Life

Desert Moonset with Headlights

/ Merilee / 4 Comments

When I go to the desert, there are many things that I see over and over and over again.  They are views that are like family.  Sometimes when I see these things I think, “One day I’ll paint that.”, even though I immediately tell myself that’s just dumb.

“Why would you paint that?  How could you even begin to paint that?  No one will understand why you chose to do it, so why?”  But I keep looking at it thinking how beautiful it is.  And how that particular view gives me an odd sense of comfort.

When I go to Tecopa, which is where I stay when I go to Death Valley, I always stay in the exact same room.  It’s my room.  My home-away-from-home.  I get up very early in the morning, usually around 4:00.  I go outside to look at the sky to see the Milky Way and the stars while coffee is brewing in the little coffee maker I take with me.  When I look to the west, I always see the headlights or taillights of a car or a truck driving up or down Highway 127.  I like seeing the headlights appear and disappear as the vehicle drives behind the mud hills that line the road as it goes through this portion of the Amargosa Basin, on it’s way to the tiny town of Shoshone.  If the wind is just right, I sometimes can hear the engine of the car and I always wonder, where the heck are you going at 4am???  It’s four o’clock in the morning.  Where are you going?  But they are always there, no matter what time it is.  The headlights. They are like friends.

A couple of days ago, something inside me said, “It’s time.  It’s time to paint the headlights.”  So, armed with a few terrible, blurry,  half-assed iPhone pictures and my mind and memories equipped with feelings and visions from probably close to 15 years of seeing this every time I go to my room in the desert, I decided to paint it.  For Valentine’s Day.  It’s something that is close to my heart.

Oil on canvas

20″ x 24″

Tecopa, California

A Halloween Story

/ Merilee / 3 Comments

Halloween.  It’s always been my favorite holiday.

I never liked carving pumpkins.  I didn’t like scooping out the pumpkin guts after school on Halloween when I was a little kid.  It was usually a little chilly out and the slimy seeds made my hands hurt.  I never quite liked the faces I carved.  I didn’t think they were good enough.

My mother, however, made Halloween spectacular.  She had an old, antique dress form that she would put out on the front porch of our house that she dressed up as a witch in her old clothes.  There was a large, antique cauldron that was dragged out from the back yard and placed in front of the witch.  She would get the not-so-fresh produce out of the fridge and throw it into the pot with water to make a “soup”, then float marshmallows all over the top that had eyeballs drawn on them.

Somewhere she managed to find a Robert Redford record album of wolf calls that was put onto a turntable in the living room window.  Wolves repeatedly howled over and over again.  It was just plain cool.

Usually I had a sheet over me with holes cut out for eyes like Charlie Brown.  Sometimes I was a witch.  A witch or a ghost were my go-to’s.  With an old pillow case as my candy bag, I was set and ready to go trick or treating.

There was that one house in the neighborhood everyone was terrified of.  Mrs. Breen’s house.  She had an overgrown front yard and a dilapidated house.  Everyone said she was a witch and that she baked rat hair into the cookies she left on a plate on her front porch for the children to take.  No one took them.  As I look back on it, Mrs. Breen was probably a nice lady.  I feel badly that no one took those cookies.

When I got home from trick or treating, I’d dump my bag out onto the floor to sort out the good stuff from the not so good.  Big candy bars, of course, were the good stuff.  The candy pillowcase lasted for a few weeks.  I’d have some candy after school every day until the not so good candies got tossed.

Halloween was exciting and mostly, creative.  It was a way to temporarily not be myself and be something else, instead.

Happy Halloween!  Go out and be creative.

From the cemeteries of New Orleans, Louisiana

 

Trees and Bees Make It Better

/ Merilee / 4 Comments

I had to have some trees removed from my yard recently.  Last weekend, in fact.  Birch trees.  They had a disease.

The birch trees had actually been sick for a long time, but I didn’t want to face it.  Each year my gardener or the tree man would come out and cut a little bit more off the tops where the branches and trunks had died back.  They were struggling to put out their leaves in spring, almost as if they had to think about it for awhile, wondering if they wanted to do it one more year.  Should they continue to move onward?…or let life go.

I had to make the decision for them.  It made me very sad.

