Now I am Eating my Cat!

 I remember many, many years ago, when I was a baby illustrator, reading a piece about the New Yorker cartoonist and beloved children's book author (creator of Shrek!) William Steig, reminiscing about his first paying job. He had sold a drawing of a cat, and took himself forthwith to a café for a cup of tea and a bite to eat. Maybe it was in Paris. Maybe New York. I don't remember the details. But I remember this:  He savored the moment, smiling, saying, "Now I am eating my cat!"

Steig's words were an epiphany for me; the scene I saw in my head made real the direct relationship between sold drawing to money in the pocket. Such a heady concept for someone just embarking on freelance art!  That someone would pay for art he'd created was a delicious concept for a young Steig, as it still is for me so many years later. I love getting paid for my art, writing, lectures, inventions...it's the ultimate validation for living a creative life. I think about it a lot, as the WarblerFall continues to sell briskly, 15 months after its official launch. (Now I am eating my bird fountain!) Gratitude fuels me, keeps me going.

I want to share a little story about a recent commission, a peculiar one to be sure, and the Steig moment I have every time I look at the gift I bought myself with the money I earned.

While Liam was working at a gift shop in town, he was approached by the former owner of a restaurant and wine shop where he had once worked. She knew he was an artist. Could Liam, or his mom, perhaps--wasn't she the bird artist? draw some ducks for a wine label?  The message took a little while to filter to me, but when Liam told me about the exchange, I replied, "Sure. I've done wine labels. Bring it on." 

A few days later, a mysterious email arrived with two photos of a wine label, and no message attached.

I responded, asking what this was about, and was given a number to call. Pamela's daughter had emailed the photos for her mom. I was intrigued, but I still didn't know what the job entailed. When I reached Pamela, she explained the unusual nature of this request. What she wanted was not art to be reproduced on a wine label. She wanted me to draw ducks directly ON this wine bottle. Oh. Oh! I was intrigued!

You see, Pamela's son and daughter in law had this wine, Paraduxx, served at their wedding. It's a very nice wine. And now their anniversary was coming up, and in the interim they'd had two children. Pamela wanted to mark the occasion by having someone (me) add two more ducks to the label of a bottle of Paraduxx, to make a family of four, and she wanted to present it to the couple this Friday (it was Monday).

Once I understood the nature of the job, my wheels started turning. How to make it happen? Could I draw that small?  "How many zeroes are we talking about?" Pamela asked. I burst out laughing. "Not many. Maybe two, if that. I won't really know what I'm getting into until I start the job, but I promise it won't be too expensive for you."

Truth be told, I loved the challenge of this commission. The ducks on the label are small. Tiny! Maybe no more than an inch and a half long. I'd have to draw super small. I wasn't sure my eyes and fingers would be able to do it. How could I even place the eyes? Draw the bills that small? Eek!

I went to the wine shop to pick up the bottle. The pintails were not only tiny, they were embossed. Still, I thought I could make something believable out of it.

It was September 11, and it would have been Bill's and my 30th anniversary. I hadn't done the math; I didn't mark it in any way, didn't announce it. But as I left the wine shop with the bottle to be painted, I passed Greenleaf Nursery. There was a hand-lettered sign propped out front. 

ALL TREES 25% OFF 

TODAY ONLY

I took that as a sign. Oh, it was a sign, all right. I knew just what I was looking for. I executed a hairpin turn, parked at the left side of the lot. I was looking directly out my windshield at some red dogwood trees.

The tree I'd wanted for...forever. The first three I looked at weren't so hot. Withered leaves, no buds. No wonder they were 25% off. Maybe this wasn't going to work. An employee came out to help me and led me to another section where there was one tree that looked like just what I had in mind. The variety was "Cherokee Brave." It is supposed to be cold-hardy and have dark red flowers, fading to pink, then white. Yes. That's what I want. This tree.

                                            A Cherokee Brave dogwood in full flower. Swoon! 

It was covered in buds. BUDS! and it was tall and well-branched and strong. With 25% off, the tree came to $120, a very fair price for a tree maybe 9' tall and covered in BUDS! Sold, to the artist in olive drab! I couldn't believe the perfection of this moment. Kismet! Did somebody set this up? Kinda seemed like it. Bill?

But how would I get it home?

We turned it on its side and slid it into my Subaru. 

It fit perfectly. Like it was grown to fit in my Forester, grown to live on our sanctuary.

All the way home I talked to it and told it I loved it and that it had just won the dogwood lottery. It would grow up surrounded by friends and conspecifics, planted in dogwood-friendly soil and watered and fed. It rattled its curled leaves in response. This was the Curtis Loew of trees. Rescued from another winter in a too-small plastic pot, to be set free in the wild.

