Another Memory Exercise. Some Things About This House

There are lots more memory aids now than once there were. It's easier to remember but also easier to get confused. One of my memory aids for the house in the San Gabriel Valley I've posted about several times is Google Street View. It's become something of a historical record because it records the appearance of the house and neighborhood over time, in this case from 2008 to 2022. A major change -- to me -- took place after 2011. 

This is a screenshot of my house and the house next door (where the Vegas lived when I lived in the neighborhood) taken in October 2011:

 

Several things: The Vegas' house is light brown, which it was when I lived in the neighborhood. The house where I lived is painted yellow -- which it wasn't when I lived there. But it was yellow the last time I saw it in person in 1969. When I lived there, the house was painted white with dark green (Hunter Green) trim. 

There's a heavily cracked blacktop asphalt driveway, the only one still remaining in the neighborhood. That was put down some weeks or months after we moved in in 1954. All the driveways in the neighborhood were blacktop initially. Before the driveway was installed, it was just graded dirt which turned muddy when it rained. My mother was livid about it. But the house itself wasn't finished when we moved in. There were still parts needed stucco and plaster, some plumbing fixtures weren't installed in the shower, trim still needed to be applied on the interior and exterior, and the house hadn't been painted. 

Part of the problem was that our house was the last one on the street to be built and finished. This was the Post War housing boom, and houses were being built all over the Los Angeles Basin at a furious clip. This neighborhood was being developed so fast that Life Magazine did a feature on one family that moved from Connecticut to California and faced the dilemma of the New and Incomplete Reality of Los Angeles -- and this particular neighborhood --  at the time.

What had been essentially wild country -- hills and pasture, hills and oak forest, etc -- was turned into housing overnight. Initially, there were no curbs, gutters, sewers, or other amenities that would come later. Finishing the neighborhood, to the extent it ever would be finished took years. 

The curbing you see in the picture didn't arrive until long after we moved out in 1959. I'm not sure curbs were there in 1969. And I've noticed on Street View that the sections built on street extensions later (in the '60s and '70s) have street lights while the sections built in the '50s do not.

In the picture you see a rusty rural mailbox. That was put in by my mother after a dispute she had with the post office. It was probably 1956 or so. Initially, she'd mounted a fishing creel on the wall beside the front door to collect the mail. One day she got a notice stating that her mail receptacle was not regulation and must be replaced or US Mail would no longer be delivered to that address. If I recall correctly (ha!) there was no indication of what would be acceptable. So I suspect she marched down to the post office (I don't remember where it was) and demanded to see the regulations, and she found that a rural mailbox would be... fine. 

She went to the hardware store and bought one with a metal stand. She painted the box with flowers and vines and such, mounted it on the stand and put the whole apparatus in the ground (may have had help from a neighbor) beside the driveway. With a note that said, "Put Mail Here."

Later she found out that a rural mailbox in a suburban neighborhood like ours wasn't regulation either,  and she got a British iron letterbox at an antique store and mounted it where the fishing creel had been, and that was where the mail was deposited until we moved. I think she took that British letterbox with her when we moved, but I'm not entirely sure. I seem to remember it turning up in several later houses but it may have been another one.

There's a large tree next to the mailbox in the picture up top. That's an oak (madrone?) that I planted between 1956 and 1958. It was a seedling that sprouted up in the hills beyond the end of the street. I dug it up and carried it down the hill in a can of some sort and planted it in the front yard when I got home. It grew. It's somewhat unusual because oaks don't like being disturbed especially as seedlings. But this one did fine. It was maybe two-three feet tall when we left.  Sadly, the oak tree and the mailbox are now gone (a/o 05/22). But they had quite a long run.

All Saints Day, All Souls Day, Day of the Dead, Samhain 2014

Today is All Souls Day...

Yesterday marked this year's Day of the Dead, which we noted with some interest here in New Mexico. We don't actually celebrate  Dia de los Muertos, at least not in the way many of the locals do, in part because November 1 is our wedding anniversary. This year's anniversary is our 45th since we were married. We've been together for 47 (or is it 48?) years.

While I was getting our drinking water jug refilled yesterday, a couple of cowboys were at the other spigot waiting for their jug to fill, listening to A Prairie Home Companion on the radio in their truck, yocking and laughing up a storm. I nodded and smiled. Over in the park across the street, a wedding couple was having their pictures taken in the bandstand, children were running and playing, and I thought, "Oh how wonderful! This is where we live..."