This whole past year has been sad, really.  It was a year ago today that I went to the San Joaquin Valley to drive the Fresno Blossom Trail with my friend.  The panic over Coronavirus had already started, toilet paper was a hot commodity and Costco had none.  Paper towels and napkins were missing, too, which I thought was weird.  Why were people buying up paper goods?  I couldn’t wrap my head around it.  The Panic Buying of 2020.  It was super-bizarre.

There was talk.  Other countries were struggling with the virus and President Trump was calling it the “China Flu”, which irritated me.  I thought it was a childish thing to say.  My friend and I ate outside at a restaurant and discussed Coronavirus.  She tried to educate me about how bad it really was and I did not want to face it.  This wasn’t really going to happen, I told myself.  But I had a deep sense that it was, and that it was going to be a very bad thing.

We drove out into the orchards on a beautiful day with fluffy, white clouds and breezes, admiring the almond trees in full bloom with bees flying all around.  Peaches and nectarines, too, all dressed in their frilly, pink blossoms.  It’s a sight to behold when the landscape is divided into large rectangles of color.  Whites and pinks of all kinds, stretched out in rows.

Sometimes we saw bee boxes stacked up here and there next to the orchards with swarms of bees flowing back and forth, from flowers to hives.  It’s fascinating, really, to sit inside your car and watch them.

I like bee boxes.  Some are all white, while other stacks are of different colors, which makes them cheerful.  I think bees and bee boxes are happy things.

Bees showed up in my photographs from that day as little black dots zooming over the trees.  I thought about eliminating them, but decided not to.  Why would you do that when the whole point of the photographs is to tell the story of the orchards?  Bees buzzing and making blurry dots in the photographs are a reality.  So they stayed.

Until now, I never did anything, really, with those photographs.  I didn’t feel like it.  I haven’t felt like doing anything at all during the Pandemic.  For a whole year I have done not much other than garden.  The last time I was in Death Valley was in March 2020 right before California shut down.  I came home from my last journey to Death Valley and the Eastern Sierra Nevada right when the state closed.  My local market was empty.  The produce section had been cleaned out as had the meat and dairy sections.  There were no eggs.  Even Stouffer’s lasagna was missing from the freezer section.  Don’t ask about toilet paper or Lysol.

Thankfully paper products weren’t an issue for me and I figured out how to deal with food.  I stayed on my property and cleaned my house, over and over again.  I worked in the garden and became addicted to the news, simply because I wanted to understand what was happening with Covid-19 and…what was going to happen to us all?

I have had to go through troubling and sad times in my life, just like everyone else.  Some years are really great, while other years are filled with grief and sad things, bad people and situations.  It’s part of the ebb and flow of life.  But 2020 really, to me, was deeply disturbing for everyone on the planet.  Not just me.  I actually have had it relatively easy.  Thankfully few people that I know have contracted Coronavirus.  My gardener did, though.  He said he thought he was going to die.  He couldn’t breathe and had a fever that made him feel like he was on fire.  He told his wife he didn’t think he was going to make it.

Hearing about the thousands upon thousands of people who have passed due to this horrible virus along with job losses, people having no food to eat, and losing their homes has taken its toll on me mentally and emotionally, but so has the political environment.  I think that has depressed me almost more than Covid-19.  The fighting and more fighting.  Politicians lying and selling their souls for their careers.  Backstabbing and more-than-usual-icky-behavior on the part of lawmakers and leaders.  Lies and riots.  I became physically sick to my stomach from the events of January 6.  There was no reason for that ever to have happened.

Social media has become a toxic place that I don’t really like visiting any longer.  Ten years ago I liked Facebook.  It was fun.  But it’s not fun anymore.  I have an account with very few friends.  I deactivate my Instagram constantly, even though there are artists and photographers whose work I like to look at.  The world has become a very divided and ugly place with angry people.  It depresses me, and there really is nothing I can do about any of it except to do my part with staying home, wearing a mask when I do go out and to try to not listen to the news.

When my trees were taken out last weekend, it made me feel badly.  I knew that the trees knew that they had to go, but that didn’t make it any better.  It was a death from a virus that is not controllable and it’s killing trees in Southern California.  I still have two more that need to go, but I’m waiting to see if they send out any leaves.

A few days after the trees were removed, I decided to take a drive.  I had to.  I needed some way to get myself out of the depressed state I had been in for months on end.  I headed up to the San Joaquin Valley for just one day, alone in my car, knowing I would encounter no person.  Just trees.  I needed to go back out to the orchards to see the blossoms and bee boxes.  I knew they would make me feel better.

And they did.