I have watched the snow in silence all morning. I am truly grateful for this period of quiet peace. I have needed to concentrate on a project I have been working on.
The view from my desk.
No, it is not decorating for the holidays or decoupaging Christmas ornaments. That would be fun. I will hold off on glitter and glue until after 5:00PM.
I am rewriting my story. Not just a chapter, the whole thing. Well almost all of it. I am culling what was myth and wishful thinking to see what is left.
This has not been an easy thing to do. If I did not feel that it was necessary, I would not be doing it. I am tackling one past event at a time and looking at it from all sides. We usually do not look at things from perspectives other than our own, especially when we are young.
Piling up quietly.
This has been hard work and has required my actually drawing scenarios and stick people and writing out what each person might have been thinking. It usually gives me a headache, but is very enlightening so I will keep at it until I get more clarification.
Watching the snow in silence is like staring into a fish tank. It somehow clears my mind like rice clears the palate.
Fluffy snow slowly falling is so soothing that it feels like balm for my troubled mind as I brave things I have refused to face.
This snow is like an angel. Nature’s way of quieting the setting and softening everything. Muting the noises and covering the colors so that things are monochromatic and muffled.
I did not say I would be making a snow angel nor snowman. My neighbor did bring me some snow cream.
I feel gratitude to my parents for leaving my sister and me this haven. It has brought me so much peace and comfort.
The results of this work are for a book that I have been working on for a long time. There have been surprises. I am sure there will be more. Bring it!
My sister and I met Louis’s daughter and grandson for lunch yesterday. Both of them resemble him. I felt relief to finally hand over this important part of their dad and grandfather’s history to his family.
They left us to take the notebook to share with her daughter, Louis’s grandaughter. Today, they will share the letters with his widow, Linda. Then take them home for her brother and mother to read.
Louis’s grandson and daughter.
The circle can be completed without me. I have done my part to make it happen. I did this for my mother, who saved the letters for over sixty years.
Dottie
I did it for a young, lonely marine who wrote so beautifully about his first years in the military and service overseas and then came back to a different world.
Louis in 1950
Most of all, I did it out of respect for first loves. When hearts do what they do without reserve, fear or reason. Before things get guarded, complicated and weighted.
The story of Dottie and Louis is sweet. I am not sure how or why it ended. We got conflicting stories from mama due to dementia. My mom went on to marry my wonderful father. They stayed together over sixty years until his death in 2020.
I am thankful to be prepared for the first bit of icy weather here on the mountain. Now that my body is worth more than my car, I will not be risking a fall nor a wreck.
I have a wonderful stash of napkins. These have been carefully selected and collected. I am very particular about my napkins.
Part of a vast napkin collection
I hope I have enough glitter. I left those awful tiny balls at home. Do not buy this type. It rolls off your table and across the floor. Enough of it could cause a fall. Stick with the flakey, shiny, traditional glitter that gets stuck in your hair and carpet.
Clear and iridescent glitter work best
I usually have both matte and gloss decoupage glue on hand. This glue should be thinned with drops of water.
matte or gloss glue
I guess I should check on my food stocks. Do I have milk, bread, eggs and kerosene? Why yes! But I am more worried about boredom than starvation.
Here are some suggestions for laying up your decoupage supplies for future bad weather.
Choose napkins with all sides decorated. Some only have pictures on the front.
All panels on one side decorated.
Also, randomly scattered small pictures on light backgrounds are easiest to work with.
Small and random is easiest.
Stripes with repetition are for flat surfaces and perfectionists. Individual stripes can be cut and used around the edge or middle.
Stripes are tricky.
Large central pictures are great as features on larger items.
Great feature picture.
Many items can improved by decoupage.
Light colored items
Do not try to work with thin glass Christmas balls. I have gotten all the way finished and cracked them moving them around. Thick glass, paper mache, wooden, and plastic things are best. Avoid dark colored objects. Stick with creamy, light colors or white.
I will add links to the end for further information and ideas.
Sometimes I need to play with options of an idea I am developing. That is when I pull out my Ephemeral Art Box. It contains fragile, small trinkets that can add details to cards, letters or dress up decore with a tiny accent.
Tiny, fragile treasures to add details to projects.
I added a bluebird to Daddy’s picture frame by cutting this bird off the corner of an envelope.
Paper bluebird glued to frame.Corner of a Christmas card envelope
Any time I find a tiny piece of art that I can use, I pop it into this box to save for later. I snip pictures off cards and envelopes, save stickers, buttons, old stamps, even pieces of broken jewelry or matches to lost earrings. I have bigger boxes at home, but this one came to the mountains for a workshop. That will be another post.
I will share some photos of tiny treasures I save to use in future art projects.
Scattered treasureTiny fairy stickersInside a tiny boxFairy door buttonsStickers may have borders or not.Ferns without background may be stuck to glass on outside and art on inside and overlapped for a 3-D effect.
Tiny 3-D objects may be used to add details.
