Gearing Up for Halloween

Current display at the Greenwood Library

Every year businesses in the Greenwood and Phinney neighborhoods host a daytime trick-or-treat walk, and this year is no exception.  Here is the display advertising the event, complete with a few new crows in witch hats!

Library staff who are scheduled to work that day are welcome to dress up in costume.  I’ve always had lukewarm feelings about Halloween and never felt very comfortable dressing in a costume.  Maybe one’s feelings about this holiday are formed during childhood, and we never went trick-or-treating when we were kids.  My parents held the view that this activity was akin to begging and therefore shameful (?!?) in some way.  My mother would buy candy bars to give to us on Halloween so we wouldn’t feel deprived!

I don’t hold the same views as my parents did, and I enjoy seeing how excited kids become when dressed up and given candy treats.  It’s a festive occasion.  I still do not like to dress up in costumes — too exhibitionist for me.  Perhaps I should stretch myself and move out of my comfort zone.  But I don’t think so.

Happy Halloween!

Seasonal Lethargy or Something Else?

Sunrise through trees

I wish I could tell you that I have been absent from this website because I have been engrossed in a great project or off traveling to some exotic destination.  But no.  I have no excuses.  I seem to have sunk into a kind of lethargy.  The days pass and I have no sketches, paintings, writings,  nor photographs to show for this passing time.

My friend Bonnie sent me this poem, which is an affirming way to consider my down time:

SWEET DARKNESS
by David Whyte

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.
When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.
It’s time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.
There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.
The dark will be your home
tonight.
The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.
You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.
Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.

 

Pumpkin Painter and Farmer: Eddie Gordon

Welcome sign, Gordon Skagit Farms

Each October I look forward to seeing Eddie Gordon’s new paintings on display at Gordon Skagit Farms.  This year’s outdoor gallery was as amazing as always.  I particularly liked the painting of the pumpkin included like a land form into the Pacific NW  landscape, creating a feeling of whimsy.  This year’s bountiful squash and pumpkin harvest was matched by a prolific year of painting.

 

Chestnuts from Jello Mold Farm

Chestnuts from Jello Mold Farm

What a funny mix of textures there are in each chestnut seed case.  Those prickly-as-a-hedgehog seed cases protect a nut that is as smooth as marble.  I love the feel of chestnut conkers in my hands.  Jello Mold Farm has several rows of chestnut trees separating their flower beds, and I was so taken with photographing them, I thought they deserved their own post.

 

I am Gone into the Fields . . .

Harvested pumpkins, Jello Mold Farm

“I leave this notice on my door
For each accustom’d visitor —
‘I am gone into the fields
To take what this sweet hour yields.'”
— Percy Bysshe Shelley, from “The Invitation”

Garden truck, Jello Mold Farm

Garden shed

Fall is in the air.  Mornings now are often foggy, but this melancholy grayness usually burns off making way to mellow sunshine.  I had the urge to drive in the country to see the rural landscape slipping into autumn, so even though the day started off foggy and gray, I headed north to the Skagit Valley.  The sun never did break through.  So I was prepared to photograph the lovely grays, browns, yellows and greens of our fall palette.

My first stop was Jello Mold Farm to photograph in the flower fields.  The end-of-the-season dahlias and zinnias brought an array of surprising summery colors through my viewfinder.  But I’ll save those photos for another post or two.  Today I will share photos from my walk through the flower fields.

Monks hood

Desiccated bells of Ireland

 

 

Maples Giving Forth Light

“The maples give forth light, like closer suns.  The oaks glow with garnet fire, and all the thickets blaze with scarlets and pale gold and cinnamon.   It is like the music of a trumpet.”
— Gladys Tabor, Stillmeadow Daybook

Glowing maple leaves, November

“The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
That dances as often as dance it can.”
—  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from “Christobel”

November in My Soul

“It is a damp, drizzly November in my soul.”
— Ishmael at the beginning of Moby Dick by Herman Melville

 

Wet pavement, between showers

November on Greenwood Ave N

Soggy leaves

Between showers

 

 

Everything is On the Run

My daughter running through fall leaves, 1991

Fall Wind
by Aileen Fisher

Everything is on the run —
willows swishing in the sun,
branches full of dip and sway,
falling leaves that race away,
pine trees tossing on the hill —
nothing’s quiet, nothing’s still,
all the sky is full of song:
“Winter’s coming. Won’t be long.”

Everything Falls

“It is the fall.  And everything falls — not just the leaves.  The temperature falls as the earth again tilts away from the sun.  Darkness falls more quickly as the days shorten.  Plants droop and dry up and break apart.  Trees fall into dormancy and stop growing.  Their leaves and seeds fall into the cool air, and then to the ground, where they will rot and root and become something new.  This is the season of decay — a word that means “to fall away” — to return to your constituent parts, to what you are made of.”
— Tom Montgomery Fate, Cabin Fever: A Suburban Father’s Search for the Wild

 

Watercolor sketch of fallen leaves

Circle of fall leaves, watercolor sketch

I was captivated by how these leaves were changing color from tip to stem

Watercolor sketch, circle of fall leaves

 

 

October, Month of Falling Leaves

From A Child’s Calendar by John Updike

October
by John Updike

The  month is amber,
Gold, and brown.
Blue ghosts of smoke
Float through the town.

Great V’s of geese
Honk overhead,
And maples turn
A fiery red.

Frost bites the lawn,
The stars are slits
In a black cat’s eye
Before she spits.

At last, small witches,
Goblins, hags,
And pirates armed
With paper bags.

Their costumes hinged
On safety pins,
Go haunt a night
Of pumpkin grins.

Multi-colored maple leaf

Watercolor sketch of maple leaf

Watercolor sketch of maple leaf