The New Me, Swans and Painting-by-Numbers

It seems like a lifetime since I last sat down at the computer to write. I didn’t even take a break from posting when I was in the hospital with broken ribs so this transition from posting twice a week to once a week is going to take some getting used to. Figuring out how to allot my new found time is going to effect the entire rhythm of my life except for Wednesdays. Wednesdays have long been my favorite days in the week because I get to play Mahjong and I get to publish new posts on my blog. I missed you all!

Things that happened since last week’s post:

Eight baby swans have hatched and are now swimming close to their mama in the lake here at continuum care campus. If I had a lake view apartment I’d probably get too invested in their little lives. For the next few weeks those residents who do have the prime views will be alternating between watching the babies grow and watching the snapping turtle pluck them off one by one, then giving the rest of us reports over lunch. Last year I saw one of the babies get pulled under by a dinner plate sized turtle and after that I couldn’t walk down to the lake until after they got too big for the turtles to mess with. The parent swans only got raised two of the seven they started out with last year. 

We have a guy living here who retired from a high ranging position in the Department of Natural Resources who says, “Think what a problem it would be to have that many swans on the lake. It’s the circle of life and the turtles are doing their job.” Back when my brother was a teenager he and his future brother-in-law entered that circle of life one summer and caught some of those huge turtles and cooked them on a hot plate in our backyard at the cottage. My mom wouldn’t let them do it inside and I thought it was cruel to kill them and I wouldn’t try the meat even though I was told it tasted like chicken. Ohmygod, I’ll bet they taste that way because they eat water fowl!

I’ve started taking a painting class here on the campus. It’s four weeks long, (three hours per session) taught by the same woman who micro-taught the one I took over a year ago. The class only costs $10 including the canvas, oil paints, all the other supplies plus the use of the CCC’s good quality brushes. Too cheap to pass up. Some of you may remember the drama that went on during that first class when the instructor said something dump/silly to one of the ladies and Ms Hurt Feelings left and didn’t come back. She threw her canvas in the trash and said she was keeping the #10 filbert brush “…because I should get something for my money.” 

This year’s class we have four of us returning and two newbies. The Scottish singer/resident alcoholic is one of them and he’s as blind as a bat so it should be interesting to see what he does. The other newbie is a lady who has never held a brush before and I talked her into taking the class. She really wanted to but was afraid of making a fool out of herself. I assured her the instructor’s (high-handed) hand-holding teaching methods is perfect for her. There’s no room for individual creativity in her classes but she does teach beginners useful techniques for mixing paints, how to do brush and palette knife strokes and the proper care of brushes, that sort thing. 

No one in the class knows I have a degree in art, or rather that Jean 1.0 has a degree. Jean 2.0 lost her skills, knowledge and confidence. In the dementia circles the experts say we need to meet people where they’re at and so that’s what I’m doing with myself. Yup, the discontinued model of myself couldn’t even finish a simple pasture of cows I started last winter so I’m meeting the Jean 2.0 at the bottom and working my way up. Trying to chase my former self was freezing me up and now I’m hoping to just enjoy the process without the stress of trying to live up to the artist I used to be 30 years ago. She’s gone.

Jean 2.0 even bought three paint-by-number kits to start at the very bottom where Jean 1.0 began as a kid. Two of the paint-by-numbers are customized from photos that I sent to the company. They should arrive this week. I can’t wait to try them. I have relatives who are into Mid-Century Modern decor and no self-respecting home of that era was without a paint-by-number on the wall. I picked photos with them in mind should they turn out well. One thing Jean 1.0 did that I’d like to duplicate is giving away paintings as I finish them. 

The other paint-by-number I’ve already got started on. (photos at the top.) Thankfully, I still have a steady enough hand to paint within the lines and a good magnifying glass to actually see them. (I did a little research online and learned that ‘painting’ with toothpicks in the tiny areas works fantastic.) As a kid I did a lot of paint-by-numbers until my mom found me a couple of after school art classes down at the art museum which must have been a pain for her to drive me to. We only had one car so on those days she’d have to take my dad to work and pick him back up again. He worked nights so that meant he got picked up in a bad neighborhood at midnight. If Mom was still alive I’d thank her for all the things she did for me that I took for granted, then I'd apologize for not living up to the potential she saw in me. Do we all judge ourselves through the eyes of our mothers?

