Catherine Redmond

Suffused with longing for spring and yet an almost gasping consciousness of the spare beauty of deep winter.

Ours is a long season, longer and more expanded by the pandemic and isolation.

Longer and more shocking as memories of the Insurrection vomit up

On the clean snow

As we wait for more.

 

 

 

 

That time when the clouds are full and the air smells of it

Every living thing knows that something is

about to happen,

The colors seem so full of themselves

I rush to get back to the house

The flock fed and

watered

The house will feel

just right.

Everywhere are arrangements to be seen and noticed.

An extraneous proof of a new print

A window, a view into another world

The edge of a paper cabinet

A perfect rectangle

A favorite book and

Always the plugs

Inside a hermit

though always connected

to the juice.

We are deep now in the pandemic, many of us straddling two domains. There’s the world of our isolated lives and the world of the media. Our personal lives can be anything depending on circumstances, ingenuity, curiosity and the ability to reflect and learn, whereas our media life is filled with death and suffering and the continual sideshow. Hope now must be self generated. Learning about the people we’ve elected is sobering.   I have concluded that many in Congress are marginal and ignorant.  Perhaps this explains why they don’t understand the basic tenets of science and stand instead as beacons of ignorance. This governor of Florida looks like he would have been incapable of success in any other business he tried. Poor fellow, politics was probably the only home he could find that paid his bills.  As to Trump, lugging a long record of failure behind him, only politics was available to him.  At least he has been consistent.

One of the gifts this time has given us is the chance to remember and reflect.  We have gotten in touch with people we forgot about or had a spat with and the reconnecting feels good and mends.  This reminder of last chances and wanting to have a settled heart has been a benefit of this scourge.

The land is ever filled with beauty and solace.  The moon shines down on my studio.  The coyotes howl.  The deep winter is on the doorstep.  And, at least for today, I am safe.

I hope you, Dear Reader, are too.

 

 

 

Last night I came back from the studio and as I walked up the back porch steps, I saw something dash away. Shining the flashlight I saw these two kids peering at me from the tree (see the enlargement to see them up in the branches) beside the plant shed.  The young siblings are sharing in Nicky’s cat food. More critters for the homestead!  I’m thankful for them and those adorable little faces.

 

Homage to Bonnard’s The Cherry Tart, Virginia is as lured as is Bonnard’s Dachshund.

 

The changes we are experiencing during the pandemic will alter life going forward. Of course that’s the mantra and we’re tired of hearing it, but given how long we experience this virus and how long it will take even with a vaccine to make us safe, children will have been born and entering kindergarten who never knew anything else. Then, perhaps, given our destruction of the Earth, another new virus will emerge and all this will start again until the noxious primate called man is finally eradicated.

Our stupidity and greed have no bounds.  Look at the exemplar of this, the Resident Evil that sits in the White House and actually has ignorant cult followers who claim to be Christians.  We are the world turned upside down, our own created horror film, bad actors and all.  But even in that, the land, the patches that survive and thrive, remind us of the radiant beauty we share.   To live here is a gift, an honor and I am grateful.

Zach is assisting me in this. He’s a very sweet boy and as white as a cloud. In fact, to hold him is to feel you are holding a cloud, except a cloud that occasionally grows irritable and bites.