So someone else chose Day of the Dead to get married, too. Our wedding anniversary is typically the main focus of our celebratory interest on November 1, as was the case this year. We don't let those who have passed be forgotten, however.

We have what amounts to a year-round ofrenda -- several of them come to think of it -- in the house. The Christmas tree is always up and always lit, for example, and that's for "Gramma," Ms. Ché's mother, who passed on in 2009. She loved Christmas; she loved the tree and the decorations. It just seemed right to put up a tree here and leave it up year round.

Above it on the left, actually above the doorway that leads to the section of the house where the library and the Jesus Room are, there's a shelf and on it are various objects that relate to Gramma and to the Honored Cat Mao. The two of them were, late in their lives, inseparable. They communed and communicated with one another on as deep and intimate a level as I think it's possible. They told one another stories, and they comforted one another as their lives were beginning to ebb away. The shelf -- along with the Christmas tree, which Mao loved, too -- is our version of a year-round ofrenda.

But we have what amounts to an altar on the other side of the room too, a bookstand on which various items, holy and profane, are placed for contemplation and honor. Father Roca figures prominently, and I think he'd smile, maybe he'd laugh out loud, if he saw it. There's a "Kitty Angel" that is the representative of all the feral  felines who've passed on since we've been here. There's an Indian Warrior statuette that represents the Indian warriors who've passed through and passed on. There's Holy Water and Holy Dirt from Chimayo near Father Roca's picture and the program from his celebration of 70 years in the priesthood. There's a tambourine for musical interludes and various items for holiday cheer, including -- for now -- a glitter covered pumpkin, a pair of skeleton gloves and a ghoulish luminaria can. Nor should we forget the ceramic chicken. There's even an anniversary clock spinning merrily away, a reminder that "time passes." Profound!

Above this mini-altar/shrine is a painting by Charles Curtis Blackwell of a Mississippi farmer plowing the red Mississippi dirt, a painting I call "Git on up, Mule" which is a line from the poetry-play by Blackwell called "Is, the Color of Mississippi Mud" that we produced years ago, and that Blackwell created the large painting for. Above that are a couple of landscape paintings, one of an indeterminate farming area near a mountain range (not unlike where we are, but the barns around here aren't red...) and another titled "Jack Tone Road" which is a scene in the San Joaquin Valley of California, an area which is as surely imprinted in us as is this part of New Mexico. That area of Jack Tone Road is mostly orchard country -- or at least it was, the orchards may have been torn out by now, thanks to the drought and economics -- but the painting appears to depict old eucalyptus trees along the road which were planted as windbreaks back in the teens or twenties, trees which have also probably been cut down and disposed of by now. The image in the painting, therefore, is a memory of something that once was but may not be any more. 


It's not exactly an ofrenda but it's not not one, either. Similarly, the bench/shelves in the entry hall hold a lot of items that elicit memories, too. There's a large Chinese vase full of (artificial) flowers that evokes memories of our California home(s) where often things that originated in China were collected and/or displayed. Some parts of California are tied to China much more closely than they are tied to Mexico and having something from China as it used to be is simply par for the course. Chinese things are considered somewhat exotic here in New Mexico, though, and some of the swells like to decorate their places with Chinese antiques and what have you rather than the far more typical Pueblo Indian pottery and Navajo rugs and so forth. The Chinese vase by the front door, however, is a nod to Things Chinese we recall from California rather than an emblem of rejection of Things Indian that are so common in New Mexico.

Next to the Chinese vase is a ceramic model of the Santa Clara Mission in California. I've never visited it -- one of the few California Missions I've not been to -- but Santa Clara (Saint Clare) was St. Francis's close spiritual companion in Assisi, and the mission model is a way of recalling and honoring her. Santa Clara, California, of course, is the heart of the Silicon Valley where such socially, economically and politically transformative things go on these days... and so in a backhanded way, the model of the Santa Clara Mission is a nod to that aspect of contemporary living as well.

There are photos which someone took on their European tour in a multi-picture frame behind the Mission model. I picked them up in a thrift store and thought they were interesting and charming. Every European tour seems to be the same, but here the pictures are somewhat different: A misty castle (or perhaps hotel) set on a crag viewed through an opening in the trees; a canal perhaps in Amsterdam though I can't be sure. There's a water-bird skimming the surface. It's quite elegant in its own way. The next picture appears to be a river-side scene, the river barely visible through the trees. There is a clearing in the foreground where one might picnic should one care to. The final picture is of a canal in Venice, tourists being squired about in gondolas. It's charming for its utter banality...

