​Here is one of my favorite paint brushes.  


Well, former favorite brushes, I should say.  


It’s actually been rather irritating lately.  But in the past years, we’ve been through a lot together.  Just about a year ago, in fact, this brush was doing amazing work on a rather large project.


I completely relied upon this brush, and it lived up to the task;  responsive, soft, flexible.  I could load on the thick oil paint, and this brush always smoothed things out just how I wanted it.


But not any more.  


Time has passed, and it’s grown crusty.


Stiff.  Uncompromising.  Unhelpful. 


This brush became so irksome that I wanted to cast it aside and forget about it.  Give up on it.


But the truth is, I still need it.  I love it.

So I decided to give it one last try.  After a quick soak in solvent, I turned on the warm water, and started in with the soap.  Just some hot water and a bar of regular soap.  


And an hour of my time.


Gently, patiently, I dabbed and pressed and painted on the bar of soap until the old crustiness began to melt right out of this beautiful brush.  I could not believe how much red oil paint was still stuck within the bristles!  No wonder it had been so ill-behaved!  Warm water, soap, dab, brush, rinse.  Warm water, soap, dab, brush, rinse.  Warm water, soap…


And persistent gentleness.


What if I treated other people with the same care and concern that I reserve for my paintbrushes?  What if every crusty, irritating person was gently soothed with warm water and soap?  What if I was willing to spend an hour with each grump, gently soothing away thier crustiness?  


What if?


You will be happy to know that my old brush is in perfect shape now.


No crustiness.  No stiffness, no wounds.  


It is pure and soft and gentle.  It's been restored.  

This made me smile.  Two tiny blossoms, picked by two small hands with grubby fingers.  Together, we placed them in this Lego chalice.  Art at its finest.

April 15.

Tax Day.

Groan...

For as much as I love paint and words and creating messy things,
I despise record keeping and ledgers and the monotony of orderliness.  
Calculating tax returns ranks right up there with the time I got a root canal.  

The root canal was particularly memorable because not only did it hurt like heck, but while the perky, young, blonde endodontist with red manicured nails heartily shoved medical machinery, including a running drill and what might have been a catalytic converter into my mouth, she asked 'getting to know you' questions.  

"Do you have kids?" her smile gleamed, sparkling with a million dollars of dental work.  I was flat on my back, white-knuckled, having infected tooth pulp sucked out with a vacuum hose.  I didn't feel much like small talk.

"Auhughmshix..."  I attempted to smile, and held up six fingers.
  
"Ohmygosh! Imagine, six kids!  How can you keep track!  Ohmygosh if anyone asks you how many kids you have, you can just say half a dozen!!!!!"   Her peals of laughter echoed loud enough for me to still hear today. 

Needless to say, I did not reveal to this woman that I was five months pregnant with number seven.  Better to let her imagine I swallowed a globe on my way in for the root canal.

Compared to Tax Day, which I have to endure every year, that root canal was nothing.  Just a fleeting irritation.   

But April 15 comes every year, with its infernal receipts and columns and calculations.  I am not fond of April 15.

Today my son came home from school, dumped his math homework on the table and said, "Mom, is tomorrow April 15th?"

"Yes."

"Awesome!  Will you make a cake to celebrate?"

"Are you nuts, Kid?  Who celebrates Tax Day?"  

"Mom!" he said, looking shocked with disbelief.  "April 15th is Leonardo Da Vinci's birthday!  How could you not know that?  It's important!"  

Well, who knew?  

April 15 is special!   I think I will go bake a gluten-free, sugar-free cake, after all.
​
Then we will really have something to smile about.  

Mona Lisa (public domain), Leonardo Da Vinci

This is a burnt charcoal vine.


Just ashes.


Good for nothing, you might think.  It’s the end, it’s done for.


Wrong.


I need this.  I actually went to a store and paid for it.  This small burnt vine is just what I need to begin an oil painting.


I use it to cover a page of tissue paper with blackness.  It’s a mess.  There is charcoal and ash on both my hands, on my cheek where I scratched an itch, on the floor, and all over the tissue paper.  Artists have worked the same way since the cave paintings of Lascaux.  In a mess.


I shake away the extra dust and flip the charcoal covered sheet upside down onto my new canvas.  Just a moment before, the canvas had been pure, white and clean.  But I’m not worried about smudges.  I place a traced outline of my initial sketch onto the tissue paper, and retrace my idea over the layers of tissue, and onto the canvas.  Smudges are easily cleaned up.  


