What? It's August?

Where in the hell did my summer go?  I know that technically we still have a few more months left, but damn!  Wasn't it just yesterday that I was planting sweat peas by the chain link fence in hopes of making it look a bit more attractive?  For the record, the planting of the peas was about 10 days after St. Patrick's Day.  In my boggled mind I seem to think that my great grandmother planted hers on St. Patrick's Day.  Maybe that's why mine didn't do so well.  Or that they are planted right at the end of our asphalt driveway.  What little actually bloomed smell great though.


We've had a very busy summer traveling almost every weekend.  We've been to graduation parties, birthday parties, weddings or just visiting out-of-state friends.  It's been a rarity that we've been home and when we are, we seem to have things planned out the wazoo.  (Wow! Wazoo must be a real word now as spell check didn't highlight it.)

Two weeks ago, we took a short drive - if you consider 5 and a half hours short - to Tennessee to visit my friend Sher and her family.  Most of her family anyway.  Her oldest daughter was away at drama camp.  It's the first time that I've actually spent any amount of time other than dinner or drinks with her since meeting her over at a friends blog.  And every time I've been around Sher or chatted on line I'm always amazed at what an incredible woman she is.  Don't take my word for it, check out her website.  You can find the link over to the left or just click here: http://www.sherfickart.com/ and find some of her amazing work.  But I'll tell you this right now, viewing them on a computer or in photographs does not do her work justice.  Especially her encaustic work.  It's akin to trying to describe the subtlety in the details of a DaVinci painting.  There is amazing depth to her work both figurative and literal.

I've also taken a sabbatical away from here to examine what exactly it is that I hoped to accomplish.  Well, if nothing else, it's a vanity thing.  But I hope that it's more than that.  It's like everything else in the blog-o-sphere, a place where hopefully I can shed some illumination on the world around me.  And that's the key word... me.  I can't make this about anything else because quite frankly I couldn't if I tried.  It may seem like the above references to Sher is about her, but really it's about my perception of her as an artist and as a friend.

I've written a little about my family life growing up.  The truth is that it's a rosy version, while truthful, isn't exactly the whole truth.  There were times so bleak that I can't dwell on them.  Doing so would give them a new life that would destroy the person I've become as they drag me down through the depths of despair.   I've seen how deep those waters are and friends I'm here to tell you that's one ocean I never want to sail over again. 

I've had people whom I haven't heard from or spoken to in years comment on their perceptions of those posts and that's what's kept me from writing here for so long.  To answer those people (who didn't actually ask a question) I am going to paraphrase what a friend of mine said:  You don't get to rewrite my history to make yourself feel better.  I know what happened and just because you don't or maybe you do and don't wish to acknowledge things doesn't make those times any less real.  I lived through them and could tell you things that would only make you feel worse in that you have only a small sliver of knowledge. It's like a magician uses slight of hand to keep your focus on one hand while the other is doing something else.  Actually a more apt metaphor would be of a pick pocket bumping into you and stealing from you while brushing the dust off you shoulder.

I do want to keep things somewhat light here.  As I do in my everyday life. It just makes the journey so much more enjoyable.   Sometimes though,  in order to explain why a rosebush has so many gorgeous blooms, you just have to talk about the manure that caused it to thrive.