A Good Scout is Always Prepared

The first thing I thought of when learning of the I.F. prompt “prepare” was the motto of the Boy Scouts; “Be Prepared”. I have an older brother who was a scout for many years. I suppose this falls into the “bits of useless information permanently stuck in your brain” category. In addition to what a boy scout would ordinarily need for a camping trip or some other scouting outing, I tried to think of the most absurd thing possible. So “Freddie,” we’ll call him, wanting to be a good scout, is checking off all the necessities: canteen, knife, compass, utensils, and of course a Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator. One never knows when the world’s largest and highest-energy proton-smasher might come in handy! Originally I had something different, and a lot more wicked and inappropriate drawn in it’s place. Luckily my husband talked me out of it. So here is my question to you my friends: What odd item would you like to see little Freddie pack for his trip?

I know, this is a week late, I never got around to finishing it on time. I’ll be posting this week’s “twirl” shortly, so see you there.
Thanks for stopping by!

Twirling Triplets

Did you hear ’bout the baton twirling triplets?
They’d march anybody in circlets,
When the band would play,
Their arms would flay,
And ev’rybody’d hold on to their giblets!

It’s been awhile since I came up with a god-awful rhyme… so there you go.

Have a good week!

A Bedtime Story

So they went along and went along until they met Turkey Lurkey. 


“Good morning, Goosey Loosey, Ducky Daddles, Cocky Locky, Henny Penny, 
and Chicken Licken,” said Turkey Lurkey, “where are you going?”


“Oh, Turkey Lurkey, the sky is falling and we are going to tell the King!” 


“How do you know the sky is falling?” asked Turkey Lurkey.


“Ducky Daddles told me,” said Goosey Loosey.


“Cocky Locky told me,” said Ducky Daddles.


“Henny Penny told me,” said Cocky Locky.


“Chicken Licken told me,” said Henny Penny 

“I saw it with my own eyes, I heard it with my own ears, 
and a piece of it fell on my tail!” said Chicken Licken.


“Then I will go with you,” said Turkey Lurkey, “and we will tell the King!”

Chicken Licken, by P.C. Asbjörnsen

Here is the illustration that I submitted to the Tomie dePaola award competition. He asked that the above nursery rhyme be depicted in any size or medium, and he wanted to see a style or vision that he hadn’t seen before.

I wanted to tell a story with my picture. It is bedtime and the older child is reciting the Chicken Licken rhyme for the baby. She acts out the scenario with stuffed animals that she has sewn from scraps of fabric. The landscape is the bedspread and the “falling” sky is a mobile hanging above them. The baby is delighted to be wearing the construction paper crown that the girl has made for him because he gets to play the part of the king. The highlight of the bedtime story is at the end, when the baby claps his hands, giggles and calls out “again!” As the rhyme is repeated over and over the two are so absorbed that the animals seem real to them and the walls transform into the nighttime sky.

I hand sewed the little critters from various fabrics, cut the mobile out of felt, and made the crown from construction paper and oil pastels. The stuffed critters photographed easily against a white backdrop, and were Photoshopped into the drawing. The other things were simply scanned and then added.

I really had fun working on this piece, and feel honored to have been a participant in the great Tomie dePaola’s illustration competition.

For a bigger pic click two times slowly. (Double clicking doesn’t seem to do the trick.)

Thanks for stopping by and Happy New Year!

Inanimate Messengers

Most of the time Francine would block the voices out. It was a confusing mess to filter them from the usual din of her every day activities. But she had a few days off and she was alone, alone with her own thoughts…and theirs. The objects always had so much to say, so she decided she would just sit and listen to them, and their messages. One thing she wondered though: what makes the iron think he’s so damn smart?

This is my little experiment with hand-written type. I realized that it’s harder than it looks and that I don’t have much patience for it. Oh, and like Francine, I have a few days off. Got to go—I hear the blender calling me!

Click on the picture two times if you’d like to read the messages easier.

Happy New Year!!

The Christmas Card

Joseph has just gotten back from a long walk down the road to fetch the mail. He pauses on the lawn for a moment and opens several envelopes containing cheerful holiday greetings, from friends and family near and far. Some are written in German, his native language, and he has to smile when reading the personal messages and thinks his wife Elizabeth will be pleased with them too. She has a hot pot of coffee, with a little chicory, waiting for him on the wood stove, he knows this because she had just started making it before he left. It is gently snowing and in the waning light of the day he takes a deep breath and allows his mind to wander. He thinks of the many trials and tribulations that have brought him to this moment. Raising a baker’s dozen of children at the farm next door, watching them grow up and move on, gave him a feeling of satisfaction. He remembers the years of tilling the land to put food on the table, and of his dream of a little cottage in the woods. For twenty years Joseph collected rocks and boulders from the fields as he went about his work. He told his children of the little house he planned to build for his retirement years, and a few were doubtful as the years went by. When Joseph was sixty five years old he built his solid little cottage, practically single-handedly, with all of the rocks that he had collected. He even had enough to build three other smaller structures on the property. And now here he is enjoying this moment that he has earned. He finally trots up to the stone house, sinking his feet into the freshly fallen snow. He and Elizabeth share a chuckle together over coffee and Christmas cards by the warm glow of the old pot belly stove. At the end of the season Joseph would tuck away the cards for safe keeping as he did every year. He had no way of knowing that fifty years later his youngest grandchild, whom he would not live to meet, would discover the hidden box of Christmas cards.

