Amy C Collins

the luxury of lying down

(and the haul of getting up again).

 

Yesterday afternoon, after spending four hours in the garden (I only almost cried over the physical task of setting tomato stakes - that's almost - but didn't) and a delicious lunch, I laid down in my fresh sheeted bed and fell hard into sleep. We're talking dreaming. An hour later I climbed back into my gardening attire, popped a teeth-stinging Cadbury (mini) Creme egg that the Easter Bunny left me, and went back to it.

The luxury of stretching horizontal after a day of good labor must be one of the richest rewards known to man.

 

Clean skin, clean sheets

a fan spinning gently overhead

my body relaxes, my muscles seem to 

sink into the mattress,

like falling, or melting

a Thank You 

for the rest.

 

OK, bad poetry aside, I've been busy in the garden, still. I'm hoping to taper off ongoing projects, maybe eliminate one or two, and get things in working order, set for mere maintenance and less ingenuity and innovation. I want to steer my creativity back to writing fiction, before I forget how. And yet, I've got bulbs on the brain, weeding then mulching, (should I order a couple more, just a couple more shrubs for that back drop layer?), stringing up a moon vine trellis, and ... At least the veggies are in, beans and cucumbers are up, lots of blooms showing out, the visual rewards already rolling in. 

But it's not only the garden I've been busy with. Aside from a short trip to Georgia - another incredible afternoon of Uncle Dennis' famous cooking, baseball and general merriment, much like a July 4th I wrote about two years ago: a perfect july 4th - I've been busy preparing for an art show next weekend at Jack-O-Lantern Farm.

My Cartoon Fridays have found their way into notecards and t-shirts, alongside prints and notecards of some of my color pencil paintings. This is the first time I will exhibit work I'm hoping to sell, spread out, wide open, exposed to ready opinions and, dreaded indifference. Not that I'm experiencing any anxiety about it.  

 

"If we do not find anything pleasant, at least we shall find something new." - Voltaire, 1694-1778

 

The hustle to prepare my images for printing, for screen printing, and the outward, forward thought required for organizing an event has left me, at moments, with head spinning, and a very strong desire to run back to my little room, sit quietly still, staring at the blank page, meandering the fictional paths of 'what if'. Writing is, at least, free. I'm trying to think positive, expecting to make back investment. (Mother, take note, you are strictly prohibited from buying anything from me) I'm working on getting my Etsy shop set up as well - ACollinsArt - hopefully before Saturday. If my market isn't in Florence, Alabama, maybe it's in Atmautluak, Alaska. Who knows?

Well, a short and sweet post this week. It's only 10 a.m. and I've a bunch, but a bunch, of things to do. And at the end of the day, TO DO List made (we hope) shorter, the reward of an ice-cold beer, a comfy chair, and the luxury of lying down, awaits me. 

 

 

If you're in town, come on down to JOL on Garage Road in Muscle Shoals this Saturday, April 30th from 9 a.m. until 2 p.m. to see my work in person and a bunch of other, very talented local artists!

spring teaming

Searching Out

The last couple years I lived in Manhattan my desire for private outdoor space and my impatience with mobbed public transportation grew in tandem, and exponentially. In pure and blind irony, I left the 8 million strong New York for a 13 million crowded Buenos Aires, where I had the good fortune to settle into a friend's former apartment at the end of a dead end street abutting a polo field and with a balcony that overlooked the tree-lined, bricked mall down its center. Wicker chairs and a small table provided me with the perfect breezy solitude for sipping coffee, or wine, for reading, or just sitting. I was in heaven. For about three months. The condition was a temporary excursion, a detour.

It was another two years before I realized my long desire for private outdoor space would entail digging in the dirt - gardening - in Alabama no less. First begun on something resembling a whim, I'm heading now into my fourth year as a hobby gardner. The space has expanded out, up, in color, depth and richness. And I am thrilled and enthralled, again, with the excitement and expectation of new growth. This year's garden is going to look even better than last year's.

I guess sometimes we know what we want, what we need, subconsciously, and without recognizing it until it is fully upon us, we somehow manage to steer ourselves in the right direction. If we're lucky, once we've arrived, we appreciate it before it's too late, before it has passed.

