Marion Agnew

While I've been attending to visitors and taking a little vacation, I've also been taking some notes. 1. Mosquitoes just don't give up. How can I be more like a mosquito, except less annoying? 2. The beach never changes -- the big rocks at either end sit where they were in my grandmother's time here. But the beach is also different every day: a sunny morning feels different from a breezy, cloudy morning. The beach is different at 5 p.m. than at 10 a.m., especially if you've created artwork in the morning and a storm blows in. But the beach's essentials are unchanged. How does it do that? 3. So many activities don't seem to show results until they suddenly do. Like taking branches off trees, or pumping water up from the lake with the hand pump in the breezeway, or rowing across a broad expanse of lake, or even raking detritus off the beach. "You are what you do every day" and all that. 4. Going swimming is always worth the messing around it ...

And by "gone," I mean, of course, that I'm not gone. I'm here. Just not at my desk very much, because of having company. Same goes for "fishin'": I don't fish, though I eat it (see "Kayaker" fish sandwich, below). I am, however, well-fillin'. Also stomach-fillin'. Hope you are the same.

These days, I split my time between writing and working. Not "split 50/50" (or "split half in two," as the charming expression from the southern US goes) -- just split, as in divided, probably unequally. My schedule depends on the weather, because a lot of the work I'm doing is outdoor stuff. Ah, the weather: unseasonably hot and humid. Suddenly the things I have to do outdoors (scrape, prime, and paint buildings, this summer) can't be scheduled into "afternoons, I'll paint." I look at the sky and feel the air. Is it both cool enough and dry enough this morning to paint? Is it too hot to be outdoors between 10:30 and 4? Is the wind shifting, thus dropping the temperature five degrees in ten minutes? While I've been out and about (and inside staring at the sky), I've learned a couple of things.  Hint #1. Write where it's physically comfortable. Or in my case recently, where it's cool. My office is in our walk-out baseme...

For the June page of my calendar, I used these three photos. As I write this, the weather is unsettled, with high humidity and temperatures to match. Outside my office window, the grass is tall but too wet to mow -- a far cry from the doe/snow and ice/sunrise shots. I love looking closely at the calendar photos throughout the year, especially when the seasons in the photos don't necessarily match the real world outside.  The pictures remind me that  seasons can change, but beauty remains.