Plants, pajamas, pandemic

I was supposed to go to Oaxaca for a painting workshop this month. That didn't happen. But I kinda brought Oaxaca to me by re-inventing my balcony. Plant stand, rug, plants--check. Soon there will be a bench and an umbrella. This quarantine would be so much worse without ordering stuff on the internet.

 

This giant mess happened first though. Right in the middle of my kitchen. Yes, hi, it's me. I have not been kidnapped and replaced by an impostor. This is the first time I've attempted a gardening project without a proper outdoor space to work in. Even in my 400 sq. foot apartment in L.A. I had access to a hose because I was on the first floor. Here, I potted everything on the kitchen island, feeling like there would be a stern knock at the door and I would be arrested.  

So that mess got cleaned up and everything was wiped down and sanitized. Today I decided I would make a new mess...collage because I took a very brief online class last week about inspiration for collage and photomontage, and we are checking back in with our work tomorrow. I made the paper below that I collaged on a few months ago, and also did the letter press on it in the same workshop. Now it's a collage. I was able to use some of my marbled paper as well.

I'm working on a second collage too. It's inspired by a line I read, "You break the secret or the secret breaks you." I was really happy about having the blue door in my collage pile, but now I'm thinking it doesn't belong. Maybe it's all about the tree.
The trees are leafing out here. I've been trying to force myself outside since Sunday, and I haven't made it yet. In fact, it's almost 5 pm, and I'm still in my pajamas. This is a new thing. I've been showering and dressing everyday--wearing favorite earrings and a necklaces like life is normal. But maybe not getting dressed is normal now. How about you? Do you wear your pajamas all day? What are you doing to keep from weeping? Are you making things? Writing?  Baking? Are you feeling healthy?

Home again, Home again, splishity-splash

After driving a round-trip of 800-plus miles, enduring a deluge complete with hydro-planing, a brief dust storm, wind gusts that brought Oz to mind, road construction that squeezed a billion trucks and my tiny Prius into one lane, and, last but not least, a trucker who tried to render C. and me into roadkill, I am back in my own kitchen stuffing myself with some fabulous bread that the man who loves me brought over last night. I am drinking my home-made latté and still savoring how far beyond wonderful it is to visit family, come home and sleep in my own bed, and then wake to a man who has already enjoyed his morning coffee before he crawls back under the covers scented with that morning elixir  I crave at first consciousness.
C. is fond of saying "I love my life!" when joys, big or small, rise up in her daily goings-on. And that's where I am this morning. In my kitchen, loving my life as I type at my breakfast bar next to a newspaper clipping from the L.A. Times. A few weeks ago Edna St. Vincent Millay's famous poem, "God's World," was printed there, and I cut it out and laid it next to the phone where I knew I would run across it now and again.


O world, I cannot hold
 thee close enough!
Thy winds, thy wide
  grey skies!
Thy mists that roll and
  rise!
Thy woods, autumn 
  day, that ache
  and sag
And all but cry with 
  colour! That gaunt
  crag
To crush! To lift the 
  lean of that black
  bluff!
World, World, I cannot 
  get thee close 
  enough!"