Loose Leaf Notes

I didn’t waste anytime ordering a Mayflower IPA made right here in Plymouth and poured in a Red Sox glass by a Jamacian native named Shireen.

Later, it was the first time Joe and I had a Bailey’s Colada that matched the first one we had on the island of St. Croix in 1988.

It was my first time doing kareokee in public and Tom Petty’s Last Dance with Mary Jane.

The Ranger at the Plymouth Rock verified that the Pilgrims did not stop in what is now known as Plymouth because they ran out of beer (mead),.

This is the a replica of the ship that my friends’ Jayn Avery and Diane Geissler came over in.

I lived in Plymouth for a short time in the ’70s, and so it was an emotional revist with this rememberance of Massasoit holding a peace pipe, which has always moved me.

We collected rocks on the beach and named them all Plymouth Rock.  before getting ready for my niece’s wedding the next town over.

Hotel perk.

Making Joe.

In the Matrix Clone Room

Seeing spots

Where am I? Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Room at the D.C. Hirshhorn is a psychedelic experience.

Doors lead into other worlds at Laurie Anderson’s Weather exhibit also at the Hirshhorn.

There are doors and there are golden canoes for this kind of travel.

I am in the womb of the ultrasound (that’s what my friend Laura said when she saw this picture) of mother crow.

No side effects here, just one door that leads to another.

1. I have my cake and eat it too.

2. The power went out the day before my birthday, May 16. The power company said the estimated time for it to come on was midnight, so power for my birthday, May 17, alright.

3. It happens every year but this is the first year I got orchids on my gourmet carrot cake by Invisible Chef Kelly Erb.

4. HERE is the first shot of my Kelly real deal birthday carrot cake taken in 2005 when my blog was brand new.

6. Joe’s bee picture (above) that he made at a Spikenard Bee Sanctuary retreat is titled, “There’s a buzz about you today.”

7. Having a birthday right after Mother’s Day is a little like having a birthday after Christmas.

8. We squeezed my birthday in the day before a long road trip and in between me scrambling to get control of a mouse infestation in the attic crawl space where the mice were living and where I found a notebook of old poems from when I was a teenager and in my early ’20s that I had completely forgot about.

9. I was finding my voice but it was often more dramatic than truthful, more romanticized, and I was trying to be older than I was. I found a manuscript I had submitted somewhere called Blue Drummer and one of my first poems titled China Cup.

10. From author Matt Labash: “Read more than you write.  I once had a sickeningly prolific friend say that he now writes more than he reads. This made me never want to read him again.  It’s your duty, as a writer – any kind of writer – to always keep filling your tank. And you can’t just do that by huffing your own fumes. You have to always be on the hunt for things that inspire, that amuse, that somehow open up the world to your readers.  If nothing can capture your imagination, how are you supposed to capture the imagination of others? There’s no surer way to do this than to make a habit of reading writers who are better than you.  In my case, that gives me a large pool to choose from.  The more good words you pour into your funnel from others, the more good words are likely to come out the other end.  If you’re a writer, you’re forever a student – you don’t get to graduate.  So keep reading.”

11. I read more when I was younger and lately have thought of myself as a moderate reader who writes more than I read. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that I am an avid reader, but one who reads articles and news stories, who researches more than reading novels and literature, who enjoys music and song lyrics, who reads memoirs of artists, writers and poets, who is inspired by art shows and jumps around from subject to subject that interest me, psychology, dreams, quantum space, language, flowers, politics, fashion, history and more.

12. How come age isn’t like art or poetry? / How come it’s hard cold facts? / A labeled box that never fits / A branded number that follows your name / And just when you get used to it – it changes!

13. China Cup: I’m a piece of china made in heaven for you / My cup is blue with some chips and cracks along the glass / If you’re gentle I’ll last a lifetime / But if you’re unkind I may break this time

____________Thirteen Thursday

_______Wordless Wednesday

-The following first appeared in The Floyd Press on May 12, 2022.

Art admirers were mesmerized by the vibrant colors and swirling textures of Anna Pittman’s alcohol ink art featured in Pitman’s Saturday exhibit at Deer Park Farm’s Shanti Meditation Hall in Pilot.

One attendee of the May 7 event asked Pittman how she goes about creating such patterns.

“Did you use a brush?”

Pittman said the paintings were moved by her breath, a straw, a hair dryer, or maybe the pads of her fingers.

Director of The Breathing Space, Pittman offers online Hatha Yoga classes and teacher trainings, meditation and self-awareness programs and classes, as well as counseling and coaching out of her home in Blacksburg.

She had never made art before immersing herself in the alcohol ink medium with the challenge of doing one painting a day as a meditative and therapeutic practice that she refers to as “play.”

Pittman said she doesn’t know ahead of time what will be created, but once a theme emerges, she goes with it. Occasionally, she uses a stencil, a permanent marker, a foam sponge, or she overlays acrylics onto her work, which she describes as an emerging process that involves following a fluid flow.

