does when he’s waiting for the right idea, or the right sentence, to come along. i left him there and made a cup of tea, then answered some emails, then put a load of laundry in. i never saw him leave the kitchen. i just saw this sitting in the middle of a white sheet of paper the next time i walked by. i got very quiet and thoughtful. then i went to get my tripod.

blue jay and yellow flicker feathers

saint paul, minnesota

the engineer in me wants to separate these colors into discrete rectangles and order them in an attractive grid. the artist in me wants to splash them in a disorderly harmony across the page. in the end, what you get is what you get. chaotic order? random regularity? mathematical artistry? disrupted symmetry? i don’t know. what you get is mary jo hoffman. take it or leave it.

stems, old and new

saint paul, minnesota