An unusually deep snow fell here over the weekend.  It greeted the beginning of the weekend–starting just a few moments after I left school, and quickly and magically covered my whole world.  I stopped for provisions, filled the woodbox before dark fell, and planned to be forced to relax, eat well, and paint for a few days, without interruption.

All that happened.  The days that were gray made the woods look soft and mysterious.  I’ve been challenged, in my paintings, to figure out how to represent the dove grays of the woods– so thick that no light shows through–tiny limbs interlaced and overlapping.  The texture of limb on limb is subtle, and varies in different lights.  The snow showed the lay of the land more clearly than I usually see it.  At night the moon was nearly full and I got to see the shadows cast on the snow from its light.  The air was so clean and the sky so clear that I was enchanted by the movement of a plane overhead at night– its warm light gliding over the landscape like some slow motion comet.

In daylight I got to observe crazed bird and squirrel behaviors.  Birds came from everywhere, and hung like wild earrings from the tree limbs.  The cardinals accent the winter world like holly berries, the bluebirds like pieces of clear sky.  A leopard spotted bird appeared, with some red markings and turned out to be a Red-naped Sapsucker.

I kept the woodstove loaded and the house grew cozy.  One night I cooked venison for dinner , and brussells sprouts from my brother’s farm.  Another night my dinner came from the boat of a Gullah shrimper, the former husband of a dear friend.  I went out into my own winter garden and cut icicle covered broccoli heads to go with it.  Cat got the leftovers and amused me by tackling the remains of a sweet potato.  He has learned to love my cooking, I tell myself.

I washed all the bed linens and dried them in the arid heat of the woodstove.  For three days I worked on a seemingly insoluble painting problem.  It remains to be seen if I suceeded.  But I do know this much– three days of quiet, all imperfections hidden under a white sparkling glaze, long soaks in a claw foot tub, home cooking and art can be very restorative.

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Beth is one of my friends from college days.  She’s been there with me through a lot of interesting experiences.  She was a bridesmaid in my wedding.  She is godmother to my middle son.  She and I have stood before thousands of paintings and talked about what we saw.  We have looked at the ocean together for hours with or without conversation.  Not since Chapel Hill days have we lived near one another, but that hasn’t kept us from staying connected.  Some of my favorite Beth memories are from the times she lived in Maryland near DC.  We would sometimes stay at her house, and sometimes in the city, abandoning our children to other people’s care so we could go to museums all day, seek out adventure-dining and funky thrift shops.  I’ve forgotten more days than most people have lived, but it seems like I remember all the times I ever spent with Beth.

This entry is in tribute to Beth’s influence on me.  One of my earliest memories with Beth is one afternoon in our early twenties when we took a blanket and some snacks out to the reservoir in Chapel Hill.    We found a remote spot beside the water and sat there enjoying the fall day, the lake and  sky.  Beth produced a notebook in which she started writing.  In my memory it was a book about ideas, goals and inspiration.   I was so moved by her purposefulness.  She was the first young person I’d ever known who even at twenty-something was living an examined life.  That’s probably where my adult notebook-keeping habit came from.  Now many years later I have several well-worn volumes I use to give myself organization and direction.  

Beth and I have just returned from a weekend at the beach.  It was a perfect beginning of November experience.  It was sunny and warm enough that we sat beside the ocean for two days– almost all day long.  The cooler weather had inspired the wildlife and so our entertainment was schools of porpoises cutting through the water.  At times hundreds of birds converged on shallow areas in the surf . There was a dead octapus on the beach we could examine at our leisure.   We were small and the vista was large.  We were quiet and it was loud. We kept the doors open so we could hear the surf all night.   I picked up blue crabs at the fish market because I will pay to watch Beth eat a blue crab.  After years of living in Maryland she is semi-professional.  If I think about it for more than a minute, I can be back there with Beth, examining our lives under the big blue dome of the sky.