The colors in these photos are muted and somewhat faded. The pictures themselves are probably twenty five or thirty years old, maybe older, it's hard to say, for the images are timeless. These sights don't change, do they? Castles are always on their crags along the Rhine, the canals of Amsterdam are perpetual. Riversides in some parts of  Europe have been nature preserves for centuries. The canals of Venice are living museums. These pictures could have been taken yesterday, and nothing much would have changed. That's part of the social and cultural context of Euro-America. Once set, a thing or a place deemed Historic is "forever." It never changes. Or it's never supposed to change.

Next to those pictures is an old Seth Thomas mantel clock. The works were pretty well shot, so I replaced them with chiming battery powered works that revivified this beat up old clock such that it seems quite festive and cheery now. Of course it's not authentic, but so what? It works and keeps good time. Not so before.

On top of the clock are varied things: a wooden sculpture by Stephen Wall that vaguely evokes something Native American, a old map of New Mexico in a frame that probably dates to the 1920s, a couple of skulls -- one ivory, one turquoise -- for the season. There are a number of other seasonal things including a nice crow scattered about below.

On the other side of the clock is an Adrian Wall sculpture called 'The Beauty.' An Indian maiden, wouldn't you know, only in this case, I was told the model was Adrian's wife, and it's a charming piece in its somewhat quirky delineation. I like it. She has a Mona Lisa smile and wears a squash-blossom necklace. There are some old and battered Shakespeare books, some game sets in wooden cases, an alabaster lamp with a scenic shade that we turn on when we'll be away after dark. "We'll leave the light on."

The wall above is covered with paintings, photos and prints. The central picture is a black and white photograph of a room at Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon. The photographer is from San Ildefonso Pueblo, and I bought the picture at Indian Market in Santa Fe a couple of years ago, first because it appealed to me, and second because this particular room was where Ms Ché and I had a kind of epiphany regarding the place and what it had been when it was occupied. Ms. Ché has had many epiphanies when she's been at Chaco, but this was one we shared, right there in that room, and the photo captures a sense of the mood and the moment. When I told the photographer of our experience there, he was intrigued. His own experience has been different, he said. There are times when the place speaks to him, but other times, he said, it's been silent, and he's captured what he sees as images of that silence. We had a lot of photos from Chaco that I stored online; unfortunately they were all deleted when that photo storage service shut down a few years ago, so I have very few photos we took at Chaco. This one takes the place of many of those that were lost.

There are many other items of memory and interest in the entrance hall. It was quite crowded with furnishings and objects at one time, but much of it was moved out as part of a more general clean-up project getting ready for the "New (half) Year."

October 31-November 1, you see, is also Samhain, the traditional Irish half-year festival, when winter sets in. In our tradition, we carry over only certain things from one (half) year to the next, and there's a good deal of clean up and disposal of whatever isn't going to be carried over. We made a lot of adjustments in the house getting ready. Several rooms were rearranged. Some of the paintings were re-framed, and others were replaced. Rugs were taken out or replaced. Cobwebs that had been collecting all year were taken down. (We're not adverse to most spiders, but their webbage can get to be extreme!) The point was to make modest but necessary changes before the onset of winter.

A lot of things that I might have done this year were delayed or abandoned because of the sciatic attack I suffered in January. Here it is November, and I've only partially recovered. I still have quite a limp, but worse for me is the loss of endurance. There's only so much I can do before I have to stop and rest, and it bothers me a great deal. It seems much more difficult for me to get around any more. Though I don't have to use a cane regularly, if I'm going to be out and about for more than an hour or so, I'll have one with me and use it as necessary. Stairs have become a challenge. There are other ambulatory challenges as well, some of which I'm still adapting to and getting used to.

Age. Yes, getting older. Recognizing my own mortality. Slowing down.

In some ways it's frustrating; in many other ways, though, it's a relief.

So as we pass into the next half-year, we honor those who we admire, who have gone before us, whose memories we treasure, and we look to tomorrow as well.

All Saints Day, All Souls Day, Day of the Dead, Samhain... a time for reflection, a time for memory.

Repost: September 11 and The Narrative

As the war drums beat ever louder once again, I've decided to repost my 10th Anniversary of 9/11 opus, as so little seems to have changed except... it's worse.

September 11 and The Narrative (originally posted September 11, 2011):

I'm in a motel room in Kingman, AZ. That morning 10 years ago, I was in a hotel room in Seattle, WA. Travel has been a consistent part of my life for most of my life, so it doesn't seem strange at all that I would be away from home when Something Happens.