Last and least…at lunch a woman asked if I was signed up for the Mother’s Day Breakfast and I told her I’m not a mother but she insisted that aunts are welcome, too. Didn’t matter, I don’t want to go. I’ve never been to a Mother’s Day event but imagine them to be a place were they compare kids and their accomplishments. Finally, she says,”You’re going!” and she marched over to the concierge's desk and signed me up. When I got back home I hoped on our community app and canceled the reservation. It made me mad that at my age someone would think they can make decisions like that for me, then I proceeded to wonder if that’s what I did to the friend about taking the painting class? After debating with myself I gave myself a pass because she initially expressed an interest in going and she herself called to register. No amount of badgering on my part would have made her call if she didn’t really want to do it. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Until next Wednesday….  ©

The Water's Edge and Angel Wings

Two perfect swans glide on the cloud’s reflection, their babies in tow as they approach a Great Egret standing on skinny stilts stalking minnows. The family stops to pluck their weedy dinner from below the water’s stillness. Geese touch down on the far side of the lake and Father Swan sets off on a mission to let the geese know the welcome mat is not out for them. The swans want to keep the aquatic plants all for themselves and the white creatures wins this round over the flock of honking, dark Canadians. But the war is not over at the water’s edge. It never is when territory is fought over to the amusement of those watching from the shore. 

Someone on the bank used their Boy Scout skills to build a tepee of sticks and twigs and they wove white swan feathers into a pattern at the bottom of the tepee, like spokes on a wagon wheel. I plucked three feathers from a pile of those not attached to the shire and carted them home. Three of anything is a collection. The longest one is 19 inches long and its a flight feather. I know that because google told me how to tell the difference between tail and flight feathers. “Tail feathers are balanced left and right of the center. Flight feathers have a wider and narrower side. This makes them better for flying because they can cut through the air with very little resistance,” according to Arizona's 'Ask a Biologist' website. And try as I might I cannot separate the barbules and hooklets. 

Carrying my stolen treasurers home, someone along the trail told me it's illegal to keep them but my fear of going to feather hoarders’ prison didn’t last long. Google told me that people are selling them in plain sight. Yup, you guessed it. I fell down the rabbit hole of learning everything there is to know about features including how bags of white feathers are sold for weddings and others have their quill ends sewn on webbed ribbons and sold by the yard presumably to those making Native American ceremonial costumes or Victoria Secret type angel wings and capes. Those angel wings the models wear, by the way, are made of ostrich feathers and they weigh between 12 to 18 pounds. If you’ve always wanted one you’re in luck because there are tons of DIY videos online on how to make your own wings which begs the question: who is making themselves a set of wings and where do they keep them when they aren’t parading them around in the bedroom or on Halloween? There are videos on how to make your own feather capes and headdresses, too. 

But down duck and goose feathers sold by the pound make me sad thinking about all the birds that had to die in some smelly processing plant and get their feathers plucked out moments after death. No time to grieve their friends also going down the line to get their heads ground off in the cruelest looking machines I’ve ever seen. (Remember Sarah Palin doing a promo at Thanksgiving while a turkey was being jammed head first down a machine in the background and the guy holding the bird by its feet was waiting to pull the headless bird back up after the cameras quit rolling?) We mammals pride ourselves on standing upright and living in houses but we are no different than the swans. We take what we want from lower down on the food chain. Some of us more cavalier about the process than others. Native American's in the movies of my youth, at least, thanked the spirit of the animals they kill for dinner. Sarah Palin laughed at the reporter who asked if she really wanted to do the interview in front of the turkey guillotine.

I thought my collecting days were over when I downsized and moved here last October. But now I have a collection of owl and swan feathers and I am resisting picking up goose and duck feathers. What are the possibilities they’ll give me salmonella? Growing my mom caught me licking a turtle once and gave me my first salmonella lecture. What are the possibilities an apartment filled with nature’s discards won’t lead to me becoming what I’ve always feared---that in my old age I’ll start saving creamer cups and picking lent off the hall floors and hoarding my ‘treasures’ in a dresser drawer. My husband’s mother did those things in her dementia. 

Lately I’ve been spending more and more time at the water’s edge. I come prepared with my notebook and book of inspiration, intending to go back to my writing roots when my teen-self tried to create poetry. But so many people walk by on the trail and stop to talk that I don’t get very far trying to channel Mary Oliver. I carry around her book, A Poetry Handbook as if just holding it will give me an ear for meter and rhyme. It’s not working. Nor did the two times I actually read the book impart me the ability to do more than learn to look longer and harder at nature and write opening lines like, “Two perfect swans glide on the cloud’s reflection, their babies in tow as they approach a Great Egret standing on skinny stilts stalking minnows.” ©

Sarah Palin

 P.S.  I ran across a blog post that might help those of us having trouble posting comments on our own and/or other people's blogs---they come out as anonymous instead of with our google account name and link. Life and Linda has helped many of us bloggers with technical stuff and gives great, detailed instructions. I followed her directions for Firefox but she gives them for Chrome and Safari as well. A Fix for Anonymous Comments.  Good Luck!

