A pile of pillows!

Did you know that paintings could turn into pillows?!

www.mariapace.etsy.com 

a cup of tea and a peach

I violated the cardinal rule about blogging... I left off posting for about two months.  But I can't say I'm sorry or make any promises.  First of all it would be ludicrous because there's no one to apologize to.  My only readers are my friends and family, who already hear all my stories and blabbing over the phone or in person and I don't think they really read my blog anyway, but became "followers" because they're so good to me.  I still don't know what it is that makes me want to keep this blog since I keep a real paper journal and because blogs are such a weird mixture of public and private and there's something inauthentic about trying to present your life in an on-line magazine kind of way.  But I do enjoy reading other people's blogs, and I'll persist in trying to keep up this one.  In case there is someone reading whom I haven't spoken with lately, I did everything I said I was going to do on my list of things to do at the beach.  I got a big bar of French-milled soap and took every shower outside, two of them even at night by candlelight.  But  after the vacation, I got into a terrible mood that went on for weeks...  I worried a lot... I was grumpy, anxious and pessimistic.  And now, I think I'm finally restored.   I've moved to a big, clean basement apartment (with windows!) in Madison County. It is a really good temporary arrangement and a perfect workshop.  I have been sewing and sewing and sewing... there are scraps and thread clippings trailed all over the floor... evidence of work getting done, which makes me feel good.  I've been making pillows and will post them for sale on my Etsy site this coming Monday.  I am working on an entry for a contest through Country Living magazine and also trying to prepare entries for an art show in Madison.  By the end of next week, it will be a new month, and I'll have sent off my current projects and be starting new ones.  Anyway, I've been hunched over the sewing machine so much lately that I've been a terrible delinquent today... looking at over-sized decorating books in bed, finishing a silly love novel about an Italian orphan I got addicted to, and drinking tea and eating peaches out on the porch while making lists.  Now I have to try to do some of the things on the lists (how can I be slacking like this in the midst of all these deadlines?!?) before it's time to dash to the restaurant and take dinner orders.

surprise strawberry I found in the garden this evening!

I'm not a good 'relaxer.'  I think I have been at other times in my life, but right now, I'm itching to figure things out and get things done.  Things like where to live next, how to make more money and all sorts of logistics surrounding my fabrics and my future.  If I were a nail biter, I don't think I'd have any fingers left at all.  Because of all this, I'd decided I wanted to skip my family vacation and stay home alone to do research, send inquiry letters and try to find answers to as many of my questions as possible.  But my mom threw a fit, and my second cousin was counting on me to take her.  So I'll be on a barrier island off the coast of Virginia for five days, starting tomorrow.  I have two choices:  to resist every minute of the vacation, or to embrace it the way I would have fifteen years ago.  I'm going to embrace it, with a minor twist.  I'm making a list of things to do, so I can have the satisfaction of feeling like I'm fulfilling goals.  Yep, I'm a little bit nuts.

send postcards
ride my bike
take walks
start and finish a book
paint one watercolor
write in my journal
wake up early
drink coffee on the porch
take only outdoor showers
search in all the little shops for antiques (especially linens!) and other treasures
drink beer
cook
jump around in the ocean
daydream
have lots of exciting conversations with my vivacious family
wear only loose, soft clothes
worrying is strictly forbidden

That's it.  Those are my goals for the week.

Hea(r)t of Summer

While not writing, I've been working.  And when I haven't been working, I've been eating.  Things like wild raspberries from near the Hazel River and sweet drippy peaches and watermelon from an old lady on the side of Route 229.  One evening, when I was home alone, I picked the first tomato of the year, hot with the heat of the whole day and heavy and gritty against my palm.  I cut it up and sauteed it in olive oil with swiss chard, some vidalia onion and some basil leaves from the plants I started in my bedroom windowsill when it was still chilly outside. 

 I mixed the melange from the garden with whole wheat noodles and ate it slowly out of a big bowl while watching  I Love Lucy.  Lucy has some dresses I'd love to wear myself.  After dinner, I started making chocolate chip cookie dough, noticed the sky through the kitchen window and wandered outside.  A mass of bruise-colored clouds milled above, but I could see a thin line of white horizon 360 degrees around it.  The wind picked up and made the trees and bushes sigh and bow.  As dark descended, I finished the cookie dough and the storm seemed to hold its breath.

And then thunder began rumbling, and lightening darted across the sky quick as a snake's tongue.  I turned off all the lights in the house and climbed the stairs to bed, the wood of each step creaking under my bare feet. In the summer in this house I grew up in, I love crossing the invisible line between the air conditioning downstairs and the hotter upstairs.  I like the moment when the air conditioning is around my ankles and the heat of the upstairs is around my head and shoulders and arms.  The floor shook with thunder while I brushed my teeth, the house lit up and went dark with the lightening, rain came down soothing and hard against the slope of the roof, and I couldn't wait to get into bed with my pile of library books.  After I shut off the lamp, the thunder moved off into the distance.  Haphazard bursts of rain splattered the shingles, while a chorus of what must've been at least a few hundred frogs sang in and out in the rhythm of someone breathing until I fell asleep.  

Cinderella Pumpkins

my Cinderella seedlings!

Last autumn, I bought the best pumpkin of my life so far at The Garden Patch in town.  A Cinderella Pumpkin.  It was a beautiful dark orange.  It was shapely.  It remained as vibrant and solid as ever for eight months... first on display for the autumn, then on top of the trunk at the bottom of my bed while it snowed, and Christmas came and went, and spring unfolded.  And then last Monday, the same day my sister and I squished beetles, I cracked it open and planted its seeds.  The Cinderella pumpkin is the French heirloom 'Rouge Vif D'Étampes' which means 'bright red of Étampes', a place I think is about 30 miles from the center of Paris.  Supposedly these pumpkins take about a hundred days to mature.  Unless they are fickle, I should have my very own Cinderellas around September 20th!  Maybe I'm just going through a phase, but I can't imagine liking any other variety of pumpkin nearly as much as this one.


I managed to paint a few zinnias, and hope to do more in the coming days...

I also painted the potato blossoms, and realized they are very sweet smelling flowers.  They smell like honey - not  light and sugary like clover honey, but a musky, rich sweet like chestnut honey.  

We have raspberries galore in the garden.  My sister picked these (and many more) and she and my mom made a big batch of delicious jam.  Today I think I will visit the neighboring farm to pick some blueberries!

Beetle Juice

One day last week, my sister and I spent the whole morning in the garden.  We planted pumpkins and gourds, we weeded, and then we squished hundreds of Colorado Potato Beetles.  Most of them were in the gummy larval stage, and my arms got covered with brown beetle guts.  One squirted on my neck, and thankfully missed my eye.
We have a pretty good potato patch this year.  I like the blossoms and leaves of the plants and think they might make a good fabric pattern.  Hopefully I'll paint them before they vanish.

My Maran rooster is all grown up, and even crowing!  But there are no eggs from the pullets yet.  His name is Hercules Poirot, his hen is Miss Marple and the two other hens are Nancy (Drew) and Thumbelina.  If you remembered that I began with six, the other two were roosters, and hawks swooped down and got them while I was away in France.

And the seeds I planted before I left turned into flowers, so I now have lots of zinnias, my favorite blooms!

Today I made all of my fabrics available for sale on the Spoonflower website:  http://www.spoonflower.com/profiles/maria_pace

And tomorrow my wonderful great aunt is coming for lunch and I'm hoping she might be able to teach me how to oil the sewing machine!

Here & There

Unionville

Dinan