Merry Christmas Grand-Pa.

Love, your youngest grandchild, Heidi

This is the little house my grandfather built, and he is holding one of the cards that I found in a crawlspace there.

(This is a re-post from one year ago…today.)

Cat n’ Dog Games

Day after day it was “cat’s cradle, cat’s cradle.” Nelson would like just once for it to be “doggy go fetch.”

What is so appealing about the anthropomorphising of animals? Authors and illustrators have been doing it for years; Beatrix Potter’s “Peter Rabbit,” Arnold Lobel’s “Frog and Toad,” and A.A. Milne’s “Winnie the Pooh” are some of the best. Animals are just plain cute when they are acting like humans.

My daughter was in the hospital for a while last week and when she came home it was an occasion to celebrate. I don’t know what got into me, but I went to a local Goodwill store and bought a bunch of toddler clothes for our two dogs. Everyone laughed and laughed as they pranced about in their little outfits. The dogs loved the attention, so they didn’t care, and we really needed that bit of levity.

Hey the way I look at it, life is short, so dress up your pet and have a laugh. It’s not wrong or cruel—it’s therapy!

Thank you to the friends who left the comforting messages on my last post, and Andrew…you have a heart of gold.

A Scary Scare

Halloween is supposed to be a time for unexpected frights, but this year it turned out to be more surreal than I could have imagined. Perhaps a more apt title for this post would have been “To Hell and Back.”

During the previous week, my beautiful young daughter had been complaining of a headache behind her right eye. It sounded like the migraines her father suffers from occasionally. He suggested some remedies that work for him, and then we forgot about it for a couple of days. She called us back to say the pain had gotten much worse and that she was going blind! She was rushed to a local emergency room, where they told her to go immediately to Wills Eye Hospital in Philadelphia. By then, last Sunday, she was completely blind in the one eye and the pain was excruciating. She was given an MRI of her brain, chest X-Rays and every blood test imaginable. Reports were coming back that two likely possibilities were a brain tumor or MS. I have never experienced such fear, terror and dread in my life. We were scared to death. She was admitted to the hospital with optic neuritis, an inflammation of the optic nerve, and administered an IV of steroids. Apparently a myriad of ailments and diseases could cause it, sometimes with no known cause.

Meanwhile, my aged mother had been in a slow decline for months, but had just had a serious stroke, at the same time my daughter’s headache began. I had moved back home to take care of my mother two years ago, and I’d been intimately involved in every aspect of her care.
As the week progressed, my daughter gradually began to see shadows and light, and some of the test results began coming back. With each bit of good news we breathed a sigh of relief. All the while my mother’s death was becoming more imminent.

By the end of the week my daughter was released from the hospital, with all of the tests coming back negative, and her sight gradually improving. Sadly my mom passed away just past midnight on Saturday October 29th, surrounded by her loved ones. I held my poor mother’s hand, which had become blackened with necrosis. And as I watched her take her last breath, I felt as if a door was closing while another opened. It is the right order of things for a child to bury a parent, not the other way.

After it was all over, the next morning there was a snow storm, the first in over 50 years in the month of October. The heavy wet snow weighed down branches of the trees, still with all of their Autumn leaves, and they fell all around us. The electricity went out for three days. We were left in the dark, and cold with no distractions, only the thoughts of what we had just been through. The power finally was restored, on Halloween.

And so here as a catharsis, I’ve created with a little ink, pencil, charcoal, scissors and glue my account of a week of “Scary Scares”, or to “Hell and Back.”

Ferocious Infectors

Bacteria and viruses are tiny but ferocious. They can have devastating effects on us much larger humans if we are unfortunate enough to get a nasty one. Viruses are among the smallest known life form, they’re 10 to 100 times smaller than bacteria. A bacterial infection can be treated whereas a viral one usually cannot. Oh boy, I’m really looking forward to winter!

I was inspired by the ferociously gorgeous works of art by Ernst Haeckel, the German naturalist, biologist and artist.

These little buggers are drawings of actual viruses and bacteria, some of which we have all had at one time or another.

I think I’ll go wash my hands now….

Going Batty

Ned was just about to find out why he woke up with a mysterious yen for mosquitoes and gnats.

Okay so this is a bit strange, I admit. Last night I was sitting out on the porch at dusk, watching dozens of little brown bats swooping and diving after insects. I decided I would do something with a bat for this week’s prompt, Mysterious. Not wanting to do the obvious spooky haunted house or graveyard, I came up with this. Here is Ned, splashing some cold water on his face; he’s not quite awake yet, but he will be…very soon.

P.S. I’m a weirdo.

By the Sea

At the Sea-Side
By Robert Louis Stevenson, 1850–1894

When I was down beside the sea
A wooden spade they gave to me
To dig the sandy shore.
My holes were empty like a cup
In every hole the sea came up
Till it could come no more.

I was feeling under the influence of a warm summer afternoon at the shore, and dreamed I was disguised as the water, shells and creatures all around me.

This is the second seasonal self portrait of a series. My first was of spring.

We had a wild ride with hurricane Irene here on the east coast this weekend. Time to dry out now!