For more than a year Pittman has been posting art with titles like Morning Musings, Big Moon Night, Spring in Progress, Beauty is a Message and more on her Facebook page, where she sometimes asks her followers to suggest a title. “I feel like in ten years, I’ll be where I want to be,” Pittman said about her emerging art process.

Various sized paintings done on photo or yupo (a synthetic paper made from polypropylene), some framed and some applied to canvas, were offered for sale by donation at the exhibit.  Attendees enjoyed a spread of refreshments that included teas, tomato cheese bruschetta and roasted vegetables from the Deer Park Farm’s gardens. __________Colleen Redman

-The following is the poem I wrote and read at my friend Alwyn Moss’s (November 3, 1926 – April 21, 2022)  memorial service at the Quaker House in Blacksburg, where there was music, poems and Open Worship sharing and story telling. The second poem I read, First Tree (a gingko) is one of Alwyn’s from Remembering Their Names- A Gathering Time, her poetic legacy. 

Where the Grass is Greener

“I never found a 4-leaf clover”
she told a lover in a dream
then repeated it to me
and I heard it as an epitaph
her essence distilled
in depth mythology

I imagined that I pressed one
into her frail open hand
the one from my brother Danny’s wallet
that I took from his apartment when he died

It was sealed in cellophane
embossed with gold letters
‘Good Luck’ wishes for its lucky owners
Still hinting green and faintly scented
the way her Yorkshire tea
almost smells like kelp

He needed the purchased luck
for the hope of a liver transplant
when he wasn’t sick enough
to be high on the waiting list
and then was deemed too sick
to survive it

And what would she spend her luck on?
To save her songbirds? Her feral cats?
To write a new poem
reach age 95?
To drink tea with friends
squirrels and wrens
on her patio?

She never found a four-leaf clover
or saw the Everglades
but she remained faithful
and left behind a windfall
in the name of nature’s holy spirit

Will we all need a lucky ticket
to arrive where the grass is greener?
And will we remember
the luck that brought us together
the lived-out days
and the ordinary ways
we gave our time
and our love
to each other

Colleen Redman

First Tree

There was only one tree on the block
where I was a child. A single messenger
from woods I rarely saw.
A pale slim thing set in some sand and earth
behind a ring of metal spokes.
By who? What angel set it there?

Not maple or an oak
but some kind that could breathe
despite the gas and dust and howls of sirens
from the hospital six lanes across Broadway.

Winters the leafless stalk shed half its bark
Leaving dark patches on the paler skin below.
In spring the miracle!
And more the miracle on that bleak block
Of dirty brick and cracked concrete;
sprigs of green coming out in long twirls
Until there they were, flat and clean
like open hands above us as we played.

Love? For that?
Even the branches were too frail to climb
Although we tried. Yet decades later that single tree –
erect and small in the long corridor
of grey lives in my eyes
holding my childhood on its thin arms
like laundry on a line:
first snow that turned the pavement slippery but fun.
The moist dim basement where giant cockroaches lived
under the old washing machines.
The wheelchair child’s shrill laughter,
full moons over the water towers

Ah tree, you made the world a promise
Your quiet breath at night beneath my city window
helped me sleep, entered my dreams,
told me secrets from another realm.
Still remembered…the secrets have come true.

Alwyn Moss

Read Alwyn’s obituary HERE.

We were lucky to have know her. She may not have found a four-leaf clover, but “the secrets have come true.” Thanks, to all of her extended chosen family who manifested her memorial as Alwyn wanted and took care of her in her last years better than some with biological families, which Alwyn didn’t have.

Picking a poem for a reading
is like playing spin the bottle
when you’re 13 years’ old

Do you want to be picked?
Are you rewarded with a kiss?
or happy with your lucky miss?

_______Colleen Redman / Poets and Storytellers United

1. One of my nicknames as a girl was “colly dog,” but I’m actually more of a watchdog because I follow the news like a hound.

2. Some people knit. I thrift shop and then spend hours sewing the clothes I found to make them fit.

3. Looking for shoes on Amazon is like looking at suspects in a police line-up, and they keep posting duplicates to trick me.

4. We just got a new electric massage chair and I’ve started to enjoy teasing Joe with ‘you’re going to get the chair!’

5. Mother’s Day Love.

6. Sheryl Crow wrote THIS song for her sons and it really chokes me up.

7. When I image googled Lady Slippers (a wild orchid) to see what colors they come in, actual lady’s slippers for the feet came up. More from Name That Bloom HERE.

8. Cinderella’s Lost Lady Slipper / If the shoe fits, wear it / If the song lifts, hear it / Don’t wait till midnight.

9. “Falling in love can be exhilarating, but it isn’t the secret to happiness per se. You might more accurately say that falling in love is the start-up cost for happiness—an exhilarating but stressful stage we have to endure to get to the relationships that actually fulfill us… the secret to happiness isn’t falling in love; it’s staying in love. This does not mean just sticking together legally: Research shows that being married only accounts for 2 percent of subjective well-being later in life. The important thing for well-being is relationship satisfaction, and that depends on what psychologists call “companionate love”—love based less on passionate highs and lows and more on stable affection, mutual understanding, and commitment…” More from The Type of Love That Makes People Happiest – The Atlantic, HERE.

10. You vow not to forget love’s lasting imprint when life has been spent and time no longer counts you. More HERE.

11. We discovered the lady slipper croppings off the Blue Ridge Parkway at the Smart View Recreation Area, which the National Park Service said was named for the “right smart views.”

12. On the Smart View trail you will find this Trail Family Cabin, no relation.  “Built by W. J. Trail in the 1880s, the cabin is typical of the early style Appalachian cabin. “This one-room cabin style was common in the area. Oftentimes the initial home was a simple structure—people needed a decent shelter fast so that they could move on to other activities that sustained their livelihood. Over time, as families grew and became more established on the land, extensions would be added to the house or a new home might be constructed nearby. Once this cabin no longer served as a home, it was used as a barn.” -National Park Service

13. “When I haven’t any blue, I use red.” Picasso

____________Thirteen Thursday

_________Wordless Wednesday

-The following first appeared in The Floyd Press on May 5, 2022.

The rainy weather held off for the 3rd annual Mayfaire at the Floyd Center for the Arts on Sunday.

The 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. free-to-the-public event featured May Pole dancing with the Mystical Witches dance troupe, kid’s activities, artist vending, live music and more.

The pending forecast that only manifested in a few late thunder claps caused much of the festivities to be moved indoors,

but the Mystical Witches, a non-profit dance troupe that raises money for charities and causes, performed outside around the May Pole in their spring apparel of flower garlands, ribbons and bright colors.

They also presented May Pole weaving instruction for children, along with making posy baskets for lilacs and bubble play.

Face painting, crafts, artist and food vending and live music took place inside.

Attendees enjoyed performances by Cave Man Jones, Lester Weddle, Paul Lemay, Brad Collier, Stella Trudel, and Virginia Hollow.

Some took in the FCA’s Clay and Glass exhibition in the Hayloft Gallery.

-The following first appeared in The Floyd Press on May 5, 2022. 

Seussical Jr. is the Floyd County High School Theater Department’s latest musical production, scheduled to be presented in the school’s auditorium on Friday, May 6 at 6 p.m., Saturday May 7 at 2 p.m. and Sunday May 8 at 2 p.m.

Directed by teacher Emily Williams, the play features the talents of 24 high school drama students, both seasoned performers and first-time stage actors.

On Monday afternoon, the cast performed a full-dress rehearsal, bringing the fantastical world of Dr. Seuss to life with dazzling costumes, detailed sets, stage lighting and quality song and dance numbers.

Good intentions, monkey business, a circus and a court scene are all part of the entertaining drama as Horton the Elephant (played by Disharoon Orr) hears a Who and tries to convince others that “a person is a person, no matter how small.”

“I’ve never been so proud of a show as I am of this one. The collaborative effort from an adult crew and the student cast has resulted in an amazing show,” Williams writes in the program’s Director Note.

“Over the past twelve weeks, these kids have learned a song a day, dancing for close to three solid hours while singing. Their stamina is amazing.”

Williams also gave a shout-out to the generosity of community members who stepped up and provided help and resources to create the “stage magic” that the production achieves.

________Colleen Redman

1. Interesting how human fingerprints and tree rings look so similar.

2. And that bullies spell bull and lies.

3. I got #2 from watching Severance, which is like Stepford Wives meets the Matrix or The Good Place gone wrong.

4. Break a leg or shake a leg?

5. “The Devil doesn’t need an advocate.” – My friend Warren on Facebook

6. “My striving after stillness was a noisy affair, I discovered. It seemed raucous and fitful and poorly planned. I could be wrong about stillness, though. If it isn’t fitfull after all, then the simpler conclusion might be that I’m just not very good at it. Trying to still your life is something between a pinky swear with whatever ordains you and an arm wrestle with your nature. That’s what I found.” – Stephen Jenkinson

7. Life etches itself / like tattoos I can’t hide / Truth is hard enough / Lies are insult to injury / Time’s sea level is rising / I’m preparing to drown / I’m preparing to love water / and to hold my breath / Life etches itself / where love collects – Read After Katherine’s Year of Haiku in its entirety HERE.

8. Haiku is like Chinese food, I’m hungry again an hour after reading it.

9. I think of April as a fling, whereas May could be the real thing.

10. When I was 13 my hair went white in a streak on one side of my head (segmental vitiligo). This is my new white streak.

11. Check out THIS Monkey Business.

12. We have A Little Monkey Business business in Floyd.

13. They Blinded Me with Science HERE.

__________Thirteen Thursday