When I got home, I put my new tree on the patio and set right to researching flying pintails.  The anniversary was Friday, and it was Monday. I drew a couple of tiny ducks and used my ca. 1991 reducing Xerox machine to bring them down to label size.  The next day I transferred the drawings by coating the back with soft graphite, taping it onto the label, and re-drawing the birds.

As I'd anticipated, I was unable to draw that small, but I could take a very fine brush and paint that small. 

A valuable lesson! I suddenly understood how people paint cameos and the like. Tiny brushes. One has ever so much more control with a brush than with a pencil or pen.

I added some splash tracks to the subtle water lines printed on the bottle, to place my juvenile bird in the foreground.

Then I painted a second juvenile pintail taking off, and layered its wings over the printed drake's tail. 

The finished label, impossible to adequately photograph. It looked pretty cool! 

I wrapped the bottle in kraft paper and wrote an invoice on the wrapper.  It was easy to decide what to charge for my work. $120.00, a fair price, I thought, for maybe three hours' total work, plus two drives into town and back (72 miles). It was the price of the red dogwood.

I drove the bottle to town and left it for Pamela at the wine shop counter.

It took me about a week to decide where to plant the dogwood, but I knew I wanted it somewhere I could watch it grow, flower, leaf out, turn gold and red...I wanted it outside the new lean-to greenhouse, and I wanted it backed by wild white dogwoods. Oh, I can just see them now.

To my surprise, the nursery wouldn't give me a warranty on it--they said they don't guarantee dogwoods to live. Huh. Eep. OK. I still want this tree. I kind of held my breath until I unpotted it and saw the gorgeous healthy white roots! I scored them with a knife in four places as instructed on the tag, to stimulate side growth. 

Planting it was a rather bigger deal than I'd figured on--digging the hole 2x the diameter of the pot; hauling manure and sand, filling it in, watering it down, then staking it with wooden stakes and a bunch of old landline phone cord, wrapped in vinyl, which wouldn't cut the tender bark. Yep, I'm one of those people who has a hard time throwing potentially useful things away. Knew right where I'd coiled that phone cord and hung it in the garage.

 It took several hours to plant the tree and I was tired afterward!

I have so enjoyed watching its leaves plump out, uncurl and turn a gorgeous golden maroon since I planted it September 16. It works well in the landscape, I think.

I added a couple of big tomato cages to the stakes, to keep bucks from rubbing on it this fall.

Did I say it was full of BUDS? Yes, I believe I did. Pamela and her son and daughter-in-law were thrilled with the embellished Paraduxx label. She sent me a check with a nice tip, too! Everybody was happy in this interaction! It was a win-win all around.

I can't tell you how long I've wanted a red dogwood tree. Maybe all my life. They were always so expensive, and later in life I found out they are extremely fussy. Well, I'm ready for that. I feel good about our budding relationship. If a red dogwood can succeed anywhere, Indigo Hill is the place. 

Every time I look at this beautiful tree, I say to myself, "Now I am eating my cat!" It's a tree of gratitude.

I thought you would enjoy this epic story of rendered wine labels and fat little ducks and dogwoods and kismet. You need tiny ducks on a label, you know who to call now. 

Bring on the Big Machines!

Mini-excavator at work! Lane Johns got this machine for his high school graduation present. That is some graduation present. He seems to enjoy running it. Who wouldn't? I'm standing inside my bedroom on the lower level, watching from the open sliding door. I can't help but squeal as the huge machine does its work right in front of me. Love to watch excavators at work. The precision their operators achieve blows my mind. 

The concrete pad is transported in pieces in the scoop of the skid steer to a waiting dump truck. At this point Curtis is totally cool with the demolition. He barely turns his head as the machines roar past. You don't find many dogs like Curtis. For my money he's a little too cool. I was backing across the lawn in my Subaru last week and didn't see him out my blind spot where he was lying, flat out, on the grass. I was shocked to see him there, unmoving. After I parked the car, I walked over to him. His tail thumped on the ground. By the tracks, my wheels had passed eight inches from his nose. 

I knew you wouldn't run over me, Ma.

                    Curtis Loew! Don't be so sure! Your Ma is getting old and blinder every day!

The 6" thick concrete pad outside the bedroom proved to be a different beast than the little thin one we had poured off to the side for the Groanhouse. It gave up hard. Real hard. Turns out it had rebar all through it, and that rebar went back into the house foundation. We were trying to find out if that might be the case; I even called the foreman of the job now 24 years ago, and he said he thought the patio rebar shouldn't go back into the house foundation. Well... There were some awful noises as the concrete was torn out, the worst sort of wailing squeal made when my big set of windows bowed outward under the pressure.  That sound brought me running down the stairs. The windows, unbelievably, were tamped back into place with a hammer, and everything works perfectly. I never would have believed that could happen, but it did. I didn't catch that on video, but there was this:

I guess the moral of the story is what an unexpectedly big deal it turned out to be to put a lean-to greenhouse on my home. I was unprepared for all the stuff that had to happen (ripping out existing concrete); for the duration and the intensity of it. I have managed to keep up with the expense of it (another great big eye opener) and ride with it, and I've tried to enjoy the process along the way. 

