In a Nutshell

Welcome back! Filling in the gaps from last year… John and I celebrated our 10-year anniversary with a little road trip in the Miata <3

Flying Adventures had a month-long exhibition at Columbus’ Priscilla R. Tyson Cultural Arts Center, which was a dream come true— decades ago I took ceramics and painting classes here, and taught my very first photography class in the basement. I was always inspired by the exhibitions in the gallery space and hoped that one day I’d have an exhibition there myself. It was an honor to be accepted.

I’ve finally come to embrace that Flying Adventures is truly a long-term project that runs along at its own pace. It will find a spot to land for a bit, then I’ll pack it away again for awhile & work on other things until it feels right to find another destination for it. I might work on a print-on-demand book for fans who’d like to buy a full-version print copy… we’ll see… my projects list is long!

The solar eclipse happened on my birthday and somehow I managed not to get sucked into a hole in the space-time continuum! John and I spent the afternoon having a picnic with Pippin, who insisted that we all pose for a selfie with our glasses.

Pippin and I finally worked toward riding together. All on our own and in our own time. I’ll write more about this in a Dear Pippin post, but basically it involved taking the tiniest baby steps and doing them over and over and over. We were dedicated.

Airplane friends, it’s been AWHILE. The Champ has been out of commission for the past two years while it’s being rebuilt (John’s thinks it will be ready to go sometime this summer!) and the Starfighter has been down for those same two years while waiting for its new engine, which finally arrived last fall! Below, John is hauling it into the hangar. Doesn’t it look like a little spaceship?

Many good friends helped swap the engines that day, and the new one — actually a rebuild, thank you, Richard Goode! — is now being put through its paces— 20 hours at max power to get everything “settled in.” It is amazing to see (and hear and feel!) it fly again. And it makes me so happy for John, because a piece of his soul goes missing when he can’t fly his plane. Here’s to summer flying adventures!!

Also lots of great trips last year with John in his Superman — err…umm — captain suit. (Yes he is Clark Kent until he puts on the stripes.) San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Sacramento, L.A., Vegas, Chapel Hill, Greenville, Seattle, Cleveland, Indianapolis… We always look for a bookstore, a place to go for a long walk, and if the weather’s nice, a good spot for a picnic.

Capital Books in Sacramento

I woke up from a nap on the flight from LA to Seattle, looked out the window, and there was Crater Lake. So unmistakable!

Summer came, and with it, the patio. Fireflies, hawks, grasshoppers and praying mantids in my plants, mama ducks with babies, coyote howls across the field in the woods, crickets well into October… I love our apartment patio SO much. So does Sherman…

Even Valentine gets to enjoy playing in the greenery.

Later in the year we got to go to DC for a very special occasion: One of John’s siblings was retiring from a super-top-secret government career and invited the entire family to celebrate. We toured the Capitol, the Library of Congress, the Museum of American History, and had way too much fun at the International Spy Museum.

The best part of the entire trip, though? — sitting at the dinner table listening to his sister tell stories about her job that she could finally tell, and realizing she did WAY more for our country than her family ever knew.

At the US Capitol

And after all the doing of things throughout the year, winding down 2024 with a quiet Christmas and New Year’s Eve at home was perfect.
More soon.

Catching Up

I started writing this post at the end of March on Florida’s east coast, where John and his daughter and I spent five days of spring break. Beach time… visits with my brother and his wife… sand under my feet… even a touristy day in Orlando with mini-golf and amusement rides downtown. A decade ago when my Mom and Dad’s health was failing I pretty much lived down here— a second life that felt both right and strange at the same time (where was home?) — but now I don’t visit Florida as often as I’d like. It was so good to be barefoot after all the winter boots and scarves and mittens, to hear mockingbirds and start writing again at our little Airbnb bungalow in the mangroves of the Indian River. We are lucky.

2023 was a personally difficult year for for a lot of reasons. Some heavy family drama. The death of a friend. Chronic insomnia. A move. Feeling unmoored. Facing some old demons. Not knowing what I wanted to be doing anymore— not with art or writing or my freelance work. As I now reread that list I can see why I didn’t always feel that great. But in between the hard stuff there were so many good things, and even though it wasn’t a big photo-taking year, looking back through images makes me happy. SO many good things.

