Smart girls, they figured out that right beside the quonset hut there is a good place for a dust bath.
Tag: American West
Paintings of the Drive Home
I’m continuing with the “quantity over quality” approach. This is partly inspired by an artist whose work I found on Pinterest, often with the tag “a sunset a day.” He does lovely impressionistic cloud paintings. However, I think he may be putting more time into them than I am.
What I do is, notice the sky around 3 or 4 p.m. when I’m driving myself and my offspring home from school across the windswept Idaho plains, take a mental picture, and do my best to reproduce that mental picture over the next few days.
Both of these are 8×10.
The one on the top is cornfields; the one on the bottom features fields that have been harvested, then harrowed, then planted with something green again before the winter.
Another 8×10: Big Southern Butte in a dirty sky.
Life in America: Unrhymed Sketches
I love the little houses:
trailer,
double-wide,
double-long,
saltbox,
shotgun shack,
ranch,
unconverted farmhouse.
Dogs that come out and terrify you
from behind a far too flimsy fence.
***
Castor oil, ginger,
apple cider vinegar,
put half an onion on a sill and see how it behaves.
Honey’s good for cough and cold,
pine-needle for the hard-core.
Lots of garlic helps to chase the stomach bugs away.
Epsom salts and menthol rub,
basil, thyme, and black cohosh.
Herbs that our great-grandmothers
used to keep in stash.
Tinctures, teas, and poultices,
but we don’t say Hail Marys ’cause
we’re Protestants.
***
At first, it will seem intrusive.
If outdoors, you’ll want to stop what you are doing and watch it glide by,
noting its three or four engines,
its well-executed graffiti,
its rhythmic clicks.
If indoors, you’ll want to stop speaking
when you feel its rumble.
But after a while, it will become part of the necessary sounds of life:
water running, the heat kicking on, children singing, your own breathing,
and the train.
This process will take less time than you expect.
In weeks, not months,
you will feel uneasy if it does not come on time:
your motherland’s lullabye
rocking you through your days.
Bears! The Blondes Have More Fun Edition
The following article appeared in my local hometown newspaper a few weeks ago. It has everything you could possibly want in a bear story:
Recently a local family had the experience of finding a bear in the woods. Those woods happened to be on the [redacted] property four miles north of [town name]. Apparently she sniffed out the bee hives near the [family name] place and found herself in the trees.
After observing the trails cams, [the family] found her among the trees sitting on the ground and called Fish and Game to come take her to a safe place so she would not be killed. The Fish and Game were able to dart her as she was sitting on the ground. She apparently was not aggressive and seemed content where she was.
They said according to the biologist she was an older black bear by the wear on her teeth. They thought at first she may have been a grizzly cub because of her unusual blond coloring … The biologist was also excited about the coloring of her fur because it was so blonde, being a black bear.
The Fish and Game have no idea where she may have come from, but speculated over by Sun Valley, and it is not uncommon to have bears on the desert when the water becomes scarce in the mountains.
The bear was tranquilized and put in a transport cage and taken away, but not before everyone involved had a photo-op with the “sleeping bear.” The bear was transported to the Bear Lake area.
Our hometown paper, vol. 27
Really, I can’t add anything to this. The last line says it all.
Our Week Last Week
Thursday
Saturday
Explanation: On Thursday night, we attended a community dance where we danced the Jitterbug, the Foxtrot, a polka and the Virginia Reel. By Saturday morning, we found ourselves standing at the edge of a field, praying over the grave of my son’s pet rabbit who had escaped his hutch and mysteriously perished without a mark on him.
The Tetons at Evening
Done from a photo.
I was there, I took the photo, then I came home and did the painting.
Another Mediocre Painting
The inspiration: Logs and rocks visible under water at Jenny Lake.
The execution: The first painting I’ve ever done entirely with a pallette knife.
Yes, yes. Underwhelming, I know. I have so many ideas and limited time, so I have decided to go the route of prodigious quantity over quality, based on the theory that if you churn out enough quantity, your quality will also improve eventually. Actually, I have seen this principle operate in my son’s paintings. However, in this case the quality is more potential than realized.
I have seen amazing, photorealistic paintings of pebbles under shallow water by professional Western artists. I’d love to return to that theme some day, when I have weeks or months to spend on it, and do a better job. Bucket list.
Botany: Plains Prickly Pear
I know I’ve blogged about these plants before, but please enjoy these pictures of them as seen at Citadel of Rocks.
Botany: Speargrass
I did not need to look this up in my Falcon Guide to Central Rocky Mountain Wildflowers. Husband identified it, and kids immediately started throwing it at each other.
Idaho Wildflowers headscratcher: Silvery Lupine?
I first assumed this was a yucca, but the leaves are all wrong.
I looked up these leaves with the help of the Google machine, and it suggested Silvery Lupine.
Sure enough, here’s a more typical-looking example of the flower from the same trip.
I can only conclude that the freakishly tall and white silvery lupine is an unholy hybrid of lupine and yucca.
Here’s an in-between-looking specimen.
Botany is hard.
