This morning’s sunrise was one of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen. I went outside in the chill air to watch the colors seep across the sky—and really, it wasn’t that chilly. After our recent ice storms & bitter cold, it felt almost balmy. I thought about taking a walk but I’d just made cocoa. So instead, I went upstairs and sipped as the streaks of rose and gold stretched out above the blue mountains.
Those mountains: they mean so much to me. In our first years in Portland, after I recovered from radiation treatment, I used to walk a two-mile loop almost every day—a route that took me directly past our current home, though I couldn’t have guessed that lay in our future. I would turn at what is now our actual corner—admiring what are now my own apple trees as I passed—and head toward a park several blocks away, because it had a gorgeous view of the mountains.
In parts of our neighborhood you can glimpse Mount Saint Helens, whom Scott adores beyond reason. (I say “whom” because she is absolutely a personality.) She’s awe-inspiring and quite lovely, but my own favorite mountain in the dog-park view was one of the low peaks in a blue range to the northeast, across the Columbia River. I grew up in Aurora, Colorado, where the Rockies are always in sight—and so often, they too were a deep violet blue. Later, I lived in Virginia at the feet of the Blue Ridge—the hills that gave this blog (birthed in that house) its first and best color scheme.
So I’m deeply grateful that these now-familiar, perfectly blue mountains are part of my daily view. A week ago they were snow-capped. Now only specks of white remain. Beyond the sharply peaked rooves of Northeast Portland is that delicious ridge of deep blue under a pale sky.
Happy New Year! I began the year with a longish post over at Substack—
—and then popped into my email to discover an announcement from my friend (and favorite maker of papery goods) Lesley Austin of Small Meadow Press. She has created a 2024 digital planner, lovely as all her creations are. I bought it immediately and I can report that it is a delight. I uploaded it to both my iPad (in Goodnotes) and my beloooooved Supernote e-ink notebook, about which I can’t rave enough, and Lesley’s digital daybook looks beautiful in both. I appreciate that she includes a few different layouts for the weekly and daily pages. If you’re looking for something to get your year off to a gentle start, you should take a look.
(Ha! That sounds like a sponsored post but it isn’t. I’m just a longtime & very enthusiastic customer. I first encountered Lesley’s work at a homeschooling convention in Richmond aaaages ago & her stationery had me at hello. The friendship came later, and was a happy perk!)
November 19, 2023 @ 2:24 pm | Filed under:
Photos Nobody: Gee I wonder if Rose’s rubber snake is still giving her mother heart attacks all these years later
Me, looking for an old photo in my blog archive:
November 16, 2023 @ 9:52 am | Filed under:
Art 
Photo by my father, Murray Brannon
The maple has dropped perhaps seventy percent of its leaves now. All the upper branches on its south-facing side are bare and the morning light glows through into my studio. The north-facing side is holding its secrets a while longer.
I love that I can see—in the wide gap between the Norway maple and a different neighbor’s Douglas fir—a distant blue smudge of mountains in Washington State.
In a middle-school art class in my hometown of Aurora, Colorado, I once painted a picture of blue mountains beyond a wide green valley speckled with wildflowers. Blue-green foothills, and mountains in deepening shades of blue and violet. We saw the Rockies every time we walked outside, and I painted those mountains the way I saw them in my mind’s eye. But then another student made fun of them. Mountains aren’t blue, he scoffed. And I remember the sudden flood of doubt. Of course he was right. Mountains are brown and green and gray and snow-white. What was I thinking? Mortified, I cut the entire mountain range off the page and threw it away. I tried pasting the meadow to a new sheet of paper and painting properly tinted mountains, but the glue wrinkled the paper and anyway, the new range was hideous. I trashed the entire thing.
And went outside and saw that I’d been right. There was blue in the hills. I’ve been watching for blue mountains all my life. For a few years I lived at the feet of the Blue Ridge and drank in those blues and violets all day long, feeling like I’d found my own personal Innisfree.
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I’ve thought often of that boy in class with a kind of wry gratitude and ruefulness. Of course I had no idea at the time, but that encounter helped shape me: it taught me to trust my own artistic vision. I knew what I knew. My mountains were blue, and they were beautiful. Everywhere I’ve gone, “standing on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,” I’ve seen them in the deep heart’s core.
November 15, 2023 @ 9:37 am | Filed under:
Gardening 
Yesterday Rilla and I finished filling the bug snug with leaves, grass clippings, flower stems, and twigs. We’ll leave it be now and hope it went up in time to offer shelter to overwintering insects. We may be a bit late for this year, but now we know what to when late summer rolls around next year.
Ideally there would be a lot more twigs and branches among the leaves, but we used what we had in the yard. Flower stalks (we had zinnia, dahlia, rudbeckia, sunflower, and cosmos stems mostly) are excellent to include in the layers because insects can burrow into the stems, especially the hollow ones. Or you can simply leave the stalks in the garden all winter, right where they grew.