We traveled. Spring break took us to San Diego with John’s daughter. Cloudy and kinda cold, but who cares!? We were in California!

Summer: A trip on the Alaska Railway — their 100th anniversary! Anchorage to Denali with a few days in the park.
This is probably a whole separate post at some point.

I resurrected my little sketchbook on the trip, and tried to draw something every day. I always say I’d like to keep this habit going, but it doesn’t happen, which I’m finally okay with. Life is too short to beat yourself up about things like this. Don’t ask how many sketchbooks I’ve started for various “100 days” projects or drawing-a-day challenges… finally I just decided to consolidate them all into one. When I do wind up finally filling it with drawings, I won’t care how many years of random things are in it… I’ll just be happy to be look back through it.

Vermont in late September. John and I spent time on our 10 acres in Danville AND got to go on a beautiful horseback riding trail ride.
It’s making me look forward to the day when Pippin is in our own backyard and I can ride him to the store! Yes, really!

Asheville in November, for Thanksgiving at the house my family has rented for almost twenty years. Some years we drive up the mountain and I don’t want to come down for the entire week. This year we all wanted to be outside more. Thanks to all the running around I do with Pippin, I can actually hike up steep hills without John having to pull me up partway. Chimney Rock has 500 steps and I didn’t even have to take the elevator!

During the school year I worked part time for the Ohio State School for the Blind continuing some of the projects we’d started during and after the pandemic. The school’s history timeline banners, which I created through an Ohio Arts Council TeachArts Ohio grant, made their public debut at the Ohio Statehouse last spring, along with the school’s WPA model of the Statehouse. I must extend a very special thank you to art restorer David Terry for teaching me how to—and spending insane amounts of time helping me—clean and repair the Statehouse model.

I experienced such an odd moment when David and I delivered the exhibition to the Statehouse: For months I’d been looking at this small-scale model, cleaning tiny windows and pillars with a toothbrush… every step, every flagpole, every lamp post… and then seeing the actual, real Statehouse felt sooo strange (even though I’ve seen it hundreds of times) — it suddenly seemed so HUGE and not-real! — like I was looking at a giant version of what we’d been working on. Or that I’d shrunk and been transported onto the very lawn we painted green with little paint brushes. (?!)

In the middle of everything else, John and I made the decision to sell our condo and move to an apartment to be closer to Pippin. I was spending 2 hours in the car each day driving out to take care of him. The sale itself was fast and simple as a neighbor wanted to buy our place, but things whirled into motion fast when the apartment complex we wanted to move to called and said, “We’ve got a place that will be ready in two weeks…” It happened to be a unit in the building I was hoping for, facing a beautiful west field.

Packing was tough. Whenever I move I always think that I’ll finally go through all my things and purge old stuff, but it brought me face to face with really old projects, old work, supplies for all the wedding and portrait work I used to do… I suffered from decision fatigue before I even made any decisions and the whole experience made me wonder who I even was as an artist anymore. In the end, John — God bless him! — said to just put everything in boxes and bring it along. A year later, there are still boxes to unpack, stuff to sort out, and artwork to hang on the walls, but one project at a time I’m sifting through it.

I miss our neighbors and our Secret Garden-esque courtyard where we used to live, but I love our patio with the view of the big sky and the field and the woods behind it, with all kinds of sunshine, and the moon sailing across the sky at night .

All for now, more to come. I’ve missed blogging, and I think I’m finally getting back to it again.
Cheers!

Launching the "Dear Pippin" blog

After writing my “Dear Pippin” post last year (see previous) it occurred to me that I wanted to write more letters to my little white horse and so I decided to launch an entire new blog dedicated specifically to this ongoing project. It’s growing slowly and lives over on the Substack platform, although I will always keep a copy of the most recent letter on the “Dear Pippin” page of my website. I even came up with this little hand-drawn graphic to illustrate the title…

Head over to my Dear Pippin Substack page to watch the video from our first Christmas show together…

Read about a new dream…

And take a peek at photos from Pippin’s 2023, including goofball moments:

… and quiet ones.

If you’d like to subscribe to Dear Pippin and read our letters in your own inbox, you can do so right here: