If it would help, I’d stomp my foot indignantly on the grass, now not as green as it was the last time I posted here. 

I could work up quite a respectable flurry of indignation, too.  Summer heat and smothering humidity have been blown off somewhere with palm trees and year-round suntans that don’t come from a bottle or a tanning bed.   

Or maybe I wouldn’t stomp my foot and gripe after all.  How can I complain about the end of summer when it’s Autumn, the Best Season of All?  Summer is wonderful laziness, but Autumn is bright and crisp and the world changes with every new day.

Yesterday I took a walk along the river in a park that is filled with people of every age scurrying around having fun!  dawn to after dusk every day all summer long.  Yesterday the park was empty except for me and a man who didn’t seem to have anywhere else to be and looked as if he hadn’t had anywhere else for a very long time.  He sat at a table on a covered patio and I walked in the light rain, my camera tucked into my jacket to protect it. 

I’m not a habitual rain-walker, but the rain was very light and I needed some shots to help me at landscape painting class which starts tomorrow.  I didn’t find what I was looking for, but I found something I hadn’t known I’d see–beautiful Autumn sneaking up on me.   I especially like this bike rack.  When it’s holding up bicycles you can’t see that it is beautiful, but shining with rain and set among leaves changing colors, I think it qualifies as public art and not just a convenient fixture.

too pretty to use

The latest sketchcrawl was a week ago, but it’s been a busy week, so I’m just getting around to posting it tonight.   Showers had come and gone all day.  It was hot and sticky out and the thing I really wanted to draw was a cool refuge. 

This sweet spot was on the street side of a big old oddly rural looking building in the town next to mine.  The lucky folks who own it and obviously cherish it with care live across the street from a parkway surrounding a river that snakes through green neighborhoods.   Wouldn’t you like to enjoy a quiet hour or two here?

An afternoon at the animal shelter with my niece provided a much less peaceful opportunity to draw.  Kittens don’t sit still for long and Cookie Dough the bunny paused just long enough to identify the next impossible-to-reach place he was going to hide in.

Nephew graduated today from the high school he started in as a freshman four years ago and his younger sister and I cheered for him, though we couldn’t really see him, so far back from the stage and off to the side were our seats in the bleachers. 

Admittedly my part in this was minor compared to other graduate’s adults, but I was allowed a full measure of joy along with all the others.

My joy got a boost from the letter the young man received today from the university:  he will attend with all expenses including tuition, housing, books, and living expenses paid for him.  He will also have a university job for ten hours a week so that he can afford a social life and some foolish expenditures besides.  He will enter this larger world in late August.  After working–not really hard, admittedly–to redeem himself after the expulsion and various tickets that he’s gotten, the slate is clean and ready for him to mark it with greater care.

It’s an exciting time for him.  Be happy with me.

Today was the 18th Worldwide Sketchcrawl and I was out there with the other art-makers, alone because there was no crawling sketching group in my area.  I was driving along roads that were either snow-lined or, more often, bordered by fields and ditches that held more water than they were ever intended to bear.  What a beautiful day it was, too!  Bright blue in the sky and  sun lighting everything up and tempting me to stop and give all sorts of places my best shot.  The only thing that kept me from the picturesque ruin of the small stone shed or the mud-coated farm machinery outside the wide open doors of an old barn was that parking space seemed to be plentiful around new and soul-less structures, but absent entirely from anyplace near the really interesting spots.   I drove from one end of the city to the far corner of  three towns over and criss-crossed back and forth between them, again passing places that had only architects and landscape people to thank for perfectly proportioned spaces.    I was looking for a place with more randomly bestowed charm and I finally found it at the very end of a one way road.  If the price of gasoline wasn’t currently higher than I would have believed it ever could have been I would have driven further, but I’d driven long enough and I stopped.

The person in the passenger seat had already suggested that I’d be further ahead if I’d left the driving and parking to them.  If our places were reversed I’d find myself plopped at a place not of my choosing, I was told, and I’d be told to “Draw something!”  there.   Instead of the driving and parking, my only problem would be finding the interesting element of the other person’s choice.    I didn’t jump at that offer.  I remarked that it was a good day for an outing and weren’t we having a fine time on our little ride?  And we were, actually.

The drawing was fun, too though the sketches that I did while staying in the warmth of the car aren’t ones that I am really pleased with.  I’d already lectured myself about relaxing expectations of what I produced and reminded myself that the real pleasure of sketching isn’t the drawings that result, but the lovely absorbtion in an interesting past time that sketching is.  I’ve only started drawing again in the last few months after years of not using my eyes, mind, and hands for it and I hope and intend that I’ll improve a lot before next year’s Sketchcrawl.  It’s lovely of you to diplomatically refrain from remarking that I have a lot of improving to do.  It doesn’t really matter, though.  It really was a lovely day and all of that improving means that I’ll have many more like it.

Here’s one drawing, done with a too-soft 6B pencil.  I just didn’t want to stop long enough to get something better out.

When the snow stopped last night a person would have believed that people would have to take another day to tunnel out of their hidey-holes before the world could properly operate.  I woke at five this morning and checked the school closings, half-expecting that we’d all have another day off, but other than schools in remote areas which are starting two hours late, we are all at our customary posts.

This is not to say that things are back to normal.  The roads are plowed, but post-plowing snow fell and is packed into rutty tracks which slow everyone down to about half the posted speed limits.  People are at work and the coffee shop was busy, but customers everywhere else seem to be occupied with more pressing matters.  This leaves the employees time to compare stories about their personal sagas in The Big Snow.   When it comes to building a sense of community, you can’t beat shared adversity.  The world today is a big love-in.

Well, it’s that here.  That’s not true everywhere in the state.  For example, that city I’m headed to for art classes tomorrow has a gathering that is probably not all friendship and good will.  As snow is forecast for tomorrow afternoon, a seventy mile drive to join this assemblage is something I’m carefully weighing today.