October's Bright Blue Weather

October 17, 2015, Charleston Falls  Photo by Pauline

October 17, 2015, Charleston Falls  Photo by Pauline

"O suns and skies and clouds of June,
And flowers of June together,
Ye cannot rival for one hour
October's bright blue weather."

First stanza of October's Bright Blue Weather by Helen Hunt Jackson.

My dad often recited this in October.  I'm sure it must have been one of the recital pieces he learned as a child.  Learning such poems was common when  he was in elementary school and schools presented programs for the parents.  There are eight stanzas in the poem, all of which paint pictures of October.

Below are some other photos of October.

The three photos above were taken by Tom in our backyard.

This was taken by Phil at Brukner Nature Center while walking the Brukner Butterfly Transit.

Postscript

I mowed and mulched after posting this blog.  That's when I noticed the sky was truly bright blue today.  I stopped mowing and mulching long enough to get my camera and take the photo above.

The last stanza of  Helen Hunt Jackson's poem...

O sun and skies and flowers of June,
  Count all your boasts together,
Love loveth best of all the year
  October's bright blue weather.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Book by Ken Kesey, and the Play

After I saw One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest  at The Glenmore Playhouse, I happened to see the book when I was at our local library.  On a whim, I checked it out.  It has taken me two months but I have read it.  The book reads easily but the emotions it arouses are strong.  I could only handle a little at a time.

I read the book years and years ago.  Maybe I read a Reader's Digest Condensed Books version.  It is a book I have never forgotten.  Though I didn't remember the details, I remembered the basic plot of the book and the characters...especially Randle McMurphy and Nurse Ratched.  I had forgotten that Chief Bromden was the narrator though I did remember that much of the book read like a nightmare and other parts were just plain funny.  I remembered, too, that the end was tragic but uplifting at the same time.

This time, I found the beginning hard to read.  Partly, this was  because the book starts off almost lighthearted and I know the ending is not  lighthearted.  Also the narrator, Chief Bromden, sometimes expresses his feelings as events when the reader knows the events are not really happening.  Clearly, he is crazy...or is he?

He says as he looks back on the whole set of events...(This story burning into him like steam)..."It's gonna burn me just that way, finally telling about all this, about the hospital, and her, and the guys -- and about McMurphy.  I been silent so long now it's gonna roar out of me like floodwaters and you think the guy telling this is ranting and raving my God; you think this is too horrible to have really happened, this is too awful to be the truth! But, please.  It's hard for me to have a clear mind thinking on it.  But it's the truth even if it didn't happen."

Like most great fiction, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest works on many different levels.  It can be read as a condemnation of mental health facilities in the 1950s and 1960s.  That is the simplest interpretation.

It can also be read as the conflict between the individual and society as a whole. "Papa says if you don't watch it people will force you one way or the other, into doing what they think you should do, or into just being mule-stubborn and doing the opposite out of spite."( Chief Bromden)

It took me weeks to read Parts I and II which lead to the inevitable end in Part III. I kept deciding I'd rather read something that was FUN. Even though much of Cuckoo's Nest is funny, it is not FUN. But, when I finally made it to Part Three I couldn't put the book down.  Parts One and Two are necessary because they set up Part Three so don't skip them.

 Chief Bromden is a seemingly mute and deaf  patient, who, for most of the play, watches the action. ( He is a major player in the final act.)  In the book, he is the narrator who others think is mute and deaf but who clearly has a deep interest in all that is happening around him.  He is Every Man living his life and trying to make sense of life.   Sometimes his thoughts are poetic as in the following description.

"There were little brown birds occasionally on the fence; when a puff of leaves would hit the fence the birds would fly off with the wind.  It looked at first like the leaves were hitting the fence and turning into birds and flying away."

Randle Patrick McMurphy is the hero, the Individual.  He is a gambler, determined to live life on his terms.  McMurphy stirs up life within the closed-up Chief Bromden when he stirs up the patients on Nurse Ratched's ward.  He also stirs up Nurse Ratched which turns out to be his downfall.

Ron Samad as Chief Bromden and Steffen Whorton as Randle Patrick McMurphy  in The Drama Workshop's rehearsal of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest at The Glenmore Playhouse.  McMurphy has learned that Chief Bromden in not deaf and mute.

Nurse Ratched is Society, or the Combine as Chief Bromden calls it,  always interested in keeping the Individuals  under control.  She ignores Chief Bromden because she thinks he is not an issue in her ward.  Since we are seeing through Chief Bromden's eyes, we know this is a big mistake on Nurse Ratched's part.

