Thursday, December 12, 2024

Holiday Barns

Thanksgiving

Harvest Sunset

Red gold of pools,
Sunset furrows six o'clock,
And the farmer done in the fields
And the cows in the barns with bulging udders.

Take the cows and the farmer,
Take the barns and bulging udders.
Leave the red gold of pools
And sunset furrows six o'clock.
The farmer's wife is singing.
The farmer's boy is whistling.
I wash my hands in red gold of pools.

A few more favorites
from Tammy Sandel's
"Barn Heart Series"


Christmas

Improved Farm Land

Tall timber stood here once, here on a corn belt farm along the Monon.

Here the roots of a half mile of trees dug their runners deep in the loam for a grip and a hold against wind storms.

Then the axmen came and the chips flew to the zing of steel and handle the lank railsplitters cut the big ones first, the beeches and the oaks, then the brush.

Dynamite, wagons and horses took the stumps--the plows sunk their teeth in--now it is first class corn land--improved property--and the hogs grunt over the fodder crops.

It would come hard now for this half mile of improved farm land along the Monon corn belt, on a piece of Grand Prairie, to remember once it had a great singing family of trees.


Both poems by Carl Sandburg (1878 – 1967)

Tuesday, December 10, 2024

Barn of My Heart

Happy Birthday ~ Emily Dickinson
Born this day in 1830
[died May 15, 1886]
#178 ~ I cautious, scanned my little life

I cautious, scanned my little life—
I winnowed what would fade
From what would last till Heads like mine
Should be a-dreaming laid.

I put the latter in a Barn
The former, blew away.
I went one winter morning
And lo—my priceless Hay

Was not upon the “Scaffold”—
Was not upon the “Beam”—
And from a thriving Farmer—
A Cynic, I became.

Whether a Thief did it—
Whether it was the wind—
Whether Deity’s guiltless—
My business is, to find!

So I begin to ransack!
How is it Hearts, with Thee?
Art thou within the little Barn

Love provided Thee?


~ Emily Dickinson [emphasis added]
My friend Tammy Sandel takes these stunning photographs
and then captures the personality
of each Indiana barn with a unique name.
The two shown here are from her "Barn Heart Series"
Tammy has also inpsired me a couple of times
with my own barn - naming:
Kittredge & Portia

Saturday, December 7, 2024

Earring Christmas Tree

Little Tree from Katie F.
topped with my mom's watch locket
and decorated with miscellaneous earrings

That little genius Ellie
asked me if my earrings
were upside down pineapples!

Ben never cared too much
about his Phi Beta Kappa Keys
so I turned them into earrings!

Joan Didion: "I had not been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. This failure could scarcely have been more predictable or less ambiguous (I simply did not have the grades), but I was unnerved by it; I had somehow thought myself a kind of academic Raskolnikov, curiously exempt from the cause-effect relationships that hampered others. Although the situation must have had even then the approximate tragic stature of Scott Fitzgerald's failure to become president of the Princeton Triangle Club, the day that I did not make Phi Beta Kappa nevertheless marked the end of something, and innocence may well be the word for it. I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me, the pleasant certainty that those rather passive virtues which had won me approval as a child automatically guaranteed me not only Phi Beta Kappa keys but happiness, honour, and the love of a good man (preferably a cross between Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca and one of the Murchisons in a proxy fight); lost a certain touching faith in the totem power of good manners, clean hair, and proven competence on the Stanford-Binet scale. To such doubtful amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day with the nonplussed wonder of someone who has come across a vampire and found no garlands of garlic at hand."
~from her essay "On Self - Respect"
~see also: FN ~ KL ~ QK

Thanks Ben!

Texas A & M ~ Thanks Sara!

Friday, December 6, 2024

Christmas Tree Art

A festive art project
at the Sites Hotel ~ Medellin, Colombia
First an original work,
then a Christmas Tree Version:
Original . . .
Christmas Tree!
You get the idea!
Photos from December 2016
****************

Another way of doing it . . .

Not forgetting Valentines . . .