Ten Things. Happy New Year.

The sky is finally blue again. 

• It’s nice to be able to open every window in my house and breathe in fresh and clean air again. I was beginning to feel like I was suffocating, literally taped into this house like it was a bubble. You don’t think to be grateful for clean air but here we are.
  
  
• It feels like autumn is a bit closer, with chilly feet in the morning and yellowing leaves starting to drop from some of the trees. I’m not quite ready for the turning of the clocks, but I can feel the shift starting. Since the equinox is this week, I guess that’s about right. Summer feels as if it were oddly truncated somehow, as if the pandemic and then the fires just kind of cut everything short. So many summer things we didn’t do this year. Such a heightened awareness of how precious they are.
  
  
• I haven’t the making of a pair of earrings or a necklace in me right now and that’s G-d’s honest truth. There is one small update’s worth of new stuff waiting in my studio and then nothing. I’m finding it so hard to find the discipline and motivation to sit down and make jewelry and there’s this underlying nihilistic thought of “why bother anyway?” I'm working it out. There's time.
  
  

• I haven’t done a show since we moved to Portland. The thing is, the shows were always the thing I loved best and the right shows are what I really want to be doing. Clearly those things are not going to happen safely for a time but I hope they will come back. I really want that to be a thing we get to keep. 
  
  
• I’m doing the Full Bush Tour with Renee Magnussen this year in an attempt to find out the next steps. We left LA and moved to Portland to be grandparents, then my mom died and then we had a pandemic. I have been a little bit adrift and wondering who I am ever since we slammed the back gate down on that moving truck, to be honest, and none of the rest of it helped. Hoping I can find that true North again. I am more than just grandma. Hoping to find her. 
  
  
• I have felt myself slipping in the hope department this week, between the choking air and fires and then the news that RBG had died.
  
  
• I take a lot of heart from and am often bolstered by the words of Nadia Bolz-Weber, who, though we don’t share a faith, still speaks to me in ways that are meaningful and feel true. Her Sunday Prayers have literally been life-saving graces the last two or three weeks, and to be honest I think the things we share matter more than the things we don’t when it comes down to it all. 
  
  
• I took the plants from work home at the beginning of the pandemic because someone needed to care for them. Now my boss wants them back for the store, which is a good thing because it means we are going to re-open. I am not able to go back to work with the plants just yet and I am more than a little bit jealous of the plants.
  
  
• We grew a variety of yellow watermelon in our garden, it was called moon and stars melon and it tastes like the summer it feels like we missed. We were able to save exactly one from the squirrels and the smoke and the rain. 
  
  
• There’s a lot, a LOT going on right now and if your brain is thick and slow and overloaded like mine, well, we’re neither of us alone. Keep going. 
  
  
• I think if I had not taken up watercolor last December, I would be finding this year even harder and I'm perpetually grateful for whoever thought of slapping pigment and water onto paper. It is saving me.