Sun Rising in the West -- Valentine's Day

The big secret is that on Valentine's Day here in South Jersey the sun comes up in the west! It comes into the south window and bounces off the woodwork and west-looking windows of the livingroom, filling the room with morning light. This is a definite harbinger of warm good things.

Another secret is that on this day the sun at about eight o'clock AM makes the shadows of the two mailboxes reach exactly the middle of the road. I am looking at evidence at this very moment. The trees and shrubs are still shrugging close to themselves with the cold, but there is summertime boldly confronting everything out there. I see the shadow of a very small bird on a limb against the neighbor's porch wall. That bird knows what I know (or actually, I just learned what he already did know) about the sun on this day.

Another secret is that I did my 70th birthday performance just last Saturday at the home of my son and his wife in Seattle. A few days early, granted, since my birthday is still about a week away, but I wanted photo evidence. I have not yet received the digital pix my son took, but I have a hint, included here at the top of the page.

Visiting my grown children and my grandchildren, grown and little, is like a rejuvenation and rehabilitation retreat. It is not that I am resting while I am there. It is more that I am actively gathering up as if there is no tomorrow every scrap of information and sweetness that is there and stuffing it into a cache like rare treasure to be taken out slowly over a long period of time to be re-savored. Some of these pearls are irretrievable except in such a cache. Thank goodness for the digital revolution which lets me take a series of shots of my daughter-in-law feeding something green to her nearly nine month old daughter. It should be noted that this hefty grandbaby has been called, during this chubby, molar-getting, drooly/smiley period "Square-face SpongePants." She has a remarkably cheeky face (and has since she was born) and the largest of blue eyes. Smiling she is the Gerber Baby of old. When she is watching with all her might, her face relaxes and, well, this is she last summer.

I am told that she is endowed with her maternal grandpa's cheeks (which are normal looking now) and I know she is endowed with her Dad's startling blue eye-color in huge eyes from her mama's family tree, but never before seen in other than brown! We have yet to really know about hair. It may be reddish, like mine, but there is really still too little of it to tell much. She is a peek-a-boo expert and also loves horsie riding on people's laps. Her favorite word is Da.

And my two and a half year old quarterback has just recently taken his mother, his grandma, and his baby sister on a tour of the Seattle Aquarium where he totally occupied the space with exhibits of his own. He kissed visiting babies of his sister's ilk on the head while guiding others, adult and youthful, to the SHARK! and the STURGEON! He patiently stalked a pigeon up and down stairs, a ramp and then up the stairs again. That was one of his favorite exhibits. He also found Nemo, his film favorite, and Nemo's buddies, conveniently displayed in a case together.

The exhibit curators were as taken with him as he was with the waterfalls, the anemones ("It's pokey, Mommom, feel it!") and starfish and otters. They loved it when he crowed "COOOOOL" about everything. Obviously they recognized a budding oceanographer in this little blond kid with the energy of a blast furnace and a mind absorbent as a blotter.

I was there for a week, and could go on and on as grandmothers are wont to do. I could tell about swings and baseball games, football games in which the quarterback wears only a helmet, small stowaways in my bed, and also the cold shoulder given when it was time to say goodbye.

Is it any wonder I turned upside down a week before my birthday? Life is wonderful, though fleeting. I plan to watch next year for the sun rising in the west. Plenty of sunshine there, as far as I'm concerned. Plenty here too.

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What If?

What if you were a two and a half year old little boy whose Daddy took him to the baseball game.


What if you were the kind of little guy who loved baseball before he could say it properly?


What if you got to watch the Seattle Mariners win at the stadium with all the people yelling--you with your big baseball glove at the ready in case a ball came popping from the field into your hand?

And then, what if you waited for the elevator at the ball park and when the door slid open you found that the elevator was full of MASCOTS! I mean life size ones like the Mariner Moose?

Well, it happened to my little grandson! And now, my son tells me, he expects all elevators to have a load of mascots on it. I can just see him waiting with great expectations whenever he stands in front of an elevator, wondering what in the world will be behind the sliding doors.

How wonderful to have such memories. Not only for my grandson, but for his dad who will never ever forget the time he took his son to his first ball game. And for this grandmom whose heart is warmed to the cockles.

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A Grain of Sand

© DAH 2007

The world is so full of a number of things,
I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.
—Robert Louis Stevenson

One grain at a time -- that's a certain method of examining an ocean beach. Given the small size of a two year old boy and the enormity of a swath of Pacific Ocean shoreline, it's a good way to begin.

I try to imagine how it was for me, the first time I saw the big ocean. It might have been from the deck of a Holland-America Line ocean liner, as I went off with my mother on a trip to the Netherlands as a very young child. There are old photos of me on the beach at Scheveningen in my little sun suit and bonnet. I am not looking at the vastness of the North Sea, but instead at the organ grinder and his monkey. Something small enough for me to process in my young mind.

My grandson has met the Pacific Ocean, and I can tell from other images my son sent that he is impressed. But in this photo, he is concerned about the sand on his foot. The nature of sand. It comes off the beach and into your shoes. This is something to think about.

For a while my art was about things seen in a microscope. I found that in photomicrographs the ordinary things (like sand, or bleach, or hair, or citric acid) become whole landscapes of alien shapes and colors and formations. I found I could get acquainted with these strange places by painting them -- realistically. They are real, of course. The paintings look like fantasies, but they are actually careful renderings of organic material. With even more sophisticated equipment, like electron microscopes, we will never run out of surprises.

Grain by grain, the sand stretches out until you cannot see the grains. Wave by wave, the water reaches out until it is a smooth horizon. The more you see, the more you cannot see. The closer you look the more complex everything grows.

Isn't it great?

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