I started writing this post at the end of March on Florida’s east coast, where John and his daughter and I spent five days of spring break. Beach time… visits with my brother and his wife… sand under my feet… even a touristy day in Orlando with mini-golf and amusement rides downtown. A decade ago when my Mom and Dad’s health was failing I pretty much lived down here— a second life that felt both right and strange at the same time (where was home?) — but now I don’t visit Florida as often as I’d like. It was so good to be barefoot after all the winter boots and scarves and mittens, to hear mockingbirds and start writing again at our little Airbnb bungalow in the mangroves of the Indian River. We are lucky.
2023 was a personally difficult year for for a lot of reasons. Some heavy family drama. The death of a friend. Chronic insomnia. A move. Feeling unmoored. Facing some old demons. Not knowing what I wanted to be doing anymore— not with art or writing or my freelance work. As I now reread that list I can see why I didn’t always feel that great. But in between the hard stuff there were so many good things, and even though it wasn’t a big photo-taking year, looking back through images makes me happy. SO many good things.
We traveled. Spring break took us to San Diego with John’s daughter. Cloudy and kinda cold, but who cares!? We were in California!
Summer: A trip on the Alaska Railway — their 100th anniversary! Anchorage to Denali with a few days in the park.
This is probably a whole separate post at some point.
I resurrected my little sketchbook on the trip, and tried to draw something every day. I always say I’d like to keep this habit going, but it doesn’t happen, which I’m finally okay with. Life is too short to beat yourself up about things like this. Don’t ask how many sketchbooks I’ve started for various “100 days” projects or drawing-a-day challenges… finally I just decided to consolidate them all into one. When I do wind up finally filling it with drawings, I won’t care how many years of random things are in it… I’ll just be happy to be look back through it.
Vermont in late September. John and I spent time on our 10 acres in Danville AND got to go on a beautiful horseback riding trail ride.
It’s making me look forward to the day when Pippin is in our own backyard and I can ride him to the store! Yes, really!
Asheville in November, for Thanksgiving at the house my family has rented for almost twenty years. Some years we drive up the mountain and I don’t want to come down for the entire week. This year we all wanted to be outside more. Thanks to all the running around I do with Pippin, I can actually hike up steep hills without John having to pull me up partway. Chimney Rock has 500 steps and I didn’t even have to take the elevator!
During the school year I worked part time for the Ohio State School for the Blind continuing some of the projects we’d started during and after the pandemic. The school’s history timeline banners, which I created through an Ohio Arts Council TeachArts Ohio grant, made their public debut at the Ohio Statehouse last spring, along with the school’s WPA model of the Statehouse. I must extend a very special thank you to art restorer David Terry for teaching me how to—and spending insane amounts of time helping me—clean and repair the Statehouse model.
I experienced such an odd moment when David and I delivered the exhibition to the Statehouse: For months I’d been looking at this small-scale model, cleaning tiny windows and pillars with a toothbrush… every step, every flagpole, every lamp post… and then seeing the actual, real Statehouse felt sooo strange (even though I’ve seen it hundreds of times) — it suddenly seemed so HUGE and not-real! — like I was looking at a giant version of what we’d been working on. Or that I’d shrunk and been transported onto the very lawn we painted green with little paint brushes. (?!)
In the middle of everything else, John and I made the decision to sell our condo and move to an apartment to be closer to Pippin. I was spending 2 hours in the car each day driving out to take care of him. The sale itself was fast and simple as a neighbor wanted to buy our place, but things whirled into motion fast when the apartment complex we wanted to move to called and said, “We’ve got a place that will be ready in two weeks…” It happened to be a unit in the building I was hoping for, facing a beautiful west field.
Packing was tough. Whenever I move I always think that I’ll finally go through all my things and purge old stuff, but it brought me face to face with really old projects, old work, supplies for all the wedding and portrait work I used to do… I suffered from decision fatigue before I even made any decisions and the whole experience made me wonder who I even was as an artist anymore. In the end, John — God bless him! — said to just put everything in boxes and bring it along. A year later, there are still boxes to unpack, stuff to sort out, and artwork to hang on the walls, but one project at a time I’m sifting through it.
I miss our neighbors and our Secret Garden-esque courtyard where we used to live, but I love our patio with the view of the big sky and the field and the woods behind it, with all kinds of sunshine, and the moon sailing across the sky at night .
All for now, more to come. I’ve missed blogging, and I think I’m finally getting back to it again.
Cheers!