What is left is a perfectly prepared canvas, with the image intact.  Iconographers for centuries called this the “cartoon”.  A simple charcoal line drawing, the beginning of  greatness.  With this humble beginning, they could paint windows to Heaven.


Some days my life feels just like a mess of charcoal and ash.  But I’ll take that.   I will embrace the ashes, let them cover me.  I’ll hold on to the faith that God has a plan.  He is the Artist, after all.  He can take care of the smudges.  And he can make something beautiful from a beginning of ashes.

He did this for you!

Did you ever watch ice melt on a river?

​As it recedes, sometimes you can discover crystals that have been hidden, compressed deep within the ice.

I feel like our problems and suffering are the same as this ice;  they are just a heavy burden that we carry, they weigh us down and paralyze us for a time.  

But when Spring comes round again, as it always does, sometimes we catch a glimpse of the great value of our troubles.  Even the beauty of our burdens. 

After all, the ice feeds the river.  

​Ice is a source of its strength.

"With Mary for your guide, you will never go astray; while invoking her, you will never lose heart; so long as she is in your mind, you will not be deceived; while she holds your hand, you will not fall; under her protection, you have nothing to fear; if she walks before you, you will not grow weary; if she shows you favor, you will reach the goal."

- St. Bernard of Clairvaux_, Doctor of the Church, 1090-1153

Early Sunday morning, before the crowds of kids woke up, I went for a walk.  Before French toast and dirty dishes and washing kids' hair before church...before wardrobe checks to make sure no one still has their pajamas on under their coat (yes this has happened)...before checking fingernails for mud (Someone always manages to pass me by on this)... Before the frenzy of the day, I went for a walk.   

And I found this.

In the Mud.  Just frozen mud.

I like mud.  It reminds me of clay and sculpting and big messes with creative children and I love that.  

It also reminds me of mud puddle stomping in the half-frozen springtime with my friend Joy.  We each had a tall pair of rubber boots, perfect for stomping through frigid, crystallized mud lakes down the hill from her house.  But my boots had leaky zippers on the sides.  So we shared our boots;  each taking one waterproof boot, and pushing our stockinged feet into two long plastic bread bags, then into the leaky boots, then into an old five-gallon bucket.  We'd wrap an arm around each other and three-legged race it through puddles and ponds, cold, splashing, wet, and gloriously happy.   

We always fell.  

Our moms never complained about the mess. 

This Sunday morning, when I found these crystal jewels of frozen snowflakes in the mud, I smiled.    It was just a muddy, dirt road.  That's all.  But that's life.  We're all stuck in it together, muddy fingernails, leaky boots, and all.  Glorious, messy life.
 
I hope you can find the crystal jewels of perfection in your muddy life today.  And if you have leaky boots,  I hope you have a friend with a five gallon bucket.  

No words today.  Just this:

Today the sky is grey.  Not grey and dreary...  Just grey.

To me, Grey is a beautiful family of colors.  Grey makes me so happy!  Grey is infinite and mysterious and muted and deep.  

Thank you for taking a moment to appreciate grey.  And enjoy this grey day!

A friend of mine asked an esoteric question yesterday.  He asked, rather incredulously,  "Why the (insert inappropriate word here) would anyone live in Minnesota?
​
Well, my Friend, this is one reason:  

I hear a picture is worth a thousand words.

'Nuff said.

It's New Year's Day, the feast day of Mary, Mother of God!

She was an unmarried, a pregnant teenager... she gave birth in a stable...and soon found herself a homeless refugee, fleeing from persecution under cover of night.   

Yet the angel told her  "Be not afraid."  
And she believed.

She became the God-Bearer.  

I introduced a kid to pastels.  

It was a marvelous, quiet night.  I found a forgotten old box of cast-off pastels that hadn't been used in years...  I brought it out, and he smiled.  It simply meant a Free License to Make a Mess.  We opened the treasure chest of colors, and put some large papers down on the kitchen table.  Peel the colors, break them into pieces.  Use the sides, the tops, the hard edge on the bottom.  No lines, just your imagination.  

​Scribbling makes the best pastel art.

​In front of my eyes, his blank white page grew entangled with roots and vines.  Nordic myth and legend spilled over a pastel waterfall, alive with mystery.   

We drew together until late in the night.  

No technology.  No screen.  Just colors and paper... And his imagination.

Peace Out.

