DisCo Is Here and Filled With Memories.

BEFORE my mother died she told my sister and me that she had "gotten rid" of all the love letters our father wrote her while he was in the Army during World War II.
We were heartbroken and as I remember it she couldn't understand why.
She didn't know, however (or at least I don't think so), that there were many rainy October Saturdays when my sister and I would sneak downstairs, go into her bedroom, and search the back of her lingerie drawer for those very letters. They were wonderful!
Well, I don't know how my own children will feel about the love letters between their father and me before we were married. We were officially together 26 years - a good chunk of time - but it's been over for (officially, again) 18 years now.
When I was looking for something to add to my DisCo Project - I knew I wanted to bind up the book sections to make another book - I was frantic. Nothing was right. I slowed down and took a careful look around the room and came up with this: old love letters. Pieces of my past. Sections of heartache. Promises unfulfilled. Longing, desire, plans for the future.
What better to add to weathered bits of paper than weathered bits of promise and hope?
Holes were punched and I bound them in such a way that the letters can't be taken out and read. Peeks may be obtained of some of the pages - a word here and there - but unless the book is taken apart they cannot be read in their entirety.
This, I think, is like the past. A word overheard now and again, a glimpse of a person's face as you passed their doorway, but the entire picture can't be put together with these few bits. And even if the letters are read someday, I don't think anyone can fully appreciate this once happy couple's dreams and plans. Still harder to find in these clippings are the reasons the marriage failed.
It certainly didn't fail because of these letters. Like most plans, it failed because of miscommunication, pride, ego and the inability to put yourself in another's shoes.
I think I will probably add more to this book. Maybe love letters from another gentleman after the 26-year marriage ended. Maybe not. Maybe those are for burning - femminismo
(edited Aug. 2 for grammar)

DisCo Project . . . Coming!

IF I'm not mistaken, tomorrow is the unveiling of the DisCo Projects we promised Seth Apter we would construct from the elements we exposed to the winter winds, snows and frosts - or baking heat. It all depended on whether we were in the Northern Hemisphere or the Southern.
I have been working on it and August 1 has sneaked up until it's living right next door to me!
Oh, the shock to look at the calendar and realize we're almost run out of July. Strawberries, gone until next year. Dogwood tree starting to show color. (Sad, but true.)
However we still have watermelon ahead and corn on the cob and lots of green beans fresh from the garden. And peaches! So I guess there's plenty of things to look forward to.
Check back here for the DisCo Project tomorrow and I'll try not to disappoint. (But don't check too early in the day.) - femminismo

Photo is labeled "Scientific Discovery" in the Life magazine archives. Taken in 1964 by photographer Arthur Rickerby.

DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA (or conjecture) what "scientific discovery" had just been made in this photo above? Did someone disgusting just walk into the room? The professor's wife, maybe? Hah! I like that answer. The girls don't look too happy and the professor looks a teensy bit ill at ease. Wait! Maybe not his wife. Maybe ... his ... MOTHER!
"Mother! What are you doing out of your room?" (He does look a little like Tony Perkins.)

A Truly Global Education - For Anyone.

YOU don't have to be rich, just determined, to get a great education.
And you probably won't find the directions dumped in your lap. It's going to take some research and asking questions on your own.
While it might seem (to some) a little reckless to send your children off to other countries to get an education, when your teenager's brain is eager to learn and experience new places and cultures *then* is the time to use that to your advantage. And education in other countries can be just as good - and often much cheaper - than education in the United States.
Remember my blog about Maya Frost and her book "The New Global Student"? Well, here is a link to the article I wrote for The Hillsboro Argus newspaper. Follow it to read more about the Frosts and their unconventional and successful search for a better, global education for their girls.
Then check Maya's Web site.
I also have a couple of pictures of the work I'm doing on the DisCo Project suggested by Seth Apter at The Altered Page. Our winter-weathered Disintegration Project is becoming something else - to be unveiled completely August 1. But for now just two little glimpses.
Left, tied bundles of pages getting glue and glitter on the edges. At right, the pages laid out flat.
(I've visited a little over half of his participants in the Buried Treasure cooperative project and discovered lots of brilliant new geniuses. I hope to visit a lot of them again soon.)
Now off to bed - femminismo
solet's

"Wild Aim" Self-Portrait Wednesday.