This is Chief Bromden's description of Nurse Ratched as she recovers from a sudden anger spell.. ".all the patients start coming out of the dorms to check on what's the hullabaloo, and she has to change back before she's caught in the shape of her hideous real self."

Chief Bromden (Ron Samad) and Nurse Ratched (Gretchen Gantner) in rehearsal.  (The Drama Workshop, Glenmore Playhouse)

Because the book does not have time and place restraints as the play does, the action occurs in other places beside the ward and we learn more about the lasting effect of McMurphy's actions and his final gamble on the other inmates.

The play captures the essence of the story and is well worth seeing. But for an in depth view of the story, it is necessary to read the book.

More About Miss Grace Durrin

Miss Durrin was a legend.  She was ardent about her subject, Children's Literature, at a time when it was often dismissed as a lightweight field.  Her course was dreaded by many elementary teaching majors because it was not an easy course.  We were expected to go out of her class knowing something about children's literature, the more the better.

The big project for her class was a collection of children's poems, at least a hundred neatly typed and bound in a sturdy binder so we could use it in our classrooms.  I had been alerted to this project before I went to college by a woman I babysat for.  She offered me her book if I wanted to use it.  She was proud of the "A" she received on her selections.  She said she used her book a lot when she was teaching

I took her book though I intended to make my own choices since I have always liked poetry of all kinds.  I enjoyed reading poems and picking out my favorites but putting the book together was a major problem for me.  I was an terrible typist.

Another relic in the basement, my high school graduation gift from my parents.

In those days  the only three ways of correcting  typing errors were to use White-Out, a liquid bought in a bottle, or small  rectangles of paper covered with a chalky substance which covered up the error when typed over, or erasable typing paper.  She told us we were not allowed to use the erasable paper.  She wanted a neat collection with no errors.

I typed page after page, only to make horrible typing errors as I neared the end of the page. Then I got nervous and started making errors after typing only a word or two.  Finally, my blessed roommate took pity on me.  She typed most of my collection.  Many of the poems in my book are from the book of the woman I babysat for.

That project was one of the best projects ever required of me.  I still have the book. It's in the basement, too. The bits of white on the cover are from the label which fell off some time or another.

I used it in every classroom I ever taught in...first grade, third grade, fourth grade.

This is the first page of the four page contents list.

In Memory of Grace Durrin

She read what has become one of my favorite poems of all times in her Children's Literature course at Bowling Green State University.

The Night Will Never Stay

The night will never stay,
The night will still go by,
Though with a million Stars
You pin it to the sky;
Though you bind it with the blowing wind
And buckle it with the moon,
The night will slip away
Like sorrow or a tune.

Eleanor Farjeon

I found Miss Durrin's photo in one of those things I have saved because I have a big basement...The 1957 KEY...the Bowling Green State University yearbook.

Georgia O'Keeffe, a Review of Three Books

Georgia O'Keeffe's  painting, Cliffs Beyond Abiquiu,  was reproduced in  one of my grade school reading books.  It was my favorite of the paintings  in that book.

I have always remembered the vertical composition, the colorful cliffs and the "slit" down through the center of the vertical.  It was the smooth gradual variation of vivid color that appealed to me.  That smooth gradual variations of color  that were so much a part of much of her work are still part of what draws me to her paintings.

I began looking for Georgia O'Keeffe paintings.  Mostly, I found them in art museums Tom and I visited.  Somewhere I came across a book of her paintings in full color  in a large format book...Georgia O'Keeffe, A Studio Book, published by The Viking Press.  The book was first printed in 1976.  The copy I have is from the third printing in 1981.  Georgia O'Keeffe wrote the commentary for the paintings.

Twenty plus years ago, I was pleased when the Quality Paperback Book Club offered Georgia O'Keeffe, a biography written by Roxana Robinson in 1989. When the book arrived,  I opened it up with anticipation.  But I put the book aside after I bogged down reading about her ancestry.  I know forebears are the typical beginning of most biographies but I was reading for pleasure and the details about her ancestors were not my primary interest.

A month ago my sister loaned me The Spirit Catchers by Kathleen Kudlinski, copyright 2004 and published by Watson-Guptill Publications.  The book is part of Art Encounters, a series for young adults.  In this novel,  a fifteen year old boy meets Georgia O'Keeffe in New Mexico in the summer in the 1930s.  She befriends him and teaches him photography.  In return, he cleans her brushes and helps her with other tasks around her adobe dwelling.  Part of the story is concerned with Georgia O'Keeffe's painting, Ram's Skull with Brown Leaves, which is reproduced on the cover.