What's strange, as I watch the coverage of the 10th Anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on MSNBC, is the persistence of The Narrative. Narrative is not just Myth, it is the Whole Story now. There is nothing but The Narrative. And even more than The Narrative is the insistence that "everything changed" that day ten years ago, while everything is being done today to demonstrate continuity. Bush and Obama and Clinton have all been out and about, and the commentary is as if Bush is still in office, the pivot around which all else revolves.

"Everything changed" on that day ten years ago. They talk about "resets" -- that the events of September 11, 2001, "reset" America's relations with itself, and "reset" the American relations with the rest of the world. That's true enough. For a brief moment, the trivialities and obsessions of the past -- particularly the media's summer obsessions with sharks and missing white women -- were set aside while the shock of the attacks was endlessly chewed over...

Of course we know that sharks and missing white women would return to the summer schedule soon enough. The shame of the Chandra Levy/Gary Condit media obsession -- and the eventual denouement that hardly anyone remembers -- should have put the likes of Nancy Grace out of business forever, but if anything, the events following that summer of 2001 have only reinforced the warped and twisted freakishness of Grace and her fantasies of persecution and prosecution. The major mass media has gotten far worse, in other words, and worse in ways that make it less and less likely that the public will ever again be an active participant in government.

That's the worst part of the change that has taken place since the attacks of 9/11/2001. Our Government -- well, what used to be Our Government -- has retreated behind ever more secure barricades. In many cases, it is no longer accessible or even knowable to the American People. The participation of the American People in their government is now distinctly unwelcome -- except in the form of pre-packaged/pre-processed "movements" like the TeaBaggers, who simply scream or threaten mindlessly whatever they are told to.

You would think that the correct approach to attacks like these would be to make public participation in governance even more of necessity, but it has become a near impossibility at the Federal level, and it is becoming progressively more difficult at every other level of government.

Nothing seems to penetrate the barricades any more. It's as if nothing will be allowed to ever again.

It's as if the government used the attacks as an excuse to finalize its divorce from The People -- a divorce tendered with the lawless intervention of the Supreme Court into the election of 2000.

Even the most autocratic and totalitarian governments of the Bad Old Days were seemingly more accessible, in many cases more directly accessible (as in the case of Versailles under the Ancien Regime), than Our Government today. So something fundamental about the relationship between government and the people has changed.

Not "everything" has changed, but that has changed.

Another change related to the barricading of government away from the People is the capture of government by the financial sector. Many of the victims of the World Trade Center attacks were of course financiers; that's a big part of what went on in the World Trade Center, and what those people in those towers did for a living was a big part of what spurred the attacks. We can't pretend that's not so. We can't pretend they all were "innocent." They weren't.

They were exploiters and destroyers by trade. And the transfer of the Treasury to them began almost immediately after the attacks, such that now, nothing can be done without their approval and consent, and more and ever more of the wealth of nations -- all nations -- must be relentlessly poured into their maw. Is it atonement? I don't know. But we -- the People -- have no say in what more they will demand and extract from us and our progeny. Masters of the Universe, indeed.

I've had some conflicted feelings about the Memorial waterfalls at the WTC site.

Intellectually, it makes perfect sense. Emotionally, it's... tough. The memorial represents constant falling. Never-ending. Every minute of every day. "Never forget". What will it mean to those who didn't witness the events being memorialized?

Will they remember: Coups are easy. Revolution is hard.

-------------------------------------------------------
Within days, of course, what would be known as "Occupy Wall Street" and then just "Occupy!" swept out from lower Manhattan (Zuccotti Park is only a block or two from the World Trade Center site)  and spread around the world. That spirit is still active. Yes, coups are easy. Revolution is hard.

Where We Are -- El Llano(Alto), Sort Of

 Mountain View Telegraph Explore! Visitors Guide 2012-13

I've been meaning to do a post on our location in the high desert of New Mexico for some time, but I'm still a bit leery of getting too specific about it. I am too ignorant for one thing.

This area is called the East Mountains, and it is indeed east of the Sandias and Manzanos, the central mountain chain of New Mexico. Although our elevation is quite high (6,200-6,300 feet), we don't feel like we're actually in the mountains. That's because we're not. We're in the Estancia Valley, which is a high plain (El Llano [Alto])  It was at one time the bed of a large lake which has since dried up. Its remnants are found east of the village of Estancia itself where there are a number of small salt lakes, Lagunas del Perros, that have been utilized for centuries for salt and other resources.

