The Far Horizon

[Editor's Post]

Our first featured article reprint for February 2018, was originally published Tuesday, October 19, 2010. A wonderful story about living in the mountains above Redwood City, California.

You can re-read and enjoy this article again here:

At The Sky Ranch by Esther
[Editor's note: This story was written by Esther]
Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Our March 2018 reprint is a terrific story originally published May 31, 2005. It still rings with the warmth of family, love and laughter!

Telephone Chat with Elizabeth
[Editor's note: This story was written by MrsB]
Tuesday, May 31, 2005

Fine Time Art 53 by Marion 2018

Fine Time Art 53 by Marion 2018

Painting Rocks by KimB

Recently, a friend invited me to come "Paint Rocks" at her home. She explained it was a "new thing" her whole family had started to do and was a very popular past time.

She explained that you find a nice rock or cobble stone and paint it however you like, then you "hide" it for others to find. People put some sort of identifier on the rocks so the finder can post a message on line that a particular rock was found. The finder can keep the rock or re-hide it in the same spot or another location.

How could I possibly resist?

So I spent an enjoyable afternoon painting my rock and chatting with my friend and learned about painting rocks. It's easy but then not so easy.

First thing: You gotta pick a rock.

A rock is a rock is a rock. ¹

It sounds simple but you know when you are about to become a Leonardo, all of sudden the shape, size, texture and color of the rock becomes a Big Deal. My friend had a large selection of rocks to pick from that had already been washed and dried. I must of looked over a dozen before I selected "My Rock".

Next up: What are you going to paint.

What do you paint, when you paint on a wall? ²

You can paint anything you like on the rock but some rocks "hint" at an idea, sort of like the adage that the sculptor's marble block tells them what's inside, rocks can hint at images that would fit their configuration. My friend had a lot of samples of rocks her family had painted. Sunshine rays, geometric decorations, complex geometries, free form drawings and cartoon images created from transfer paper.

Then the hardest part: What colors.

What are the colors you use when you paint? ²

Like any work of art, the colors make a difference. My friend had about a hundred different colors and paint media to chose from. The basic paint is an acrylic poster type paint but there are painting marker-style pens for fine details and you can finish the job with an overlay of clear acrylic for a high-sheen look to your rock. She said they pick up a load of paints when the craft stores have sales and she had a dozen or more small brushes to select from.

Since the main object is for someone to find it, I selected some bright colors. It was surprising that some colors worked better than others and I had to re-do-over a few spots when my selected color turned out to be a dud on my particular rock.

The last item is: Paint the Rock.

I paint what I paint. ²

Magdalenian Horse
c. 15,000 BCE ⁵

While concentrating on my rock, I considered how "not new" this activity really is. Humans have been painting rocks for a very very long time. ³ One of the prime indicators of "human-ness" is art.

There are the major cave works like Lascaux and Pech Merle ⁴ in France where the wild life and spotted horses of prehistoric times are recorded. There are myriad images painted in caves, on cliffs and overhangs all over the world. There are carvings and etchings of great intricacies that are some humanity's earliest expressions of the universe.

There are portable artworks too, rocks etched and carved in great detail; their purpose is not known but they were carried far from the location of the rock's origin. Deer horns, bones, ivory and just about anything portable served the same purpose. ⁵

We've been creating and carting around a lot of stuff for a long time.


Bison Licking Insect Bite
c. 15,000 BCE ⁵




Mani Stone⁶

The Mani Stone ⁶ is an example of portable art. The stones are marked with a Buddhist mantra and placed in a variety of locations, generally locations of Buddhist significance but they can also be found along rivers and roadsides.


Perhaps many many years from now, some future person will come across our current expressions of universal connection. They will ponder the meanings of the designs and images. They will analyze all the colors and paint types and consider individual brush strokes under powerful microscopes. They will consider the origin of the rocks and maybe extract DNA captured during painting. They will wonder at the variety and styles and no doubt completely lose their way in ascribing some massive, theoretical meaning to each rock.

Then again, maybe they will be correct, because there is some ancestral need to say "I was here". A need that transcends our current status, arising from our collective humanity. A need to match the universe against our most enduring weapon: our imagination.

I left my completed masterpiece in the care of my friend.

...after all,
It's my wall . . . ²

It is just a rock with some paint on it....

But it's "My Rock".



Fire Pit painted rock
KimB 02/2018

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertrude_Stein
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_is_a_rose_is_a_rose_is_a_rose
2. I Paint What I See by E.B. White
   First printed in The New Yorker of May 20, 1933.
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._B._White
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_art
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_painting
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Stone_Age_art
   
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lascaux
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pech_Merle
5. Magdalenian Horse, c. 15,000 BCE
   Bison Licking Insect Bite c. 15,000 BCE
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mani_stone

Fine Time Art 52 by Marion 2018

Fine Time Art 52 by Marion 2018

Warming days and seed catalogs

Our days of freezing weather is over and today it was warm enough to sit by the pool and watch the breezes blow the pool toys around. One can get fixated on the toys escaping traps as they float on the current of circulating circles of water across the length of the pool. A breeze will often nudge a toy out of the lanes of water circles and cause a log jam, then eventually another breeze will blow it out of the trap into the water circles again.

While I ate lunch by the pool, spotty rain clouds began to out number the few spotty white clouds indicating our days of spring rains are due. This is the time of year I begin thinking of seed catalogs and imaging bountiful harvests of tomatoes and cucumbers. These imaginary harvests never develop into what I call bountiful. Considering the amount of labor and the cost of watering the plants, the effort is hardly worth it considering one can buy beautiful tomatoes grown in a professional greenhouse for pennies. I'll wait until after the rains to decide if its worth the effort.

update on knitting project

Things are not going smoothly. I researched stitch patterns and knitted swatches of the patterns I liked best. I spent days learning how to knit a Saxon Braid; after knitting a swatch without errors, I was ready to start the main body of the afghan. I had already knitted the border, so all I had to do was select the number of stitches for each pattern across the width of the afghan.