The neighbor’s Norway maple has conveniently leaf-mulched the large flower bed in this part of the yard (we call it the back yard, but it’s actually on the side of the house because of this quirky corner lot). The cherry, apple, and Tupelo trees are supplying the sheet-mulching project on the other side of the house. Scott is mightily amused by the way I greedily eye our neighbors’ giant paper bags of raked leaves awaiting compost pickup. I don’t need them—we’ve got plenty—but leaf mulch creates such superb winter habitat and decomposes into fantastically rich compost for your garden beds. The maple’s yellow leaves are rapidly turning brown, but to me they are nothing but gold.
1.
Rilla and I made a bug snug yesterday. I don’t have a photo of it yet (too cozy to get up right now, and anyway if I go downstairs I’ll be swept into The Rest of the Day and this post will float into the drafts pile with the hundreds of other unfinished musings I’ve amassed over the years), so I searched for bug and then bee in my photo library. So. Many. Bee pics. This one isn’t the crispest but the red coneflowers felt more apt for this November morning.
Anyway, the bug snug! You make a tripod of sticks or canes—we used this video to assemble it—and fill it with twigs, leaves, flower stems, grass cuttings, all the wealth summer left behind in your yard. This creates habitat for overwintering insects. Also it’s very cute.
2.
The bug snug is part of our big project: participating in Portland’s Backyard Habitat Certification program. The new house has a biggish corner lot, beautifully landscaped by the former owner (she’s my hero—oh the care and love she lavished on this house!), mercifully pesticide free, with roses and berries and perennials, but also a lot of grass. We’ve begun our project by sheet mulching over the grass along the retaining wall that runs along our corner sides (the front and west sides of the house). I’ve planted a few perennials there and some wildflower seeds, but the main goal for now is to knock back the grass and create beds for planting native shrubs and pollinator plants in the spring.
The kids were surprised when I told them it will likely be two or three years before we get to the Silver certification level, and longer than that to qualify for Gold. For me, the leisurely timeline is a comfort. It’s a puttering project, a little here, a little there, doing what we can do.
Huck has done most of the digging for the south-side border. We’re sheet-mulching over the grass (layers of cardboard, compost, and leaf mulch), but we needed to remove a narrow grass right along the retaining wall so we could tuck the cardboard down, and he’s making another narrow trench to edge the bed. He has discovered that he loves digging. This is excellent news for his mother.
Well. It’s been a minute. After such a long silence, I can’t imagine anyone is still checking for new posts here. And yet I’m writing!
If you’re on my newsletter mailing list or my Patreon, you know this bit of news already—I’ve started a Substack and will be posting there twice a week. Lots of reasons for this shift, as explained in my entry post. I’ve put the Patreon on a long-term hiatus and am giving myself a year for the Substack experiment.
But that doesn’t mean I’m abandoning this dear old corner of the internet. Quite the opposite. One of the reasons I moved to Substack is that it allows subscribers to get new posts via email. (Or on the website, or in the app.) But of course I don’t want to spam everyone’s email with daily posts. And since writing begets writing (a truism I experienced in full force during my years of daily blogging), I’m boiling with quick, raw tidbits of thought. Like in the old days! Too raw to plop into people’s inboxes.
(Take that extremely clumsy metaphor, for example. If I’m boiling, how are the thoughts raw? At first I wrote “unpolished.” Maybe the better metaphor is a rock tumbler. You collect the rough stones and dump them into the tumbler with a bit of grit. Hmm, I like that. Let me think about it.)
I did a few days of Summer Brennan’s Essay Camp and loved her take on a daily practice of writing a “Five Things” post:
Just quiet your mind for a moment and then write the first true thing that comes to you. Something you’ve been thinking about. Something you noticed or saw. There is no need for explanation or preamble—just dive right in. There are no wrong or stupid choices.
I’ve been doing a version of this for basically my entire adult life, in fits and starts, in notebooks and—for a good fourteen-year stretch—on this blog. (Or one of my side blogs. Remember when we all had side blogs? I had a bread blog, a daily-homeschooling-notes blog, a private blog. So many blogs!)
The “five” is an arbitrary number. In my notebooks it has most often been three. Three things that caught my attention today—images, ideas, remarks. The funny kid quips that used to fill these virtual pages. The reading notes that moved from Bonny Glen to my Kindle, almost without my noticing.
We’ve seen other iterations of the Five Things concept over the years—Jen Fulwiler’s “Seven Quick Takes” idea, or what was that other format? It went something like: I’m reading, I’m seeing, I’m thinking about…I loved reading those. Trying to recall the name of the blogger who began them. It started with a P, I think. But wasn’t Pioneer. Poppins? Penny?
ANYWHO. Five is a good number. I’m liking how the rock-tumbler image fits it: imagine picking up five pebbles a day to toss into the tumbler. Five rough, unpolished stones. Just about the limit of what I can hold in one hand.
I’ll play with that for a while and see if it feels like the right practice. It’s all a big experiment. All I want to do in this space right now is collect pebbles.