The Estancia Valley runs approximately north to south, 40 miles or so long and about 25 wide. So this was a pretty large lake when time was -- estimated to have been about 10,000 years ago, though it may have been more recent than that. The valley is underlain by an rather alkaline aquifer which provides water for agriculture as well as households, but there is not a whole lot of either in this area, nor has there ever been.

The whole East Mountain region, running from Galisteo on the north to Mountainair on the south has a population estimated at about 13,000 -- interestingly, that's about the number of Pueblo peoples who were estimated to be living in the region at the height of Pueblo settlement (until about the 1650's). The Indians left the region during the extended drought of the 1670's, and only a few returned after the Pueblo Revolt. They in turn left by the 1740's when hardships, Plains Indian raids, and population decline made settlement impossible to continue.

There was no Spanish settlement here until the 1800's when small parties of Spanish settlers arrived in the Galisteo area and established a village near the ruins of the Galisteo Indian Pueblos. Somewhat later, tiny Spanish settlements were started on the eastern slopes of the Sandias and the Manzanos, settlements which, like Galisteo, still exist, though they are still tiny.

Apart from a few scattered ranches, there was no other permanent settlement in the area. The Estancia Valley was a kind of No Man's Land. Pueblo ruins were found on the east side of the valley, all abandoned in the 1670's during the drought, but there were no other settlements in the valley itself until the land title was settled (somewhat dramatically, it is said) and the area was opened to homesteaders around 1900.

Our house was built about that time; it is considered to be one of the oldest -- if not the oldest -- ranch houses in the area.  It's built primarily of adobe, but stylistically, it's late-Victorian, not at all like the flat-roofed and cubical Pueblo and Spanish dwellings that are characteristic of New Mexico and particularly "Santa Fe Style."

I'm reading a fascinating report prepared for the Rural Electrification Administration c. 1937. It is a remarkable document on a number of levels, among them its overt prejudice against the Spanish residents of the East Mountains and its description of pretty appalling conditions faced by the bean farmers in the region.

This was a Dust Bowl. It was separate from the major Dust Bowls to the east, but still, the farming practices in the Estancia Valley were no different than those on the Great Plains, and the destructive environmental results were essentially identical. It's not that the area should never have been farmed -- it can be farmed successfully as irrigated land provided some reasonable care is taken to preserve the soil -- but the initial farmer-settlers were convinced that they could get by as dry-land farmers, planting beans, relying on summer rains, without irrigation or soil conservation, and the results were tragic.

Disaster compounded by foolishness.

Here are a couple of pictures from the report:

And here is a picture of the typical farming/plowing methods of the time that led directly to these dust bowl conditions:

What were they thinking?

Well, it's obvious.

Even in the pre-Dust Bowl era, farmers knew quite well what would happen if they attempted typical dry land farming on the Plains. If the summer rains didn't come -- which they often didn't -- the soil exposed by deep plowing would dry up and blow away in the wind and it would not be recovered. Crops would fail, farm economies would collapse. Disaster and ruin would ensue.

The farmers seemed not to care.  They knew what would happen. And yet they kept on as if possessed.

In a sense, they were.

I grew up in California where dry land farming is impossible (though it was tried anyway) because there are no summer rains -- at least that used to be the case; climate change has meant that there is now some rain in the summer time. Irrigation is essential for there to be traditional crops of any kind on a regular basis, and irrigation of California farmland is universal. Of course that has consequences which aren't always beneficial. This is seen particularly in the Westlands of the Central Valley where over irrigation has caused the ruin of many acres through the precipitation of selenium and other toxic salts. Oh well... Yes, they knew what would happen...

Yet they behaved as if possessed...

Living as long as I did in the Gold Country of California, I often wondered why Americans still flocked to California once it was clear they weren't going to get any gold. What kept them coming? In a sense, it was "possession," as in a kind of madness.

Acquiring land was a big part of it. It was much the same on the Plains -- and in the Estancia Valley of New Mexico as well. Land was easy enough to acquire in those days. It was cheap in most of California, free in the Great Plains -- as long as you homesteaded and worked it. That's where the problem lay.