I placed the Saxon Braid in the middle of the width with special stitches on each side to show it off. The patterns on each side were complex requiring counting and concentration. Even though I used pencil and paper to keep track, I often lost count and had to start over. I had started over numerous times by the time I got to row 5.

My son could tell I was getting stressed and reminded me that I had planned on making a church, not a cathedral. When the cathedral crashed for the umpteenth time, I decided to change some of the patterns, choosing simpler, but traditional ones.

I'm too far into this knitting project to give up, but keep tuned It might even turn out to be an Aran afghan that I will be proud of.

Fine Time Art 51 by Marion 2018

Fine Time Art 51 by Marion 2018

A birthday

Today I'm celebrating my sister, Adeline's birthday by having a frosted cupcake. She is no longer with us, but I continue to celebrate the birthdays of family members even when they are no longer with us. Yesterday, when unpacking things that had been in storage, I found a swim suit I had forgotten about and remembered when Adeline and I went shopping for swim suits. We had been invited to spend a week in an apartment in Carmel, Calif. owned by my daughter and her husband, but they only used it on weekends, so Adeline and I had the apartment all to ourselves.

The apartment was only a few steps away from the ocean, but there was also a swimming pool and we anticipated doing a lot of swimming. We took long walks up and down the beach but I was the only one to use the pool, Adeline never went swimming although I coaxed and coaxed. She never used her suit. which was the prettiest. I had had to settle for a plain, ordinary one because it was the only one in the store that was my size.

We went to fancy restaurants, visited all the wonderful shops in Carmel and found a wonderful store for kitchen ware. We browsed there and even bought a couple of the cheaper items. Back in the apartment, we had tournaments of Spite and Malice and worked a jigsaw puzzle. The prize of the card tournament was something from the kitchen store. Unfortunately when we went to the store to buy the prize, the shop had closed and went out of business so the winner of the tournament went without a prize.

We finished the puzzle in time to leave it constructed for my daughter and her husband to see, but instead of leaving it on the table, we carefully moved it in one piece and put it on the floor in a corner of the living room. A few days later, my daughter wanted to know how we had been able to put it there.

There is a special place in my heard for memories of Adeline. She was truly a gift from the heavens when she joined out family. Happy Birthday, dear Sister.

Shift by KimB

Shift

Shift the day to the night
Shift the left to the right

Shift the up to the down
Shift the spin of the world-go-round

Shift the light to dark
Shift the fire from the spark

Shift the high to the low
Shift the path of the way to go

Shift the door to a bar
Shift the welcome from afar

Shift the young to old
Shift the wary to the bold

Shift the way the story's told
Shift the way to know what's sold

Shift the mind to find the place
Shift the body to match the state

Shift the race to match the pace
Shift the end of starter's gate

Shift time from the start
Shift until the last depart

KimB 01/2018

Fine Time Art 50 by Marion 2018

Fine Time Art 50 by Marion 2018

The Far Horizon

[Editor's Post]

It seems just a short time ago we started MrsB's blog but it has been more than a decade! So many great stories have been passed along and many of the tellers are no longer with us. The treasury of stories remains a reminder of what family is: a living experience.

Even when members pass away, their wisdom and humor remain with us and give us insights and hope and laughter when we take a moment to reflect on who we are, the directions we selected and the paths we next decide to follow.

We are introducing a re-introduction to some of those wonderful stories with a monthly feature: The Far Horizon. We will select a story from the past to reprint and revisit. After all, this is what we do went we gather together sharing the stories of our lives.

• "Do you remember ..."
• "There was this time ..."
• "How could we forget about ..."
• "I laughed so hard ...."

So take a moment to share the memories, we're happy to have you with us.

KimB Editor

Knitting

My latest afghan knitting project is more complicated than I thought when I first decided to knit it. In fact, I'm having a lot of problems with it. I've been knitting for years and considered myself a skilled advanced knitter; I've lost count of the sweaters, afghans, baby blankets and scarves, many with complicated patterns that I've knitted over the years, but this knitting project is giving me headache!

I planned this project when we had days and nights of hard freeze with danger of water pipes bursting. While waiting for warmer weather, I thought it would be nice to make an Aran afghan. I wanted to knit it in one piece instead of the usual 5 or 6 bands which are then sewn together. I started knitting swatches of traditional Aran stitches that I found on the internet.

Little did I know the trouble I was in for when I chose Saxon Braid as one of the designs. The Saxon Braid is a series of special stitches knitted out of sequence, creating a series of intersected crosses or X's as the design develops. Its only 24 stitches wide and 16 row repeat pattern. After I started the swatch I discovered this was not going to be ezpz.

I took me three days to knit the first row, and once I got that knitted correctly, it took another week to get past row three. I either had too many stiches left at the end of the row, or not enough to finish the pattern. I counted and recounted the stitches, unraveled what I had done and started over. I only knitted a foundation of 2 rows before starting the pattern, so starting over meant that I had to begin at the real beginning. That meant casting 24 stitches onto the needles and knitting a couple of rows then start the Saxon Braid. That took more time than trying to knit the 24 stiches correctly.

I've reached row 8 and keeping my fingers crossed. If I do a swatch without errors, I'll add Saxon Braid to my afghan.

Saxon Braid