Digging In

I've been busy in the garden. Tomatoes, beans, cucumbers, peppers and various herbs are planted already, with a few more on the way. I'm getting more into flowers this year than I have before and enjoying the colorful blooms as they adorn and disguise the veggies-to-be. I made a trip to the Sale Barn last week to see Claudia and buy up her beautiful starts (Sun Sugar tomatoes, Long Red Cayenne, something new to me - salad Burnet, a perennial herb that tastes like cucumber - foxgloves and columbines. Claudia sells her organic starts under the name Plants Plus out of Collinwood, Tennessee. I see her once a year and she's always smiling, and very busy.

 I love walking around the Sale Barn, open Tuesdays 6 a.m. to Noon, with tables of junk and off-color t-shirts, plants and vegetables. It's a place where old men go to meet-up, to check in on their friends, where the skilled offer wooden handles for any number of garden tools, and the solicitous pawn $3 DVDs and kid's Hot Rods. It's like walking through the Union Square Farmer's Market in NYC, only the beep and roar of surrounding traffic is replaced by the mooing of up-for-auction cattle calling across barn stalls.

Back at the house, milling around the yard, I discovered a nesting Carolina Wren, incubating. These wrens always remind me a little of chickens, and she gave me a corresponding, one-eyed look of question and threat, then jolted from the house, causing me to step backward too quickly, and in a perfect comedic display of rotating arms, I nearly fell down the ladder and over a pile of rocks. Inside, were five little eggs, one of them not matching, and which I suspect may be from a Brown Headed Cowbird - those parasitic avians. 

On the other side of the drive I checked on another bird house where days earlier I found an aging nest from last year occupied by a dozen brown and black caterpillars. But they had moved out, in search of food, or a place to cocoon. Instead, I found a small colony of red and black ants watching over a dozen or more ant eggs. But when I returned several hours later, having pulled out the old nest and left the bird house door open, they too had moved out, and taken the eggs with them. My curiosity was peaked. I'm wondering about the hidden lives of insects, teeming and moving about, like the easy drawling Sale Barn patrons, like my occupation with planting the beds. 

I've vowed to enjoy every minute of harvesting and monitoring the vegetables this year, no matter how much it takes me away from writing. And I've sworn not to get so angry with the problem insects. They're just doing what is in their nature. Cows moo, old men swap stories, Cowbirds leave their young to be raised by other species, Japanese beetles eat everything, and I get to witness and take note, all of us leading private lives, and still, we're all in it together, more exposed than I imagine we know. 

 

loaded wagons and slippery phantoms

Mantra for the week:

When one is towing a wagon load of burning aspirations, sooner or later the mirage of completed projects-to-be will fade, the thirst forgotten, and quite possibly a good idea, or a great idea, will be lost in the desert forever. The demand of each weighs heavily on borrowed time - some ideas hang around longer than others, though perhaps no more worthy than those which fleet.  

You don't know until it's completed if the idea works or not. In the mind, the potential for genius is enormous and prisitine. But that lives only in the mind of the aspiring creator, which does no one any good. Tim once had a conversation with an aspiring artist who told him, "I'm painting in my head all the time." Balderdash! On occasion, in my mind, I'm a returning guest on David Letterman. Dave and I are good friends, of course. I'm always terrifically witty when I'm on the show, and usually we go out for dinner and expensive drinks later in the evening. Tim used to grace the Dick Cavett Show in much the same way. Obviously, that's only in our imaginations, for our imaginations. 

The key is to turn the aspirations into finished product, no matter the outcome. The spaghetti won't always stick to the wall. But I, we, have to try. We owe it to ourselves. We owe it to each other, to impart inspiration and add beauty to the world. "Beauty is a respite," Tim says. Amen.

I have before me a very ambitious To Do List for this week. I have to make lists. I have to sketch a schedule for the hours get too easily whittled away without structure. 

And I apologize if I sound a little preachy this morning. I'm talking to myself as much as to anyone, and I'm desperate to see results before week's end. So, big deal, just do it. And here's the hitch.

The burden of aspiration has two sides. It's one thing to witness the ideas come through, another to collect them, make notes, make plans, and still an entirely different point - demands a different person of the self altogether - to put the idea to work, to create a reality that other's can see, to make a killer pool party with all my favorite people out of a mere mirage. Then, of course, from the other side, a tidal wave of impossibility, come the doubts. What's the point? What if it never leaves this room? What if I'm the only one to think it funny?

Do completed projects not recognized, lacking affirmation, die in vain?  