“What do you DO all day, Mom?”  my son asked me, a small tone of jealousy in his voice.  “I mean, we’re at school for seven hours.  What do you do?”  

Wow.  What can I say? That I sit at the kitchen table all day, eating ice cream?  Does he really think that I find all the hidden Snicker bars and scarf them down with no one to stop me?  They do go really well with ice cream…  Okay, I’ll be honest.  That could have happened.

But really, that is his fondest dream;  to be left alone with the refrigerator for seven hours, with no one to stop him.  

That’s not quite how it is.  Since you asked, Son, I will show you what happened at the kitchen table while you were gone.

These are a couple of statues that a very patient person has been waiting to be painted for a long time.  Today is the day...

The kitchen table turned into this:    It was gloriously quiet and deliciously fun.

The statues now look like this:

While I was painting the seeds in St. Francis's bowl, I thought about how much I love my brushes.  I have a lot of them...Some are fancy and luxurious and delicate, some are rotten-looking things that don't appear to be worth keeping.  They might look like garbage to someone who looked in my paintbrush box.  But all my brushes are needed, they all have a special purpose.  Here are two of my favorites:

The one on the right is a luxurious, expensive oil painting brush.  It is sleek and soft, the finest Red Sable Filbert. It is 100% reliable, and far more sophisticated than I am.  It blends colors beautifully.   It softens the lines that other brushes leave behind, smoothing all the imperfections.  

The one on the left is a 99 cent cheap thing from the hardware store.  It is ancient, hardened, crusted over and pretty much destroyed.  But that's why I like it so much.  That old brush can do things that no other brush can.  Like paint abstract, splotchy spots to make seeds in St. Francis' bowl, for example.   None of my other brushes can  do that.  It is precisely because that old brush is ruined that I like it so much, and use it so often.  I need it.  At times, I have taken a scissors and snipped some of the inside bristles, thinning it out even more.  There's not much left of it, really.  
That's why it's so valuable.  

As I painted today, I did a lot of pondering about brushes and people.  

People are just like my brushes... They are all unique, for their own special purpose.  
And we need them all.

So Son, that's what I did today.  But don't worry.  The kitchen table is now cleaned off, and ready for you to eat again.  

And I made cookies.

For you.  Because He loves you.

More signs of spring!  Hope you enjoyed the sunrise, too.

Years ago, the Irish dance group Riverdance made an appearance in our city.  Their thunderous shoe stomping, jumping, frenetic tapping and leaping lit up imaginations, made a generation of Americans fall in love with the Irish, and changed my kids’ childhoods forever.  It was a crazed phase, really.  Irish dance schools popped up all over the U.S. in response to clamoring parents, willing to plunk down hundreds of dollars for imported hard shoes and curly wigs.  The universal story of oppression and rebellion and heartache and finally, freedom, told by glamorous athletes in tap shoes was powerful enough to make most hearts pump green blood.  It made us all feel Irish, deep down.  I ordered three pairs of little hard shoes for my daughters within a week of the show.

But no one wanted to open an Irish Dance school way out in the sticks.  So down to the city I went, and I found myself a teacher who would travel to the edge of civilization once a week.

God gave us the luck of the Irish when he sent that teacher to us.  This dancing Irishwoman took my impetuous ideas and impulse purchases and gently turned our  country kids into Irish Step Dancers.  

“Riverdance is great,” she used to say.  “But there are centuries of Irish dance and rich cultural traditions that your kids would appreciate more.”  For the next nine years, she patiently taught our growing group of kids dances from Irish history, set dances from the Irish countryside, dance steps normally done at parties on propped-sideways doors and kitchen tables, and even one that she learned from an Irish garbage man. 

She was brilliant.

“They can share joy through dance,” she explained.  “It is not just about performance and competition.  With music and dance, they can bring happiness to so many.”  With that aim in mind, she led them from nursing home to nursing home, across our metro area.  Instead of competing for trophies, they danced for the elderly.  

And the elderly responded, loud and clear.

They sang along.  They clapped their hands, tapped their velcro geriatric shoes, and pounded their canes to the beat of the kids’ shoes.  They smiled at the children, cheering them on with each jig and reel.  Inevitably, the strains of “Oh Danny Boy” drew tears from the nursing home residents.  Wispy voices joined in, crackling on the high notes.

Oh, Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling
From glen to glen, and down the mountain side.
The summer's gone, and all the roses falling,
'Tis you, 'Tis you must go and I must bide.