This book sent me back for another try at the Georgia O'Keeffe biography.   The book is a thick one, over five hundred pages.  There is a lot of information so there were times when I had to set it aside for a day or two so I could absorb what I had read up to that point.  She lived to be ninety-eight and had an active life for most of that time.  This time I read, looking forward to the time that would correspond with the young adult novel.

 Robinson does a good job of describing paintings Georgia was producing so I could look through the Viking Press book and find many of the paintings.  The three books provided a rounded picture, Georgia O'Keeffe as seen from different viewpoints.

She associated with many  well known artists and photographers so I learned a bit about Arthur Dove and John Marin, Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter as well as a lot about her photographer husband, Alfred Stieglitz.

Her strong will, strong opinions,  and deep commitment to her art are obvious in all three books.  It appealed to me that she believed in taking care of this earth long before "being green" and "leaving a small footprint" were  the popular messages they are today.

Earth Colors by Sarah Andrews, a Book Review

I read a lot of mysteries.  Sometimes, in the winter when the weather is bad, I will read as many as eight in a month.  Usually I get the books from the local library and that is where I found Earth Colors by Sarah Andrews.  I liked this book so much that I bought two copies, one for myself and one for my daughter who has a masters in geology.The mystery revolves around a Remington painting.  Is the painting authentic or a copy?   The sleuth is Em Hansen, a geologist looking for a subject for her master's thesis.

What, I , as a mystery reader, really want is a good entanglement where right triumphs over wrong in a few hundred pages.  Mysteries are an escape for me from the entanglements of real life where motives and solutions only evolve over years of a person's lifetime.  And Sarah Andrews provides this escape, along with interesting and believable characters, some of whom appear over and over in the series.

What makes this book different from most  mysteries is not only the amount of information Sarah Andrews incorporates about geology in general but also the history of pigments and their relationship to the geology of  Pennsylvania which she explores as the mystery progresses. Being an artist, I found that history  interesting as well as the information about analyzing those pigments which Em Hansen learns.

Sarah Andrew's thoughts on environmental issues are always interesting to me, too, and come up in other books of this series.  One of her characters in this book, Jenny, said something that impressed me so much I added it to my little book of inspiration to live by.

Jenny and Em, the geologist, are discussing how Jenny is able to maintain a happy attitude when she loses battles to preserve significant features of the landscape.  Jenny tells Em about the chestnut tree blight  that  destroyed all the chestnut trees in the eastern United States many years ago. There are still very old stumps sending up new sprouts.  The sprouts die when they reach a flowering age because the blight kills them.  These are wonderful trees, extremely rot resistant.  A person can still find barns and homes built with chestnut lumber.  Scientists have been working for years to find a way to counteract the blight.

Jenny tells Em,  "Nothing lasts forever in this world, not even blight.  So I think I'll just honor my roots and keep on sending up my sprouts."

Where Lilacs Still Bloom by Jane Kirkpatrick

Last evening I went to the Booklovers Book Club at the local library. If you like reading about American life in the early twentieth century and like flowers you will like this book. It is an easy to read biographical novel about Hulda Klager, a German housewife with an eighth grade education, who developed 254 new species of lilacs. The novel chronicles the life on farms in the early 1900's, particularly the lives of women. This was a period when women were moving beyond the traditional roles of housewife and mother.

Today, the house and garden where Hulda lived is a National Historical Site in  Woodland, Washington.  The town is near where the Lewis river meets the Columbia River, not far from the Oregon-Washington border and Portland, Oregon.

The Woodland Federated Garden Club was instrumental in saving Hulda's garden and home from being bulldozed.

The Hulda Klager Lilac Society was formed to administer the estate. The society sponsors Lilac Days in mid April through Mother's Day, an annual open house like the one Hulda began when people began to show an interest in her lilacs. There is a lot more information about the gardens at the website...

www.lilacgardens.com

Happy Birthday, Ted

I pulled this photo from one of you and your dad at the wedding. As I was going through our photo collection I found this one. It is appropriate that you are wearing a shirt proclaiming "Navy".

What I remember most about you as a child was your curiosity. I think there was a cicada in the jar.

Given your curiosity about all things it is not surprising that I associate these two books with you. You wanted me to read I Can Count to 100, Can You? by Katherine Howard with pictures by Michael J. Smollin for about a month every time I saw you which was often. You loved to count.

Counting to twenty was easy.

And shortly afterward, you were counting further.

Another book you liked was The Holes in Your Nose by Genichiro Yagvu.

This was one of your favorite pages. Even boogers lined up neatly are dirty.

Whatever you are doing today, I hope you are happy.

Love, Grandma

Happy Birthday, James

I hope your day is a happy one. The photo is pulled from one of your dad and Gretchen's wedding photos.  I  have a wonderful collection of pictures of you as you grew up. I'm glad you lived near us.

