Why do I have this feeling of not doing anything? I don’t feel like I have accomplished a thing in days. And what, pray tell, do these little paintings from my vegetable garden have to do with it?

Jim and I took the holiday weekend and built a yellow oblisk for the garden. We had planted a small circular garden several weeks ago, the first vegetable garden I’ve had in nearly thirty years! Jim has never grown vegetables. But now that he likes to cook and eat them, he is interested in learning how to identify them in the garden so he can pick them for dinner!

Since the garden is small, we needed something for the cucumbers and a tomoto vine to climb. Yes, I meant to say vine. I got one tomato plant from a grower here in Mathews (at our Farmers Market) which is said to grow a 25′ vine. Along a fence, she suggested. My circular garden doesn’t have a place for a fence. Remember yesterday’s story about the Farmers Market paintings and the fence? I need to build a tower in the garden.

The garden is located right below our deck, right in the space where we have been trying in vain to establish a lawn for several years. Every year I till up the bare earth and weeds and start over. Every year it dries up and dies off. So this year I did’t plant grass seed. This year I mounded up five raised beds; one circular in the center for the tower of cucumbers and tomato with salad greens around the edge. Then four quadrants with paths between them around the circle.

I found it refreshingly new to design something symmetrical for once! One bed for strawberries, another for tomatoes, one with rows of peppers, bok choy and green beans and one with summer squash. It took all weekend to finish the oblisk, mostly because we choose yellow for its’ color. A spray can of primer, another of yellow, then two coats of yellow enamel brushed on to make the color pop.

Jim worked on the finial, turning it with the lathe then sealing it and leafing it with copper leaf. Then he applied one of his patinas to turn it bluish. It’s been a long time since we created something together just for fun. I notice his hands as he reaches across mine to nail the lath in place. Tender and dear to me, I remember this feeling from some time long ago. Not sure when. Not all the years we worked the art shows together, longer than that. Perhaps the first days of our marriage when we created the glass fired screens together.

The imagery on the screens from twenty years ago is strangely similar to the paintings I made yesterday in the garden … somewhat abstract … delicate colors … fragments of familiar shapes … not unlike the abstract landscapes I did in pastel in the late 70s! How odd.

I wonder if I have photographs of those paintings? … Under the Crookneck … Twins … a diptych of tomatoe plants with one panel mirroring the other, the same composition with different colors, different patterns of light and dark. I painted them long before I had twins. Yet my twin sons have turned out to be strikingly similar to the painting … identical genetics … with different patterns of likes and dislikes … one a team builder with tremendously innovative software writing abilities … the other a guy who quit his dream job and sold his house to go back to school and get his PhD. Writing this, I see my descriptions are more about me than them!

In many ways I am the twins painting. Gemini, yes. A mirror of myself, painting and writing, startling myself each time I dare look into the mirror of them and catch a glimpse of my true self. Somewhere along my path, I quit my dream job and sold my house. If this were a dream, a house represents where my spirit dwells. Somewhere, years ago, I quite painting the stuff in my own backyard. Like Dorothy, I too followed a yellow brink road to the edge until there was nothing left to do but jump.

Not jump off, jump in. Into my own life and dreams once again. I fall asleep on the couch and sleep through The Mentalist. Jim wakes me to go to bed and now I can’t sleep. I lay awake tossing and turning … thoughts and images flooking through my steam of consciousness ... offer the print version of the Daily Painting Journal as a printable download … week by week … story by story … a few dollars each. You can still offer them printed as well … use the Lulu.com store to handle sales and shipping for you so you are free to do the paintings and dreams.

Produce … Let it run and produce? I have been the one running and producing for years … I am over it … doing what I think other may want or be interested in … only to find out they’re not. What’s the point? I may as well do what I want! Like spending the weekend with Jim making an oblisk for the cucumbers in my garden. It’s been a long time … and it’s good to be home!

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