It was not free to homestead and work the land; it was in fact relatively expensive which meant that most of the farmers who went out to California or the Frontier of Settlement on the Great Plains or in New Mexico were deep in debt from the get-go. They had to put in crops and harvest them as fast and as much as they could in order to service the debt load they were under. For a brief period during WWI and into the 1920's, it seemed as if it would finally be possible for marginal farmers on the Plains to clear their debts and even make a reasonable profit if they plowed and harvested more and ever more because crop prices were high, weather was good, and opportunity seemed promising.

So they did what they thought would do the trick. It was a disaster of Biblical proportions.

It was a smaller-scale disaster in the Estancia Valley, but a disaster nonetheless.

Once the soil was plowed up and the rains didn't come, the soil blew away in vast clouds of dust that blocked the sun and filled every heart with horror and despair. I've read that there were two episodes of Dust in the Estancia Valley, the Big One in the 1930's, and then again in the 1950's. Apparently the lessons were not learned... or more likely were learned well enough, but they were simply ignored.

Nowadays, it isn't so bad. There are a limited number of farms in the valley, and they all irrigate. The practice of dry land farming simply isn't done here any more. (Of course, someone more knowledgeable than me will tell me I'm wrong about that, but that's all right.)  Beans are still a significant crop to be sure, but the scale of bean farming is much smaller and the growing is more intense -- which it can be with irrigation. Cattle ranching is extensive, but the ranchers are well aware of the delicacy of the grazing land and take precautions to ensure that grazing is kept within reasonable limits.

Since the 1950's and later, the East Mountains have become a bedroom community for Albuquerque, but the Estancia Valley has resisted absorption. This is still very much a rural area, which is part of what we like about it. It's 50 miles to Santa Fe and 35 to Albuquerque, which means that we're close enough to the city if we need or want to be there, but we're not so close that we're overwhelmed or subsumed in the urban swirl.

There are some wonderful Wild West stories about how this area came to be opened for settlement when it was, and I'll try to get into some of that in another installment...

Travel Days Today and Tomorrow -- Then Again Wednesday and Thursday Next Week

On the Road to Santa Fe

The whirlwind continues.

With gasoline approaching (and in some cases surpassing) $5.00 a gallon in California, with predictions of much higher prices before the month is out, it's prolly a good thing that I'm making a trip out to New Mexico today and tomorrow transporting a load of stuff to our place out there (meaning there will be less to transport when the Big Move happens) before it's just altogether too expensive.

It'll be hard coming back. But there's still a lot to do in CA before our final departure toward the end of the month.

There were times when we were mucking out the garage that we were nearly convinced it would never be done. There were several lifetimes of stuff in there, most of which we hadn't even been conscious of for years, had not looked at for decades. There's still one section of the garage that needs attention, along the south wall where there are shelves with boxes of who-knows-what from however-many-years-before.

So much of this project has been like an archaeological dig. For example, I came across this in a pile of random sweepings:

Post Card c. 1967

It's a postcard from the Summer of Love titled "The Hippies" published by Sea Cliff Press in 1967. The legend surrounding The Hippies may be hard to read for modern eyes, so I'll translate: "San Francisco Loves You." Of course. What else would it say?

I found this Polaroid snap of my father taken sometime in the late 1950's or early 1960's:

RJC at Dinner, c. 1950's-early '60's

It strikes me as highly characteristic and quite sad, for he is dressed impeccably, probably reading the evening papers, having his dinner in a hotel restaurant... all by himself. It was his way. And he was always nice to the waitresses.

Then there was this:

Iowa Landscape c. 1911

It's a watercolor done by my uncle Vincent. It's dated on the back August 26, 1911, when Vincent was 11 years old. The frame and glass were broken and it looked like animals had walked over part of the picture (the image above was too large for my scanner so I had to seam it, thus the line down the center.) But apart from some dust and dirt and discoloration, it's in OK shape. Surprisingly enough. I don't know whether it represents an actual farmstead or not. At the time, the family farm was still being operated, so it could be... then again, it seems vaguely imaginary.

I came across a number of my old paintings and renderings, a surprising number of them, since I thought they had almost all been given away or destroyed years ago.

In fact, there was so much history -- not just our personal history, but much family stuff from ages past. There was jewelry, there were hundreds -- probably thousands -- of photos, there were items of remembrance, there were odds and many ends, some of which made no sense at all, some of which were instantly evocative of people, places or interests from a lifetime, or several lifetimes. Lots of it we had no idea was there...

But enough reverie. Must pack and be on my way.

Remember Where You Are

For Earth Day



NASA time lapse views of Earth from the International Space Station.

Music: "Walking On Air" by Howard Blake.

http://youtu.be/hWz5ltE_I4c