Here you are with a  stuffed monkey that was a gift from Great-Grandma-with-the-dolls. That was the name you knew my mother by since she had an enormous collection of dolls.

Books that I read to you when you were young...here they are.

The Little Mouse, The Red Ripe Strawberry, and the BIG HUNGRY BEAR by Don and Audrey Wood.

The little mouse really had a hard time protecting that strawberry.

The second book that I remember you liking was Great Day for UP by Dr. Seuss.
 

These are two of the early pages.

Even after you could easily read the book yourself, it was a book you liked to have me read to you. I think you liked the last page best of all. I'm not going to publish that page. People will have to find out about that last page some other way.

Till I see you again...Happy, happy, happy birthday.

Love, Grandma

Portrait From A Photo Update

I took the photo above on June 11. Since then, I have worked a bit now and then on the portrait. "Piddling with it" is what I call it. But on Monday, I decided to REALLY work on it. This is the result.

I have been playing around with the eyes for a while. In the photo, there is no information about eye color. One of the problems with photos is that details an artist is interested in are not always shown.

When Camille came to visit, she, her dad, and I talked about the color of her eyes. Camille decided they were "hazel" a mixture of brown, green, and blue, the kind of eyes that vary according to lighting and the clothes she is wearing.

Before I started working on the eyes, I looked through books on painting portraits to pick up any information that these artists had learned. I got useful tips from all of these, Painting Children by Benedict Rubbra, Painting Watercolor Portraits that Glow by Jan Kunz, Portraits from Life in 29 Steps by John Howard Sanden with Elizabeth Sanden and Painting Vibrant Children's Portraits by Roberta Carter Clark.

You will note that there is one more book in the photo, The Artist's Complete Guide to Facial Expression by Gary Faigin. This book has detailed information about drawing every part of the face with hundreds, maybe thousands of different drawings.   The drawings in the blue strip along the book binding are  samples and so are  the women's faces on the cover.

The table of contents... If you click on this photo, you will be able to read the contents.  Clicking on the other photos will enable you to see them in greater detail.  You can see those black blobs of eyes recorded by the camera. 

I plan to make a few more adjustments to the painting.  I haven't added the shadows of her hair on her face which give more shape to it and I have more to do with the hair.  Undoubtedly, I will find more odds and ends as I paint.

Happy Birthday, Camille

It's nice to have an up to date photo of you. That's because you came to visit us in August. I didn't read to you when you were a preschooler because you were five hundred miles away but I do know something you like to read now because you have told me you like this series.

This manga book was created by Erin Hunter, written by Dan Jolley and has art by James L. Barry.  The copyright is 2011.

I bought the first one for you because I had been buying manga books for your older brothers and I know that you like cats. Also, I remembered that when I was your age, my sisters and I enjoyed spending afternoons reading comic books
.

Your mom has told me that you like the traditional books in the Warriors series, too.  By traditional, I mean the old-fashioned kind of book I read when I was young.

   I hope your birthday was a happy one.

 Love,
 Grandma

Happy Birthday, Treven

Hi, Treven, I hope you were feeling well enough to enjoy your birthday. It has to be a bummer to spend so much time aching and feeling bad. I'm glad that bio-feedback is helping. This is the photo I took of you just before we headed back to Ohio last October.





Since your family moved 500 miles from here when you were two, I don't have memories of reading special books to you when you were young. I do have good memories of looking at the Anime style drawings you drew. Every time we visited you had a collection of new ones that you had drawn.





I was always happy when I could find a book that had drawing ideas in it that I thought you might like.  I remember finding some good how to draw hands diagrams in this book. I am not sure I sent you this book but I am almost positive I sent you the diagrams of the hands.





Enjoy your day.  Happy drawing until I see you again.  I expect Grandpa and I will visit you some time this fall.

Happy Birthday, Stephen

It wasn't long ago that you and I took a walk at Charleston Falls and I took this photo of you at the front of the limestone cave. That was a good day. I hope this was a good day, too. This year I decided to remember some of the favorite books that your cousins and you liked to have me read. I'm almost positive that your favorite when you were young was The Train to Timbuctoo. Remember the last page?

                    "From
                      Kalamazoo to Timbuctoo
                     It's a long way down the track
                     And from Timbuctoo to Kalamazoo


                     It's just as far to go back
                     From Timbuctoo to Kalamazoo
                     From Kalamazoo and back
                        A long, long way,
                            a long. long way,
                              a long way down the track.
                                   From Kalamazoo to Timbuctoo
                                      From Timbuctoo
                                           and back.