Once, some of the moms found a treasure trove of cast-off dance costumes at a thrift store. The day we tried them out for the first time, a white haired man from the fifth row raised his cane, shaking it.

“Does your Mammy know you’re out dancing in that red dress?”  He scolded the girls.

We put the kids back in pleated plaid skirts.  Good to know your audience.

One performance, something happened that I will never forget.  It was around St. Patrick’s Day.  The kids put on a show in a Memory Care Facility.  This wasn’t the first time they’d danced for people with Alzheimer’s.  They didn’t expect much of a response here.  They were veteran dancers, after all, who showed up with gifts of cookies.  Just a bit of joy for the elderly, who seemed to need it.  

It happened to be a Sunday, and many residents had families visiting.  We wheeled residents out to the sunroom, set out the platters of cookies, musical instruments, and plugged in our speakers.  Silence fell in the room, and the first dancer took the floor.  The ten year old girl began her traditional Irish jig, hard shoes banging and rapping away at the floor.  That’s when it happened.

A frail man, who had been quietly sitting to one side staring vacantly into space, suddenly pushed away his walker and stood up.  His flaccid, sad face broke out in a huge grin.  

“That’s my song!”  He yelled.  “I know this one!”

He gleefully bounced to the front of the room, took the girl by her small hands, and proceeded to dance all about the room, jigging his heart out.  He leaped and turned, kicked and twirled with the girl, as well as any ninety year old man could.  The lilt of the music kept him aloft, and it was as if eighty decades of age melted away and the two dancers became one with the music, dancing their jig.  

As the song ended, the girl guided him back to his chair, and he eased down, still smiling.  His family was shocked, his daughter openly sobbing.  

“That’s my song!” He said again, before falling silent, back into the shadows of Alzheimer’s.  “That’s my song...”

But come ye back when summer's in the meadow,
Or when the valley's hushed and white with snow,
'Tis I'll be here in sunshine or in shadow,--
Oh, Danny Boy, oh Danny Boy, I love you so!

Little Fugue in G Minor by Bach is softly echoing through my living room.

I love this song.  Especially when it’s played by my kid.

Gentle, lilting, then intense, the notes tumble over each other like a waterfall, and I am carried away.   It is such an emotionally charged piece, and of course, I get choked up watching her play, imagining her in the very distant future, dressed in a floor length gown, performing Rachmaninoff on a stage. 

She’s just a little kid and she halts on some of the notes.  Determination is written on her face, and at the difficult passages, her small fingers pick out the notes timidly and delicately.  She looks over at me.

“Hey Mom,” she sighs and stops playing.  “Can I play a kid one now?  I like Chopsticks better.”

Reality check.  

The truth is, the Bach I so enjoy comes from my kid playing a magic piano app on someone’s Ipad.  

It’s not the real thing, it’s just an app.  Pathetic, right?  But I’ll take whatever music I can get.

I did buy an old piano, almost twenty years ago.  

I bought it used, and now it is unused.  

It has been moved three times.  In those twenty years, I have paid for three kids’ piano lessons.  I idealized the thought of piano playing kids like our former Perfect Neighbor Kids, who learned from their grandmother and could play anything, sensitively and beautifully.  Collectively, my kids know exactly one song on the real piano.  Just one, rollicking, pounding jazzy creation of their dad, who likes to tinker in music.  

No one can really play the piano.

The last time I had our real piano tuned, about twelve years ago, the guy was quite taken aback.  

“You say some of the notes won’t play,”  he began. 

“Yeah, it’s a pretty old instrument.”

“That’s not the problem.”  He sternly looked at me.  “Do you know what I found in this piano?”


Did I want to know?  Because that sounded like a loaded question to me.  What was it?  Was there money?  A treasure map to a lost civilization?  Or something hideous?  I looked at him nervously.  Was it terrible?

“What?”

He made a flourish with his hand, displaying the hidden contents of our piano.  Stickers.  A postage stamp.  More stickers.  Twelve small paper dolls.  A family photo.  And 89 cents in coins.

Hmm…

“How would you expect this piano to function properly when it is being used as a safe deposit box by your children?”  He humphed.  

That was the last time I had it tuned.  

And that is why the only piano music around here comes from an app.  

Until recently.  

