Love Notes

Love notes hang from all the edges of our dining room table.  They are secret language messages from John to his friend.  (When you don't know how to write, you resort to a secret language.)  How could I ever tear them down?

So our meals are laced with mystery and passion, in the form of yellow sticky notes.  (The sunflowers to match help, too.)

I'm ready for Valentine's day.

Making Things: Trees

Recently, I gave each of my kids a square canvas and begged them to draw a tree.  I love to kick-start an art project and then watch to see where the chips fall.  Sometimes there is a creation.  Sometimes there is a drama.  Sometimes I get nothing.  But, on this day, we ended up with four authentic paintings.  Hallelujah!

Everyone painted one tree.  I love the way they are all so different (Will's and Clara's), or not so different (John copied June).  Surely they were all inspired by the Sorry board that never left the table.

Beauty: Pre-Spring Flowers

In good "Portlandia" fashion, I spend brainspace thinking about the pros and cons of buying cut flowers.  Here's how it goes:

• Isn't having tulips in your house in the winter kind of like buying blueberries from Chile in December?
• Were the flowers grown organically?
• How far did they travel?
• Shouldn't I forage some artistic looking sticks or cattails or pine cones instead?
• Shouldn't we spend our money elsewhere?

I do have a ritual of planting Narcissus bulbs before the holidays, which are beautiful for weeks.  Then they sit in our house for many more weeks in the form of the lump pictured above because I can't toss the green.  Jeff loves them.

In the end, I broke down and just bought some flowers already!  I opted for the sweet, delicate cheap variety:  daisies and things that keep well when they dry, though I avoided the non-native "baby's breath" that we once saw rangers furiously trying to clear around Lake Michigan one summer.

I must say that the dose of color and smell and sense of life are doing the trick.  And they are a reminder of the bounty to come.  Right outside the door.

Cranberries on Cedar

Today, amidst the cold and snow, Clara and I laid a bright red strand of cranberries on my favorite cedar tree.  Brave, bold colors await a brave, cold chickadee.

Just a few feet away, our warm home feels like a messy blur of color and tone.  Yet, we have our own clear contrasts: little joys and little sorrows, affection and anger, late night quiet and mid-day screams, cuddles and kicks, vegetables and sugars, sweet costumes and temper-inducing socks, dreams and worries, fears and hopes.

I remain inspired by the red on green and white.  Its beauty, its contrasts, and the clarity it inspires.  A nice vision for the new year.