Oh to be here. Starting out renting a cottage for a while with a husband recruited to run the Lifesaving Station en route to running bigger and better somethings closer to the North Pole up where everyone wears moon boots and dresses in white looking like the Michelin man but with seals and polar bear cubs dancing at your feet instead of little tires spinning like a merry go round of rubber ascending into the sky and coming back down like Old Faithful on a bad day when there are too many tourists and the geyser god gets bored and decides to liven things up with the occasional backpack ensnared.
my new envisioning/short piece of fiction, around 390 words. This is the first paragraph the rest is at this link
Oh to be here. The lowing of cattle who wouldn’t be lowing if they knew what was coming next. The wail of the triplets’ Siamese cat for a counterpoint. Too many animals and cabinets stuffed with God only knows what, but that not mattering much. No, a sort of fancy husband with degrees from sort of fancy schools met back home in London who runs companies and a jumbo mansion stuffed with maids to take care of everything.
My new envisioning/short fiction piece over on my Substack where you can read the rest of it at this link
According to the archive out in California, Ed Fletcher was a noted San Diego land developer, civic leader, and member of the California State Senate. It looks like his family had a weekend/holiday/vacation retreat at Cuyamaca Lake where these pictures were taken. The picture span the time period ca. 1915 into the 1960s.
The sun shining like mad. An afternoon to sit on the balcony with its pots of flowers in every color, especially orange. A blessing. The library down the hall with its vast balcony and junior balconies running to the end, all tended by the garden boy with his veritable fleet of watering cans.
Please see the link to read the rest which is over on my Substack and free to see. It’s around 410 words counting the credits for the image.
In 1753, Louis XV commissioned the sculptor Jean-Baptiste Pigalle to create a mausoleum in honor of one of his most illustrious military commanders, Maurice de Saxe, who had died three years earlier. A Protestant by faith, this prominent military figure was buried in the Lutheran Church of Saint-Thomas in Strasbourg. This ambitious royal project was, however, not inaugurated until 1777, after twenty-four years of planning and construction. A wax maquette had been presented as early as 1756 in the sculptor’s studio in the Louvre. Pigalle employed the sophisticated vocabulary of funerary sculpture, depicting the marshal descending the steps of his own tomb, surrounded by allegories of France the interceder, and Death. Several designs and reproductions of the monument to Marshal de Saxe are known today, attesting both to the scale of the undertaking and to the exceptional legacy of Pigalle’s work. Among the earliest stages of the creative process is the famous wax “position” model now in the Louvre (inv. RF 1551). Another model was executed by Senckeisen, the son of a Strasbourg goldsmith, who had expressed his desire to reproduce the mausoleum group in wax in 1776 (mentioned in a letter addressed to Baron d’Autigny).
Likewise, a version donated by Mr. Albert Vernes to the Strasbourg Museum reproduces the general composition of the group in plaster. As is the case in the present relief, it features a narrative variation: Cupid is shown bareheaded, without a helmet—a choice Pigalle adopted only at a later stage of his work. Another reduction in marble, dated 1801, was donated by Baron Grouvel to the Strasbourg Historical Museum. Finally, various terracotta versions, sometimes limited to individual figures, complete this ensemble of reinterpretations.
A different skirt to change into and half an hour to watch the new talk show before they come around and get everyone. Assisted living, and that hard if you are used to ordering dinner from cook whenever you like as long as someone else is hungry. But the egg salad delightful, and never having to spend the morning tasting anyone’s pickles down at the town hall pickle judging contest until the sourness makes your stomach ache and your willpower melt until an entire quart of strawberry ice cream somehow vanishes with the help of a spoon.
Read the rest over my Substack at this link. The piece is around 350 words so not a long read.
pirouetting on air on the blush of a Georgia peach ripening in the sun as a few blocks away in the middle of the night something starts to glow in the terrariums in the back of the garden shop greenhouse . . . oh no . . . the plants digging each other up and redoing the arrangements the way they want . . . pale green on the right with all the ferns on the left and not mixed in anymore with the pretty tiny orchids . . . better begin now . . .everything needing to be ready for the wedding planner and her reception hall . . . a few more jolts of coffee and . . . Start!
the last post in my spring series. It’ll be back next April with my fall pre Halloween series starting September 1st and the winter series on December 1st.