Someone Else’s Kid was visiting our house, and sat down at our neglected, old treasure receptacle of a piano.  The notes reached my ears while I was making supper in the kitchen.  I stopped everything to listen.  It enchanted me.  I crept to the edge of the wall, and peered around the corner so as not to disturb whoever was playing.  Someone Else’s Kid continued, intense and smiling.  Eagerly, his fingers fluid like water, he poured out song after song…Joplin, Bach, Mozart, Schumann, and more.  I didn’t know my piano could sound like that!  He had a look on his face that was priceless.  I think it was love.  He loved playing the piano.  Every note was joy.  I leaned against the kitchen wall and a tear rolled down my cheek.  It was beautiful, because he loved it.  

After a while, Someone Else’s Kid got up, and ambled away to another adventure with the boys.  

But his music stayed with me.  

It certainly was not my piano that was worthy or beautiful.

It was the child’s Love, shining through the piano.  Through that wretched piano.  

Love changed it, and enabled it to make beautiful music.

Isn’t that what God does for us?   

We may be old and broken, beat up by the world.  People may think we are useless.  We collect junk on the outside and we often come with hidden baggage on the inside.

But the truth is, when God loves us, our real worth shows.  Love makes us be beautiful.

And God always loves us.  

Beginning the pictures on a new project... Watercolors make me happy!  
Watercolors + Baby = Joy!  This is your mathematical equation for the day.
Hope you find joy today, too.  

I cartoon blog at downsideups.com on Fridays.  Come visit us!

I recently had a most enlightening conversation with Small One.  I was painting, she was painting.  She likes to do what I do.  

We were enjoying working side by side, watercoloring the cloudy sky and some cartoons.  

“Small One, please pass the Kosher salt.  Want to watch as I sprinkle it on my wet paint?”

“I know, Mom.  I do that too.  It makes snowflakes in the paint.  See?”  She proceeds to take a pinch of salt with her dainty little fingers, and gently drop the grains into her wet paint.  

That’s my girl.  Her ‘snowflakes’ are exquisite.

We continue painting.  I paint a cartoon character pregnant, looking like a globe.  She paints her character round like a piece of candy.

“Hey Mom, do you want a tootsie roll?”

“We don’t have any, Dear.”

She smiles a knowing, secret smile of delight, and puts down her paintbrush.  “Yes, we do!  Hiding way up in the cupboard.”

I stop working.  “Oh really?  How do you know that?”

“Oh, me and Sis found it.  Don’t tell!  It’s Halloween candy.  No one  else knows, so they can’t eat any.”

Ah.  A secret stash of candy, hidden away from many siblings... Do tell.  If you want to eat something in a house with many siblings, you have to learn to either A., eat really fast, or B., hide stuff.  

At this point, she climbs up a chair, onto the cupboard, and reaches up above the toaster.  She returns victorious, with a half-empty bag of Tootsie Rolls, leftover and forgotten from Halloween.  She is so happy to share this secret with me.    

“But please don’t write about it on your blog, Mom, because then everyone will find out and it will be gone tomorrow!” 

Good thinking, Small One.

I blog at downsideups.com on Fridays...  Click on the picture to see today's 'toons!_

Wandering through art museums is something I really love to do.

I recently spent a day at a gallery with a daughter.

She is like her dad, that one.  Intense and talented, she sees things that most people do not.  Her dad draws comic books for DC in New York.  She essentially grew up in an art studio, surrounded by Batman, Superman, and the DC Universe for companions.  Her world was filled with epic battles in art, and the good guys always won.

When she was young, I read Gardner’s Art Through the Ages to her more often than Go Dog Go.   She and her siblings made (and still make!) extreme messes at the kitchen table, in watercolor, acrylic, pastels, charcoal, graphite, clay, sticks, fabric, sculpture, even lights.  I love the moment of discovery, when a dinosaur emerges from the Play Doh, roaring in the hands of a toddler.  Our Family Nights include covering the kitchen table in rolled paper, and dumping the box of markers in the middle.  Everyone draws.  Art is as essential as breathing.  

Back to the gallery:  While in the museum, we saw this gorgeous painting by Whistler.  It stared,  large and looming on the wall ahead.  My heartbeat quickened.  So did our pace.  By the time we reached the painting, I was crying, and she had tears on her cheeks, too.  We stood in awe in front of the vast, white wildness, and the grandeur of Whistler’s oil brushstrokes overwhelmed me.  Seeing my daughter feel the same power of emotion from some paint and canvas multiplied my tears.  

She claimed the tears on her cheeks sprang from sheer embarrassment, because her mother kept blubbering in public.  

But I don’t think so.