Wild

Feeling like a wild woman these days. Everything is moving too fast. Help! Help! (If only I had some leopard skin.)

From the Flickr commons.

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I'm proud to say that a story I wrote about the farm up on the Shutter Sisters blog today. I'm thrilled to give the farm and the animals there some good positive exposure, and make everyone just a little more aware of what abused creatures go through.

Have a happy fourth, and remember to take care of one another.

More.

Ancestors

I've been veeeeery excited about tracing my family history on my father's side lately. There's simply so much to unearth and discover, and I'm a sucker for a good mystery. I regret not asking more questions while my dad and grandparents were still alive, so now I'm left to work with what remains.

My aunt sent me this photo, which was sent to her by a distant cousin in Denmark. I have no idea who the people in the photograph are, but just seeing my ancestors made my heart skip a beat.

Look at those shoes! And the spinning wheel! And the cottage! And everything!

I'm not sure why, but there's something very comforting about knowing where I came from.

Feet

I have puddle duck flat wide feet. I'm OK with that, but it makes shoe-shopping really difficult. As my husband will attest to, I seem to be fine finding ways around that difficulty. But still...shoes never quite fit right.

So I took the plunge and ordered a pair of custom made leather sandals off of Etsy. I was a little scared. But holy crap! I don't think anything so perfect has ever touched my ducky feet before. These designs are inspired by running sandals worn by the Tarahumara Indians of Mexico. While I don't ever plan on running in them (ha ha. run. yeah right.), I am pretty stoked to have something that actually fits. No more squeezing my toes into a pair of sticky plastic flats from Target.

The farm

Words cannot express, so I leave you with links to pictures and a story.

Tiny paintings

The other night I was "bored," which loosely translates to "I have so many options to choose from that I cannot figure out what to do with myself." I felt the sudden urge to make some tiny paintings using acrylic paint, so I set to digging out my supplies.

As I rummaged through my bins of paints and brushes, I stumbled across some smooth wooden disks, leftovers from a project I did in college. The wood is from the branch of my grandparents' lemon tree, which stood mighty in the backyard of their South San Francisco home for many many years. Lemons as big as my head, I say. AS BIG AS MY HEAD! (Slight exaggeration. Maybe.) I was really, really sad when it needed to be cut down several years back, and my Uncle Carl saved me a small piece of the branch.

I don't know what it was about that tree, but it was such an important piece of my childhood and my memories of my grandparents' home. So I put away the paper I had planned to paint on and used the dense wood instead. I painted memories of their home, a handful of things I remember best: A yellowish house (it looked nothing like the one in the painting, but still); the fog rolling in; my grandmother's button collection; ants in the kitchen; and of course, big juicy lemons.

And this last little piece shows some little houses that exist only in my imagination. Just for fun.

Memory and place is a recurring theme for me. I can't ever shake it. I'll never shake the memory of the lemon tree, or of their home, or of them. It's wonderful what happens when you open a box and inspiration hits you so squarely and perfectly in the face.