 

Swans, Margaritas and Mother’s Day

It wasn’t exactly a beautiful spring day but the temperature was in the 62 degrees range and I’d waited long enough. I was going to walk around to the lake side of the building to see the baby swans. Lunch chatter from the people who’d paid $10,000 more for their units with window views of the lake and an additional $300 more per month in service fees were raving about the little gobs of gray feathers gliding along side the turtles sunbathing on a log near-by. Someone said I’d better hurry to see them before the turtles snatch the babies up for dinner. I knew snapping turtles could do that but while the turtles I saw that afternoon were big enough to drown a baby swan like a swamp alligator does with its pry, the sun worshiping turtles I saw were box turtles. I’m surprised I remembered the difference. I guess spending all my summers on a lake growing up gave me a few useful tidbits of information, like never lick the baby turtles we caught unless you wanted to get salmonella poisoning and spend the night in the outhouse with the spiders.

I sat on a bench by the lake for 10-15 minutes listening to the birds. That’s another thing the lake side people get for their money. Birds singing. Birds calling. Birds fishing. Ducks waddling on land. But the tin dog is doing a good job of chasing the Canadian Geese off the 20+ feet of land between the pedestrian path and the lake. On my side of the building we get to see and hear the Fed-X, Amazon and the US postal trucks coming and going and the only birds I’ve seen from my apartment is a pair of geese who seem to think they are night owls. They strut around in the middle of the night, honking and waking up the light sleepers. The parking lot lights are so strong they probably think it’s still the middle of the day. I get fooled by those lights all the time. I’ll get up to pee in the middle of the night, see the sliver of bright light coming in at the top of my black-out shades and think it’s the sun so I’ll wander out to the living room and see the geese outside acting like they're king and queen of the place.

Some of the rich people on the other side of the building complain about the real sun being so bright in the morning that they can’t sleep in. Others say the birds wake them up and they all fear that mosquitoes are coming. Am I sympathetic? Not in the least. But to keep my jealousy at bay I do remind myself that I was the twenty-forth person to sign up to live here. I could have picked an apartment across the hall if it hadn’t been for the fact I played it safe money-wise and I told myself that not having a good view would give me incentive to walk more. But the walking around the building part hasn’t happen most of the time because I found out I can take the elevator down to the parking garage, go out a pedestrian door near-by and I’m there---just a few feet from a park bench and the sounds of nature at its best.

The Life Enrichment Director loves theme weeks and this week it was all about, Cinco De Mayo. Why we are celebrating Mexico’s victory over the French in 1862 is beyond me, but the holiday here in West Michigan seems to be growing in recent years. Here on campus we had a one-man Mariachi band for entertainment on Wednesday. Then a happy hour featuring free margaritas and homemade pita chips another day. But the happy hour got super crazy because the Enrichment Director accidentally scheduled a woman’s group at the same time who came out to give all the ladies living here five carnations with cookies  and punch for Mother’s Day. We were all having such a good time because of the margaritas and dunking cookies in them that I don’t think it registered what a screwball combination was going on until we all got back home to our apartments.

Also this week was a fancy luncheon for Mother's Day, but I’m not one so I didn’t pay attention to that dress up and look pretty party. I was told I could still go because I did have a mother even if I’d never been one or I could invite a niece to be my surrogate daughter for the event. But an invitation like that to either one of my nieces would be a hardship for them to arrange, given the distance that they live and the heavy load on their plates right now, not to mention they had a mother who has passed away. For all I know they could be making time to stop by their mom’s grave this week. Flower sales for grave-sites ticks upward this time of the year. I’ve never been to my mom’s grave for the holiday---or rather her headstone, her ashes were scattered---but my brother has been known to do it. My mother died in the early ‘80s but Mother’s Day still churns up bittersweet memories. I wrote about my mom once here, so I won't get into the bitter or the sweetness in this post. Besides, I'm guessing those feelings are universal when it comes to mothers and daughters. ©

Photo: This is the bench you'll find me on if I'm not in my apartment. It looks like it's sitting on a road but it's actually a walking path for residents and dogs that also doubles as a fire access road should the lake side of my building ever catch on fire. It goes all around the lake---one mile. One of those low windows behind the bench is at the end of my parking stall and I have a chair parked there. I actually did sit there a few times over the winter.