Maybe small expectations are the trick. If I draw a cartoon that makes one person laugh, then that one person might share her laugh with another person, maybe a dozen, and so on, even if the subject changes, the expression, the sentiment ties them together. It ties us all together. Life affirmed over misery commiserated.

And some days, like today, even the greatest idea ever, with a hundred wagon loads of enthusiasm behind it, sits like just-poured concrete when it's time to run laps. I feel like I'm writing in a borrowed voice today, like my head is loose, and aspects of this post ring untrue, or read foggily twisted. In the end I'll know I did it, wrote it, finished and posted. Check mark, gold star, faint nimbus.

The aspiration is a slippery quick phantom. A right place, right time, serendipity sort of thing. So to be safe, I collect the ideas, make notes and prioritize and when all else fails, I can rely on this old stand by (best heard in the voice of Dory, from "Finding Nemo"): 

 

unexpected characters

I had planned on writing this morning about the 10,000 Civil War reenactors that descended on the Shiloh battlefield over the sesquicentennial weekend. Tim, Ronnie and I drove up Saturday to witness. I was going to wonder about the brutality of that battle - over 23,000 men died in 3 days - and the logistics nightmare of delivering the correct ammunition to the various canons used by a single mule-led wagon wending its way through smoke and fire. I was going to imagine the destruction of the landscape - the battle spread out in small coveys, firing at any movement in the woods, breaking trees in half, bullying in caverns where maybe only a deer had dared cross. I was going to describe for you the young boys in relic garb, the same age as the boys who fought and died in the battle. I had planned on being amazed.

But it turns out the 150th Anniversary Reenactment of the battle is next year. Rumor was, they were remaking a film for the visitor center. But that was the weekend before last, and again next weekend. And according to The Daily Corinthian in Mississippi, they are expecting only about 300 reenactors for the film. 

Disappointed but undaunted, we used the facilities at the Shiloh visitor center, talked with the gift shop clerk, a unique fellow with a hearty laugh who warned us the park may not exist next weekend if Congress doesn't convene and decide by Friday. We watched the bald eagle that lives over one of the old battlefields, then went about looking for adventure elsewhere. Of course, as one would expect between three artists, we discussed creativity, branding (we're all for it), blogs, subject matter, an upcoming show on April 30th at Jack-O-Lantern Farms (more about that later), gatekeepers, how to get around the gatekeepers, and always, always, always, back to the core - why we create - because we're sick people. And because humanity is drawn to beauty and beauty breeds joy. 

Next stop was the flea market in Crump, Tennessee where my nostalgia for the flea markets of my youth was basically destroyed. Ronnie found an antique children's tool box he can use as a prop, which made the stop worth while. And there were some very cute fluffy bunnies for sale. 

Ten minutes down the road, over the bridge and we were in lovely, historic Savannah, Tennessee for lunch at the Uptown Bistro where we ran into the Godwin Sisters - not a bluegrass trio, but the most delightful and lovely three sisters one could ever meet. Two are twins, and with uniform coiffure and dress style, one might think them triplets. All practicing accountants, Emily Godwin is a photographer as well - Amelie Photographie - whose art is featured on the restaurant's walls, including a beautiful, enticing image of Caney Creek River on a piece of 20x30 metal. Needless to say, we had a great time laughing, talking about art, et al. 

We stopped in Corinth on the way home and discovered an outdoor craft show with a live blues band, where we met J.B. McMahan, "a minister by calling and an avid outdoorsman by nature." Jeremy creates lamps, tables and other novelty pieces from found driftwood along the Mississippi River and various antler sheds under the name Mississippi River Driftwood (or Drifting Antler). I am the proud new owner of a coat & hat rack made from small deer sheds and a piece of aged cypress from Miss Violet Webb's abandoned home. Miss Violet's house sat on a curving bank of the Mississippi before the government straightened it out years ago. Jeremy surmises the house was once used as a community mail drop. 

The weather was a perfect 72 degrees without a cloud in the sky, a perfect day for a drive, perfect day for meeting unexpected and unsuspecting characters. A perfect day for stepping out of routine and remembering again, there is a world outside our own.

Favorite overheard quote of the day:

On leaving a little country store and gas station near Burnsville, Tim overheard a good old boy drawl,

"This place is damn busy this morning. It's busier than New York City!"