My least favorite part is the waiting in between spurts of progress.

By the next evening, this was the sight that greeted me out my bedroom window. Disorienting. Very disorienting. Because the bare earth quickly became a morass with the frequent rains and gutter spillover from the plugged downspout, I could no longer use my patio doors. I realized how used I had become to strolling out into the backyard, and how much I loved walking right out of the bedroom into nature.

Stemple Gutters had to come and unplug and then re-route the downspout that used to come down the west wall of the house. I was intrigued by the ingenious curve he had to describe to get it to turn the corner, and decided I loved the way it looked. Kind of like a sausage curl on a lady's temple. A lady with a small black nose and great big teeth.

I was especially grateful that Eric put a temporary extension on the downspout to keep water from pouring

into the construction site. We had about a two-week delay because the mud kept collapsing when they tried to excavate the footers. Ugh! I love a wet summer, but this one kind of got in our way.

Curtis did everything he could to keep morale high. He liked to snoopervise from the high deck or from under the Japanese maple off to the side.

We waited a long time for the ground to dry out enough to be safely excavated for the footers. 

It would all be worth it, I promised myself. Very much worth it!

Finally it was dry enough for Lane and Stone to come back and dig the 2' deep trench for the footers. The walls would no longer collapse. Rebar was laid, and the form was ready for the concrete. 

Now walking out the bedroom doors posed a serious hazard! Glad I'm not a sleepwalker...Bill would have been in big trouble! I'd have had to lock that door.

Goodbye, Groanhouse! Down It Comes!

 On the 17th of July, I said a final goodbye to the Groanhouse with a grim smile and a shake of my head.  I couldn't say I'd miss it, knowing what would replace it. We'd had ten years of good times and bad. Mostly good. It had saved me in the winters, and it had destroyed me, too, when the gas would cut off and its contents would almost instantly freeze (which happened about every three years, on average). To say it was uninsulated was kind. 

Over time, as you can see, the plastic turned yellow and deteriorated, and I really noticed the effect of that decrease in light transmission on my plants in winter. 

I also noticed the Arctic breeze coming through the holes in the roof. I was tired of patching everything, the seams and now the roof, with Gorilla Tape. I was tired of everything about this structure. Good riddance, you bunch of poorly planned obsolescence. Thanks for the memories!

I had a large amount of work to do before the excavators got here and demolition commenced. There was some beautiful crocosmia "Lucifer" and a ton of nice Rudbeckia "Goldsturm" in the bed closest to the construction site. The retaining wall that supported that little bed was coming out, and I had to remove all those flowers. I potted them up and got them out of there the day before the excavators arrived. 

I put crocosmia all around the yard. This is the back deck bed, which I reclaimed this year from the giant kiwi vine that had eaten it for the past 16 years.  More on that later...that was a thing.

The side shade bed, emptied of its gold and scarlet treasure. The Groanhouse awaits its fate.

I don't like to waste anything, especially not living things. To my surprise, the Rudbeckia barely batted an eye when I dug it out and potted it--as long as I kept it in full shade and watered it every day. 

I loaded the 16 pots in the trailer and drove them around to live under the back deck for the rest of the summer, where they put on a beautiful show. I just had to remember to water them every day or two...I'm STILL watering those pots, two months later. 

Operation Relocate Rudbeckia in progress.

I took a deep breath. I was ready for the next morning, when the excavators would arrive. 

Lane was concerned that the weight of his mini-excavator might crack my sidewalk, so he executed this nifty leapfrog, taking the weight of the machine on the scoop and sort of jumping over the sidewalk!

Here comes the demolition crew: two young men. Lane, in red, and Stone, in gray, use their bare hands, arms, and legs to dismantle what took us a whole bunch of Saturdays to construct. I took a weird delight in seeing it taken apart. 

Witnessing Curtis watch the demolition squeezed my heart. He's nervous, licking his lips and shifting his gaze. He doesn't understand why I seem to be OK with my Groanhouse being destroyed. He thinks maybe he should do something about it, but he's taking his cues from me. Bless his rounded little head. He's got thoughts packed in there, he does.

Going, going...

Just a bunch of pieces. It left this world as it arrived. A deconstructed kit. 

Off it goes, carried by hand. Sheesh. Such an ignominious end.