(c) 2021 Amy Zucker Morgenstern
We don’t necessarily have an Advent calendar each year, but my wife spotted a really cute one and ordered it. Unfortunately, it was coming from Japan or someplace, and arrived December 15. Laughing, she showed it to us and suggested it was a bit late for a countdown to Christmas. However, someone on the ever-useful interwebs had pointed out that if one bought an Advent calendar in the post-Christmas sales and opened the first window on 12/27, the last window would open on Inauguration Eve.
So we have been faithfully opening our Totoro-a-day calendar and displaying them as they emerge. I love the dust critters. The pumpkin happened to be around; no deeper significance is intended of an orange resident that is way past its time to GO.
One window left.
We have been talking about creating a room like this almost since we bought this house, in 2011. We live in a row house and the garage runs all the way from the front to the back. Joy dreamed it up, imagining turning the back section of that unnecessarily deep garage into a small space for laundry and art. During our sabbatical time in 2016, we said we’d get right on the project when we got back. But these kinds of things take a lot of work, and other priorities intruded. This year, Joy found a contractor, drew the plans, stood in a lot of lines at City Hall to get the permits, and shepherded the whole process, and now we have a dedicated space that we have modestly dubbed “the art room,” as “studio” seems a bit highfalutin.
I don’t have a “before” picture, but here is how things looked very early on:
Out of sight to the left, between the black file cabinet and the ladder leaning against the back wall, is the wall to our office. That is now the doorway into the art room. Let me escort you:
An art room needs a sink, and this is our laundry room too. We held onto these cabinets for six years after getting new ones for the kitchen, with the ultimate plan of using them here. I’m really glad we did. They would have just gone into the landfill, and now they are storage for lots of the stuff that got booted from the garage, like our three fondue sets (please don’t judge–we didn’t pay for any of them) and grocery overflow. The glass door goes to the back yard, and it and the long transom window above it allow in lots of light. There’s even a built-in ironing board across from the washer and dryer, another original fixture from the kitchen that has been waiting for its moment.
Thank you for coming on my tour! The office, freed of the treadmill, is now home to a trundle bed that opens up to king size, so that for the first time, we have a place for people to stay besides the living room. Now if we could only have guests come visit . . . ! Let’s hope 2021 brings them, and it begins in six hours.
Until I sorted all the art supplies last week, I had forgotten that I made a whole lot of painted papers ten years ago. Different textures and colors, using watercolors on tracing paper: a trove of treasure for someone on a collage kick.
untitled abstract, 6″ x 6″
The room is pretty much finished, the art supplies are sorted though still awaiting their shelves, and I sat down to make something from those boxes of “collage materials,” a.k.a. “interesting bits of paper that we don’t want to throw away, so let’s call them art supplies.” It’s not a lie, but it’s just this side of hoarding. Unless, of course, you actually make collages out of them.
I’m grateful to my colleague Barbara for posting her beautiful collages and connecting me to a collage artists’ group online, and to my friend Jess, who also posts her collages frequently. They all inspire me.
It’s so hard to wrap our minds around the deaths of 200,000 people, or any large number. They fade into unreality. We might reflect on how much grief is caused by the death of even one person close to us. Then we try to multiply that by 200,000 . . . and again, the sheer number makes them slide away out of our imagining.
This is where comparisons, however odd, can help. Some will leave us just as unable to grasp the reality of this disaster, but if just one works for you, good.
When the news reported this week that 200,000 US Americans have died of COVID,* a friend of mine from Vermont said, “It would be like losing one-third of the people of my state.” Suddenly we’re in a horror movie: a mysterious force has struck down one in three Vermonters. Dead bodies are found in barns, cafes, on small-town sidewalks . . . the two-thirds who are spared weep and stare at the devastation.
I live in San Francisco, so I can make that “One quarter of the people in my city.”
Three and a half Vietnam Wars would have killed as many US Americans as COVID-19.
Very roughly, we adults breathe 20,000 times a day. So if with every breath, day and night, for ten days, a person died before your eyes, that would be the death toll.
Picture a big outdoor arena, such as AT&T Stadium, home of the Dallas Cowboys. If every single person who went to a sold-out game there were killed as they left the stadium, that wouldn’t be as many as our countrypeople who have died of COVID-19. Everyone at the next game would be killed too. And then, the game after that, only half the people would be killed. That’s 200,000 people.
If you’re making your 10,000 steps, then it takes about three weeks to take 200,000 steps. With every step, a death, for three weeks.
Is it real yet?
*In reality, going by excess deaths calculations rather than reported deaths attributed to COVID, we reached this grim milestone in mid-August.
In progress: painting of a window in Alcatraz prison. Acrylic on canvas, 9×12″
Earlier in this third week of devastation throughout the state, a member of UUCPA emailed us the news that a fire was burning near Yosemite, just a few miles east of Bass Lake. Bass Lake is the site of Skylake Yosemite camp, where the congregation holds a “getaway weekend” each summer. This year’s was cancelled due to COVID-19. Now the camp itself, not to mention Yosemite and its nearby communities, are approached by a wildfire that has grown very quickly.
The man who sent the email included a photo from Caltopo, to which I guess he must subscribe. I hope they won’t object to my showing it here:
I shared it on Facebook, with a few words about all the loss and sorrow we are holding. Then, a while later, I checked my Facebook page, saw this image in tiny, thumbnail format, and had three thoughts in quick succession: “What is that?” / “It’s beautiful” / “Ohhh. The Creek Fire map.”
I knew right then that I needed to draw it, to spend time with, if not make sense of, the swirl of feelings it evoked. The above are three very small drawings, each 2 x 1.5 or 2 x 1.75 inches, in colored pencil, done earlier today.
Day 49 of #100days of making art
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