TAKING a cue from another blogger, I decided to take random photos for SP Wednesday and not really aim. Just see what happened.
Well, I got photos of sky, ground and nothing much else. So much for random. I tried being just a little bit more focused, but not looking at the camera during the shot. Just sort of before.
I'm also down-sizing my photos, per Susan Sanford's suggestion -- and it's a good one. (Do go check out her "Nature Boy" today!) I put huge photos on this blog, and I suppose they take many computers a while to "work" with them. But I just love seeing everyone's work up close and in detail. I'll bet most of you know what I mean.
In one of these photos it looks like my face is melting off. My earrings are a long, almost solid, blur. The sky and trees look wavy and shimmery.
The lilies had no smell, by the way. Just looked wonderful -- creamy ivory color. I probably have orange dust on the end of my nose. I haven't checked yet. Just took these and rushed them to you before they were even dry!
I think in one of the photos, the one with the big white slash of sky above, my nose looks swollen, like it found a bee -- or a bee found me.
I've begun my Disco project and I think I might have stumbled on an idea tonight. Can't wait to see where it leads me.
And, oh, yeah, I had that thing done today where you stand by the big humming, ice-cold machine and have your breasts ironed flat, only not with heat. Good for me. I made my yearly appointment and KEPT it. How about you other ladies out there? - fEmmInIsMo

Can You Imagine? Well, Can You?

FIRST, imagine you want to make a book from rectangles of painted folded paper. But you don't want to stitch them together.
So then imagine your brain says, "What if we just fold them down the middle and punch holes in the edges and tie them together?" This must have been my right brain talking. (That's right; my brain. We're talking about me and all the painted paper I've been blobbing away at.)
So you fold back the edges and discover there is no way this will work. The brain, left one maybe, says, "Hold on, now. This won't do."
Somewhere in the middle the brains meet and after a couple of days and several observations later, it's decided by everyone that a smaller fold will take place at each edge - one up, one down - and then the pages will be glued together to form a long, long book. A book that can be written on front and back, with the reader scanning over words and images on both sides.
What will the book be about? Who knows for now. Time for both brains to get busy and cooperate since the folding and gluing has been done.
While that is drying I gathered up my Disintegration Project to begin A DisCo (Discovery?) Project with the weathered goods. Literally weathered! Do you remember this picture? Ice storm late in the year and I rushed home to take photos. (Yes, certifiable-crazy.)
Tonight I have painted the dried pages, deciding for the time being to keep them pretty much "as is," except for one picture matte-gelled onto the front of a book section. This work is keeping me sane. That is my mantra. And I have a question here: Does anyone else get nervous when they upload photos and Blogger tells them they've used up 71% of their picture storage? I'm so addicted to blogging by now that they could probably charge any price and I'd pay it. But don't tell them I said so, OK? - femminismo

Deadline, deadlines, deadlines all month long!

PROCRASTINATION is one of my strongest qualities.
Wait! Did I hear someone say procrastination is not a "quality"? There are all sorts of qualities you know. Good ones and not so good ones. What if procrastination saved you from getting run over by a bus? Not such a bad quality then, huh?
Anyway, I knew this day was coming. Seth at The Altered Page e-mailed to remind me and others of the upcoming deadline for our Disintegration Projects (DisCo for short), Aug. 1.
We need to take the projects and turn them into something else. You can use everything you "aged" or part of it for your new project. The picture (altered itself, quite a bit in photo editing) shows my bundle of papers from the book "Master of Ballentrae" by Robert Louis Stevenson. Out in the muddy garden through a good part of the winter -- now totally dry, hidden in a corner of the kitchen on the floor near the heating vent. Waiting ... waiting ... waiting.
What will they be? What will they become? Next purpose in life, please! Time to consider the possibilities - femminismo

May Day and the Eerie Wind

THIS AFTERNOON, if we lived in California, you might have thought the Santa Ana winds were kicking up a storm. But it was just an odd sort of very warm Oregon wind loping through our local area. It felt so very good after a week of cool temperatures, with mornings in the frosty 30s just a couple days ago.
But this isn't the Weather Channel, so enough about the wind. How about some "Animal Planet"? I was over by the window and could still hear the birds chirping away outside and it's almost 9 p.m. Do you suppose Mama and Papa Bird have to do 3 o'clock feedings? Well, someone was making themselves heard outside in the camellia bushes!
Speaking of birds - and one subject does seem to lead to another - I was outside in the garden earlier and, between the mourning doves cooing and the empty spot in the garden where the Disintegration Project used to be, things seemed a little mournful. That is, until I noticed how very well my transplanted lupine is doing and how the Solomon's seal is forming its floral pendants. And how very lusciously lovely the tree peonies look.
Now the project that Seth started among 123 artists, in many parts of the world, has ended ... sort of. The Disintegration Discovery - DisCo - begins, and we'll see where we go from here. Here is a bit of what the tied pages look like after four months outside laying on the ground. Can you see the glittery slug trails? Click on it to make the picture larger. Not too lovely, are they, these aged things? Have we learned something about the ravages of time here? But look at the character! They made it through rain, wind, snow, hail and freezing weather. Does this tell us something about perseverance?
Here is the project on the very first day, laid out in the garden, pristine and white with just a touch of gesso to protect the pages a bit.
OK, just a couple more pictures of the loveliness from the garden and then I'm off to bed. Tulip petticoats in yellow with a touch of red.
And this white fluted-edge tulip does look like a white slip a lady might discretely reveal by crossing her legs oh so graciously.
Flowers are such sexy things! - femminismo
p.s. Here's a lady who knows it's true.