Like this one!—outside the window of my studio space in the new house (it’s a truly scrumptious space; I’m still pinching myself to see if it’s a dream) there is a giant Norway maple. It’s in our neighbor’s yard but half its branches overhang ours. I love this tree, even though this species is considered invasive here in the PNW. (I am constantly having to wrench tiny, adorable maple seedlings from the cracks in our walkways.) I loved it all summer when it was an amiable green presence against the morning sky. And I love it even more now, with its leaves gone golden and half of them falling. Every morning: more gaps of light. Behind this tree is the eastern sky. I get part of the sunrise off to its left—enough sunrise to make me gasp some mornings—but I’ve known that I’ll get the whole pink sky behind the dark branches this winter. And now it’s coming. In the blue dark before first light, pinpricks of morning shine through the leaves. More than pinpricks now—stars. I’ve never before welcomed an oncoming winter like this. But no rush—these golden curtains framing the glow—for now it’s perfect.
There. One pebble for today.
This feels incredibly weird to write, but I’ve hardly picked up a needle in months. That feels a little like saying I haven’t stopped to think in months, because handstitching has become such a key part of my creative process: keeps my hands busy but allows my mind to roam. This may explain why my brain feels a bit like a dartboard right now. It’s been seven months of pointy Life things flying straight at me. I’m ready to take back the needles. (This metaphor is falling apart fast.)
Well, my new space is set up for creative practice beyond my wildest dreams. There’s so much room! Including a large flat counter for cutting fabric. Now comes the absolute hardest part of embroidery: deciding what to stitch. I have several hoops in progress, not to mention the linen bag pictured above—it’s a weekend pattern but I slowed it down by, gosh, months by deciding to stitch those wonky watercolor-inspired circles on the front panel. I mean, it’s no rush. I have bags aplenty already. So perhaps that’s the project to dig out? Something to do while I decide what new thing I want to make?
A frequent refrain in my head lately is how the two hardest parts of my day are: starting and stopping. Starting work on the thing I want or need to do, and stopping when it’s time to stop. The modern wisdom about motivation (the impetus to do a task) is that you have to start work first, and only then will motivation arise. But a lot of the discussion around best practices seems to assume that starting is as simple as deciding to start. And for me, there’s a gap between those two actions.
I have all kinds of tricks for hurtling across that gap. But employing a strategy is itself an act that requires a launch. I often feel the most intense resistance about taking the first step in a strategy I know to be effective for me. Like: Click on Scrivener. Simple as that. Or: Ask Scott to hang out with me until I’ve gotten started writing. That works every time and he’s always happy to oblige. But I’ll resist clicking or asking. It’s my absolute most frustrated state of mind. I’d rather sit at the DMV. Actually, it’s kind of like sitting at the DMV without having taken a number first.
I mention this because it occurs with fun stuff as well as work. I mean, a lot of my work is fun—once I start working. But I mean it happens with down-time, leisure activities too. Like embroidery, which I adore doing and often feel I don’t have enough time for.
Well, here I am, well past my allocated time for writing this post. The only thing harder than starting is stopping!
Yay! Photos are back! These are the daisies I was going to put in last week’s post.
Things I noticed this week:
• A tiny yellow praying mantis the color of the fronds of ornamental grass in front of our dining-room window. I was leaning over the bushes to turn on the hose and saw him, bright against the shiny green leaves of the vinca that carpets the mulch. He (she?) stayed put long enough for the kids to come see him, then disappeared into the jungle. I haven’t spotted him since, but I’m braced for him to wind up in my hair one of these mornings.
• A borage volunteer blooming in a pot of delphiniums. This is amusing because I planted a lot of borage seeds in May and they’ve been spindling along at a snail’s pace.
• Drafting blog posts in other apps simply does not work for me. This is a head-smacking realization because I made the shift to drafting in Scrivener or Evernote, gosh, months, years?? ago—thinking it was a smarter practice than drafting directly in WordPress, which sometimes gets snippy and logs me out without autosaving. But, duh, I wrote ALL my posts here in WP for like 15 years, at a pretty steady pace. Since I shifted to Scrivener (which I’ve used successfully for writing novels and Brave Writer lit guides, and whose quirky features I utterly adore and honestly couldn’t do without) for blogging, I’ve amassed a pile of unfinished drafts and have posted about once a month, on average. Um. Yeah. Obviously there have been other factors, like, say, exhausting myself with a move, but still. I had this system that worked beautifully for me, and then I changed it up because I love change, and whoosh, consistency went out the window.
• That no matter how sluggish I feel, certain songs galvanize me into motion and high spirits. Lately, that’s been (don’t laugh) “Mmmbop,” “Bad Romance,” and Katy Perry’s “Roar.” These three, along with “A Little Respect” and (no, seriously) Justin Timberlake’s “I Got This Feeling” from the Trolls movie, top my morning playlist and never don’t work.
• That I’m not capable of writing an even-numbered bullet list. Heh.
