I'm sitting at my window in my studio. Four wild turkeys are sitting atop the backyard fence. 6 others are milling about the perimeter. The drizzel has stopped for the moment,winter has finally arrived, and there are a few blue patches opening in the sky. Dark clouds set off the gleam of new snow, etching the shadows of trees and gulleys along the mountain ridges. It is funny to see those dinosaur like birds on the fence, or for that matter racing along the ground. And yesterday the sun was iridescing their feathers like small coppery rainbows. The Native Americans called them the Give-Away Eagle.

My body has been in a state of descent, sloping back into itself after 4 years of constant anxiety and the last 8 months of the Covid-19 virus cutting us all off from family and friends, and the 240,000 deaths. The heart and soul is tired. How to fill that saddness and aloneliness, how to heal the divide that has opened in our beautiful United States. It is a challenge of compassion, acceptance, love, and respect.

As for my painting, the muse has been kind. My art studio looks out on forest, deer, redtail hawks, coopers hawks, a diversity of small birds. My melancholy has lead me to painting flowers. Lots of flowers. Many I've given away to those who are in need of a little joy. Family. 43 Bouquet florals, so far. Some political paintings. Some soothing landscapes.

And now, the deer have joined the backyard gathering. Mother Nature has a way of distracting from the weeping heart.

So, My website isn't quite up to where I want it. But I'm working on it a little every day, adding my new paintings as they come to me.

Poem, Dawn Revisited by Rita Dove,

"Imagine you wake up with a second chance: The blue jay

hawks his pretty wares and the oak still stands, spreading glorious shade.

If you don't look back, the future never happens. How good to rise in sunlight,

in the prodigal smell of biscuits- eggs and sausge on the grill.

The whole sky is yours to write on, blown open

to a blank page. Come on, shake a leg! You'll never know who's down there,

frying those eggs, if you don't get up and see.