figurative

yupik figures recently found in quinhagak

oh my

on the edge of autumn

 it's colder

and we have to light the furnace

if only to take the edge off the cold.

i hate doing this.

but this year it's remarkably late in coming,

 we're on the edge

and soon the birds will be gluttons

stripping berries and grapes.

here at home.

 and over at the new place i'm also calling home

 i went walking over west

toward the gorge

made by rocky ridge and trout lake drainage

and found a microworld to squint my evening-strained eyes.

mosses and lichens inhabit this small zone

little red caps always please me

 where did the small waterfall go?

the gorge?

 such a dry summer and fall so far

that i came right into the streambed before i noticed

i was in the gorge

but there was no water music.

water barely moving at all.

 this is so strange.

i could easily step across

when normally, well i've thought of building a coracle

or, more likely, buying a wee kayak

just to get out on the pond. 

where's that pond?

 so i found a gift of rosiness

 the thing just would not stay still

as the night wind blew up

 the next day i found bounty for printing,

and had grand results.

autumnal equinox.

x o x o

my amazing nephew rich macdonald took this photo this summer

he runs the natural history center in bar harbor maine.

what he doesn't know (yet) is that i've lifted his photo

just to show you all

a little sweet bit of mark making.

cheers!

xoxo

other edges, rich as usual

 the last evening walk here i noticed a few things.

 i love this deep duff,

where humus is built, and the creeping 

and the many-leggeds 

live.

 further on down the road i looked back

to see a long me

stretching across the hay meadow

 right before i came to its edge.

and again i thought,

how rich this edge is.

thinking of the ecotone that holds

huge fecundity,

variety,

the very opposite of monoculture.

even the color is beautiful.

 having just made milkweed paper

and having seen a few monarch butterflies this year 

(thank goodness)

i give you pods, though some have already burst.

 i continued on to find these bracts almost 

bare

grey dogwood berries

food of birds including woodcock

who nested close, 

i saw them many times this summer.

sun is usually setting on my way home

and the warm weather that night 

didn't warn (exactly) that in two nights we would be

on the edge of frost.

they say it might come tonight

over ten days later than normal.

a speedy whitetail visitor escaped 

my lens

 on saturday we went for maple syrup

and found this

 at home i went through the mail

 and found some nice things,

tom and rima's little thank you book 

for helping with crowdsourcing hedgespoken

shown here with the cloth book i'm making

 and the catalog from 

dorothy caldwell's exhibition

i love these marks

 i just called the art gallery of peterborough

and they most graciously posted this to me.

and i found out that my credit card had issues,

as we say,

those issues made it impossible to use again

the charges were dropped.

finishing up the odd ball copies

the ones i played with a little

 we are almost ready to launch the book

i had some stitching to do on a few

 so a few of them will have mendings

we decided that was ok. 

even good.

november, a map is almost ready,

almost.

papermaker

 i found that there was a bit

of wet pulp about myself

last saturday

that i removed and placed on the dashboard.

a reminder of who i am

what i do.

i am a papermaker.

 i used to remove pulp

from the tiny hairs on my forearms

in the line at the grocery store

or at the library, searching for a good book.

 i am also a teacher, 

and the above jiggly photo was taken on my way to work

one morning this week.

below is recorded the time and temperature.

we've had a week of very warm weather 

for september.

and that little piece of paper pleases me.

that evening i walked and looked at the light

which is going so quickly now

but the colors, like the temperatures,

have been slow to change.

but change it will.

and this is what i know,

despite me digging in my heels,

change.

is.

real.

glorious chaos

the glorious chaos that is 

a community papermaking project.

the energy was very, very good

 todd making milkweed paper

 esthela and todd looking carefully

 hannah 

and chief cook and organizer

sarah barber

the genius behind the planted poems project

(a collaborative arts project with the community and the university)

 hannah brought in some more pulp

leftover from drew matott's visit

and we added badger pulp to our vats

 abaca soaking, 

and a nepalese mould holding 3/4 inch 

of badger pulp

leftover from the week of public papermaking on campus

and at TAUNY.

 we had rain for the first time in ages

so we pressed sheets

and took them home to dry.

 next to the porch the ground is a little roughed up

that was my fiber garden

long ago

 the community got into it

and here's my little arnold grummer press

doing duty

(it's a lot easier

 to cart around than my iron book press)

my dear friend

carol

sent me this

so sweet-i walk by my work table and see this

reminder 

we had parent orientation thursday night

and the sky was dancing with the promise of rain

 before, though,

we had a foggy but clear morning

sparkling from the heavy dew

 and this is the wetland i travel through

on my way to school

 the air was charged with life

and light

 and so was i.

sunday, a little r & r 

poetry and paper

i'm helping with 

a collaboration: SLU's arts collaborative, the 

 sustainability semester, TAUNY (traditional arts in upstate ny)

we're making a poetry garden which

"makes paper from local plants as a way to celebrate the environment, engage community and teach traditional hand papermaking practices".

 the sustainability semester folks have a nice big garden

and they planted  

some flax and some milkweed

 three of us showed up on the hottest saturday of the summer

only it was september

to process some 

fiber.

 flax

 iris and daylily leaves

 this little building i'd like to take home, 

it's a storage/drying shed

 sarah (the driving force behind this collaborative) and esthela

poets and slu faculty

showed up for the grunt work.

 we three attempted to prep enough plant fibers

for saturday's plant papermaking class at st lawrence

 we three

 got a lot of plants chopped, 

steamed, 

scraped and 

pulped

and the papers we make

will be substrate for poems

which will be planted

along with some bulbs and roots and rhizomes

for spring surprises

at the sustainability farm. (click for info)

~

oh, and that sustainability farmhouse

used to be the local cooperative extension office

where i worked 

(and grew a fiber/papermaking garden)

for five years or so in the 90's.

i'm so glad to be making paper here again.