Creating Memories

theo painting, originally uploaded by robayre.

Remember this painting? I’ve chosen it to illustrate a few things that I would like to share today.

Firstly, this week this painting sold, along with several other pieces of my artwork. After last weeks Paper Stack Pack and this weeks feature on Decor8, my goal of having sold 100 items in my shop in 2008, seems to be more and more possible. Thank you everyone for the support of my artwork. As I said earlier this week, I feel like I’m having my Sally Fields moment, “You like me, you really like me.”

Secondly, why must rabbits chose to build their nests smack dab in the center of a yard? Why can’t they build it under a bush or hidden away in a less trafficked area like the rest of the animal kingdom? No, instead they build it in a central location, in a seamlessly camouflaged place. One can stand right over a rabbit hole and not even realize it is there. There are a few rabbits in my parents yard and I have quartered off a few place to avoid while mowing so as not to run over a nest. I think having my own pet rabbit makes me more sensitive to this problem than your average lawn mower. While mowing, this absolutely gruesome vision came to mind of what it must be like to accidentally step into a nest, accompanied by an equally sickening idea of a crunch. To my horror, yesterday as I spoke with Matt out in our yard, I took a step backward and my foot went right into a hole and there was that crunch I had somehow predicted. Immediately I yelped and cried frantically, commanding matt to look into the hole and tell me I had not just crushed a bunch of baby rabbits. He casually brushed some grass away and said it was nothing, but I didn’t trust that and got down on my knees and picked up the covering. To my relief, it was plastic tubing embedded in the ground from our sump pump. I don’t want to ever find out what the real feeling of stepping into a rabbit hole feels like. In the meantime, I’ll just continue to keep my eyes peeled for the occasional toad fleeing from certain death of mower blades, and now rabbit holes as well.

This last story is less rabbity, and more lawny. Earlier this week when I told my dad I’d be mowing their lawn he said, “it’s going to rain, you should pay more attention to the weather reports.” It really needed to be mowed so I disregarded what he said. Then, as I was drawing near the end, sure enough, it started sprinkling. I trudged on figuring it would stop soon and I only had about 20 minutes left. But the sprinkling turned into real rain and the real rain turned into downpour. At this point I had to stop, so I pulled over under some tree coverage, figuring it couldn’t last long. I was drenched to the bones and rang out my hair while I waited, and waited and waited. Finally when I had just about enough waiting (only a few minutes) and realizing that this was not going to just go away, I looked up at my parents’ house to see both my mom and dad’s faces in the kitchen window watching me just standing there in the rain. I approached the house and my mom ushered me in offering to dry my clothes to stop the onslaught of my impending pneumonia (you know, because I was out in the rain), and she said “Your father and I were watching you and he said ‘she’s just standing there in the rain’.” I thought it was so funny, I was standing there hoping it would stop and they were watching me standing there wondering why I was just standing there, but not coming out to tell me to come in. As I headed home in my car the rain was beginning to flood the gutters and I passed some kids who were playing in the puddles in the streets. I just wanted to share this here because I’d like to keep this memory. My grandma got me in the habit of “creating memories” by trying to remember all the details and this was one of those moments I’d like to keep.

That is all for now. I’ll be back later to post something for the Friday archive.