Creative Play

APRIl 2020  Chapter One:  The Beginning Back in the 1980's I attended an exhibit at the Oakland Museum. There was a woman who painted in oil, adding words to her pieces. But you could not read her words because she scribbled them. I liked the overall paintings but wished I could read her words. Later, I attended College of the Sequoia's to take a Calligraphy class. I did not think of myself as an artist, but I did write in journals every morning, and out of those writings came stories of my growing up. I dreamt of a quilt. At close range, I realized it was not made of cloth, but of collages, each illustrating chapters that I'd been writing. The next morning I began to make what I call Ink Quilts. I was doing art, just not thinking of myself as an artist.  At some point I re-married, and we bought a home in Three Rivers. A studio was built in what as a garage type room outside of our house. It became my home away from home. Eventually, I made friends with l...

"Run" by Ann Patchett is a treat to read. About the mixing and matching of race and class in Boston. It so reminded me of my family, not in the details of the book, but in the essence. My Stepfather introduced a view to family in a new way to me. Family is blood, but it can be more. What does blood have to do with love? Not much. Actions say loudly what love really is, day by day, filling in details, so that at the end of his life I had no doubts that my Stepfather loved me and my siblings deeply (whole, stepped, and adopted), and in a way that meant there is always room for one more. Love has no boundaries. It framed the life I was to choose, two sons I birthed (brown skins), a daughter of the heart, white, looks more like me than my birth sons, and a stepdaughter, Mayan ancestry who was adopted into my present husbands life and lucky me, I received her into mine. Like my Pop I have four children who came to me in different ways, and are so different from one another, and ye...