poem: "the dreams that you dare to dream"

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“the dreams that you dare to dream”

goes the song
about somewhere

far enough away
to be uncompromised,

yet for a few minutes a day
plays in this room

when the sun and cut glass conspire
to drop a rainbow

on old cement
where the feet and guano

of chickens once fell
when it was a pecking house

of life, an egg factory,
before someone opened

a way in for more light
at the peak facing east,

a leaded glass window
that breaks the sun-yolk

onto the floor
into something dreamy

here and now,
something I haven’t

yet understood the truth of,
how and what happens

when life falls out
of the breaking and orderly
mechanisms of this world

February 2012

These shelves were the chicken roosts.

  photos from my atelier in warmer days;

once a chicken coop, which Don and Peter

transformed into
another kind of living and working space;

my Grandma Olive's easel from art school,

with Lesley's sunflower picture

from her art school days;

my paint brushes, cairn, jump rope

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l'atelier: layers and layers

A good thing about having your own room is that you can put out whatever objects you want and no one objects. On these shelves in l'atelier I have stacked boxes collected for decoupage projects that have not yet materialized, stones that were collected from beach walks and coasters sliced from the pine tree that broke my heart when it died last year.



A farmer built this 10' x 22' building as a chicken coop over 100 years ago. You can tell it's a coop because five windows line only the south side of the building, for the warm sun in winter months. On the opposite wall there are shelves where I think the farmer had his egg layers' nest boxes, but there is no sign of the boxes.

There are other items waiting on these shelves, like my oil paints (I tried painting here once), and my bouquet from Lesley and Brian's wedding nestled near the earth woman's arms in a favorite photo cut out of a magazine. When Don powerwashed and painted this room, I asked for a blue ceiling. You can see in the photo below how the tin roof was layered on rough sawn oak boards.

When I am in this room I feel that I am at the hinge of the universe, a point where there is neither time nor space. There is life here. Although everyone calls this "Ruth's atelier" it does not belong to me any more than it belongs to time and space.

It doesn't matter if the decoupage projects get done, or if the painting of Killarney stays forever in its stage of tonal study without the finishing layers of paint. I will keep adding stones to the collection on the shelf. These objects feel at home in a room of piles that are happily unfinished, but whole.

time out

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Three days off, at home. It's warm enough to sit in l'atelier after a cold winter, though a chill remains. Bugs have come inside, and died. (I posted this photo at small.) I opened a window and could hear and watch birds finding live bugs in last year's garden. I cut lilacs and set them in front of the screen door where the breeze could sweep the room with their fragrance.


I sat nestled in my Indian crazy quilt, with another blanket on top of me, and watched prisms from the leaded window dance on the pine floor. I read Anne Michaels' new release, The Winter Vault. I had visions of the St. Lawrence Seaway and the displaced towns and villages in its progressive path. I slept and dreamt about Egyptian pharoahs, five kinds of date palms and floating down the Nile in a houseboat.


Or was I really floating?


The second day off I did my morning blog browsing and thought I'd open the New York Times online. When I was greeted with their new frenetic Twittery nytimes/timeswire box rapidly flashing numbers of times the site has been updated in the last hour with the question "HOW MANY HAVE YOU MISSED?"

I thought: What is happening to us? Are we so afraid of missing one crumb of information? What about understanding what is here, what has been here hundreds and thousands of years?

When my time out is over, and I'm back in time's sortings, I'm more determined than ever to balance days with mini time outs. Stop. Look. Listen. I think I learned that in kindergarten.

non-toxic wastebaskets

Eee gads, we've been steeping in the toxic waste of the mortgage-backed securities mess - and bailout, which didn't pass in the first round, then passed in the second after some changes. We generous taxpayers came through for our poor, suffering corporate dimbulbs. I hope it will be a better move than many of us feared and will help settle the markets down. (Whispering now . . .) Hey, if anyone sounds as though they understand this mess, don't believe 'em. As Don's economics professor said, no one really knows what affects markets and how to fix them. But don't tell anyone, this is just for you, because I know you can handle the ambiguity and not get freaked out knowing no one really knows what will happen.

Anyway, all that waste presents a good opportunity to show you my little wastebasket collection.

This one is in l'atelier. I picked it up at a yard sale.




This one is very old, and sort of falling apart. I think I bought it at a flea market, for the guest room. If you come for a visit, please don't throw anything into it, I think it would disintegrate. I see it as a sort of faux wastebasket, a wastebasket wannabe, a piece of art posing as a wastebasket. I should probably make a little sign to lean on it: PLEASE DON'T PUT ANYTHING IN ME. You can just throw your kleenex in the sturdy plastic bathroom wastebasket (which I'm not showing off here, as you see).

This one is a treasure because it was my mother's. It sat in her study for as long as I can remember, under her secretary desk. I think it was her mother's before it was hers. I keep it by my dressing table (not on the bentwood chair on the porch where I posed it for a photo). Peter and Lesley can fight over it when I'm gone.

Detail of my mom's wastebasket.

I guess I'm just as guilty as anyone of covering up and prettifying my trash.

I don't know about you, but this is what we do:

• recycle everything that can be recycled around here: plastic containers, newspapers, glass, magazines, junk mail, paper, tin cans
  
• get paper bags at the grocer to use for paper trash that we burn (I hope our little bit of paper burning doesn't hurt the atmosphere too much); goodness! some checkout clerks do not like bagging in paper! Yikes!
  
• give food scraps to the chickens, except what isn't good for them, which we dump in a compost pile (that isn't being dealt with as compost yet; we're lazy so far about that)
• the rest of the unrecyclable, uncompostable garbage goes into old plastic bags from the store; we finally stopped buying garbage bags - what a waste! We hardly have any garbage that goes into the dumpster now.
• Oh, and when I'm gone, I want to take up as little space as possible. I want to be cremated.
  

I've been excited to hear about NYC and LA and their recycling of food scraps for compost for farmers.

l'atelier

Don and Peter
turned this
chicken coop
into a studio.


That was before
we knew Don
would have
chickens.

I think we began calling it l'atelier because we moved to the farm the same year we went to Paris to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary (2003).

It's not just mine, but everyone acts like it is.

Lesley gave me a hammock chair that hangs from the ceiling. I challenge you to try to read in this chair and stay awake more than five minutes.

Besides read

and sleep,

sometimes I write here.

I started painting last year, and didn't even finish my first painting. It's hard work! I don't want to show you what I have so far. Here is my little canvas before I started. That's my Grandma Olive's easel. She was a professional artist/designer.



I was following instructions from Brian Simons online.

I got the underpainting, value study and colors blocked in, but I never finished the painting.

If Gwen, Sharon or Laura
will come give me lessons,
maybe I'll finish it.

white pine floor

The white pine is the state tree of Michigan. We chose plain white pine boards for the floor of the atelier, our studio, formerly a chicken coop. Before I left for Ireland, Don and Peter worked on it, using old fashioned cut nails to install the boards. While I was in Ireland these past two weeks, Don finished installing the boards, sanded for four hours, then rolled the spar - the varnish used for wooden boats. We wanted the boards to be unstained so they would gradually age into the golden glow that pine turns over time.

The white pine has a lot of symbolism in the US, and in Michigan. The Haudenosaunee Indians (pejoratively called Iroquois, meaning "black snakes" in French, which they translated from what a rival Huron tribe called them) considered it their symbol of peace because of the union of the five tribes under their peace treaty. White pine needles grow in clusters of five. The five tribes Cayuga, Mohawk, Oneida, Onodaga, and Seneca were united after centuries of war, into one Indian nation. (These tribes are from the eastern US, and there may be information about the white pine symbol in Michigan, but I didn't find it.)

This union of Indian tribes is considered to be the longest running constitutional government still existing, and was partially the model used for the US government.

Now that the floor is done, we are going to create a ceremony for blessing l'atelier, using the Native American stories of peacemaking as a guide. Then we will move the furnishings in.

I found much of this interesting information about the Haudenosaunee and the white pine at this nice site.

l'atelier, continued

I promised I would keep you updated on the progress in the studio. Don and Peter laid the framing joists yesterday for the wood floor. This was the hard part, getting it level. Don's level (which was my dad's first, and he had repaired it once before) broke in the process. Now it will be a relatively quick step to lay the 8" pine boards on the frame.

Don snapped this photo of Peter using the power screw gun on all the joist hangers. I think that was Pete's first time using a power tool, and he liked it, and did a good job.

l'atelier

inside l'atelier

L'atelier, the studio, is going to get a wood floor.

prism from sunshine through the leaded glass window at the peak

For centuries artists have owned or rented studios for their craft. I'm not an artist in their sense, well at least not a visual artist, well I like photography. Ok, what I'm trying to say is that I'm not putting myself in a category with artists over the centuries, but I have a studio!

old jump rope

Sometime after buying our little farm in 2003 we decided to turn the old chicken coop into a studio. You know, I might as well call it a playhouse, because that's probably more accurate. I don't know how much work we'll do in it. Maybe we'll just read.

But I can picture writing in here. And you can see my grandma's easel in the top photo. I want to learn to paint.

We haven't spent much time here yet, mostly because the cement floor and foundation allow lots of bugs in, and it's hard to keep clean. They get stuck in the crevices.

But Don has bought pine planks, and he's going to install a level wood floor! (It slopes 6 inches now. They used to hose it down and the water drained out the back.) Don't worry, Don power washed this building several times and painted fresh paint. See the ceiling? That's my favorite color: robin's egg blue.

Like Mrs. M. and the Renaissance dress she's making from scratch for the high school feast in November, I'm going to show you this process. Don has promised to take pictures for me when I'm at work. This might take a few weeks, so please be patient. Don has other things to do also. He's on summer vacation for goodness' sake!

I'm glad this teacher husband of mine likes to vacation this way. (hehe)

P.S. Today's is my mother's birthday. She would have been 90!

"HI", from the farm

Vacations are lovely, a needed pleasure away from routines. But it's even sweeter to come home, especially when home is such a haven as this.

Click on photos to enlarge.


I'm glad the lilacs are still blooming because of cool temps.


Can you believe this euonymus spelled out "HI"?


Lesley and I found a frog in the thyme yesterday.


Prisms dance all over the atelier from the sun through the leaded glass window.