These may need extra glue.I love these little doilles.Antique card from my grandmother’s house.Also save textured paper and fabric scraps.
The best thing about having tiny treasures to play with is they all go back into this little box.
My sister and I found a large envelope of letters from my mom’s high school boyfriend while we were cleaning out her house to sell it. We started to read the letters while mom was still alive in a nursing home. We just could not do it. We felt like it was an invasion of her privacy. She had dementia. Sometimes she spoke of Louis like we should know him. Once she wanted to leave him a message over the phone. She thought he needed to know where she went. Mama wanted to leave Daddy messages, too. Both of them were gone by then. We just let her do whatever comforted her.
After Mama died, my sis and I were sorting contents of boxes we had moved from the homeplace to my sister’s house. Here was that envelope again. I opened it and started reading the letters outloud. Louis came to life right there in my sissy’s kitchen. His letters were full of what he was doing and what he was missing.
RIFLE Practice
He was riding on a ship or a helicopter, hiking, digging foxholes, cleaning bunkers, standing watch, stringing barb wire and cleaning his rifle. He was missing deer season, trout season, football games and home.
His duty in 1951 took him to Kobe, Japan and then Pusan and Yanngu, South Korea. He describes the steep mountains and cold weather often.
Three buddies
He tells stories of a pesky mouse in his bunker that dropped things during the night. This caused some drama in the dark. There was also a lizard that drank coffee.
I have put the original letters, envelopes and photos in plastic sleeves and organized them in order in a big notebook. This treasure will be going to his daughter to be shared with her two brothers.
This young Marine was a great writer and storyteller. I see why my mom kept the letters for over seventy years. This is a window into the past of a nice person who ended up serving as a Marine for over thirty years.
I have always appreciated our military putting themselves in harm’s way. This is the first time I have closely considered their time away from friends and family, as well as the freedoms they give up to serve.
This young man missed his hometown, football games, hunting and fishing seasons, his family, his friends and my Mama.
Louis and Mama married other people, but they were great penpals for over three years. I doubt my Mama’s letters made all the moves of a Marine, but I am proud to give these to the children that missed precious time with their Marine father.
I went through my safe this evening in order to find two letters. These two letters were opened with a knife, not my usual ripping. I never saw them until I took a box of cards and photos home from my mother’s house in the spring of 2024 as we were cleaning it out to be sold. The two letters were from two young men I dated while away at school. I am looking for dates on these, not just content. There was a period of busy months when I lived in a nearby city while my mail still came to Enwood. I am hoping these letters came during that period and were simply forgotten by my parents.
My dad had the habit of turning the stack of mail face down to cut each envelope open before turning them face up to remove the contents. I do not feel that they were intentionally cut open to be read. I did find two more Christmas cards that were cut open that I had read. This gave me some comfort.
I have waited to do this. I have had so much else to decipher. I really do not know what to do with this information when I get it. I have discovered more meddling. There were also deflected phone calls. Was my future shaped by forces I was not aware of?
I moved out of my home and into an apartment in Statesville August of 1984. I moved back to Enwood mid-November to take a job at my alma mater high school as a biology teacher. It was a much better position and I could save money living at home.
That summer and fall were a blur of preparing for my sister’s wedding in July, both of us moving away from home and readjusting to new jobs.
Date stamps on misplaced letters.
The date stamps on these letters were June 20, 1984 and Dec 20, 1984. That is when it would be understandable for my family to have been too busy to remember to pass the letters along to me. It was also a time when I was making big decisions about my future.
I will choose grace here. What else can I do? My precious parents are both gone and these two men married other women. Maybe the two letters would not have changed anything.
This is just a small part of a long story. Actually, it is part of three long stories.
I drove to our family’s favorite picnic spot along the Blue Ridge Parkway yesterday.
Julian Price Picnic Area
This is called Julian Price Picnic grounds. Just up the road is Price Lake and Julian Price Campground. My family spent many happy days at these places.
Gravel beach in the creek’s curve.
The Dudley side of the family picnicked in this spot often. Someone always went early to save it.
Deep part of creek.
We loved it because of the stones across the creek and the gravel beach in the curve where the water got deeper.
Loved playing on these stones.
I sorted through decades of photos to find these of past picnics. Many of these people are gone now. I will say to those of you who have not lost somebody close yet, you never stop loving them. You just have to find different ways to express that love after they are gone…Like writing and talking about them.
Boys being boys.
These photos made me smile. All these children are grown up now. We have such sweet memories of them playing in the water on those hot summer days.
The Dudley family enjoying each others’ company.
As I sat there alone, I was not lonely. My heart felt grateful again. What a great family I have had and still have.
I got the neighbor’s children to help move all the boxes of slides and the three projectors to one place in the basement. I was tired of looking at them every day. They have been downstairs for months now. I am finally strong enough to go down the steps. I went down yesterday to look and take photos. I need to know what is ahead of me.
The slide closet in the basement.
Each box with a reel in it potentially holds 140 slides. There are 41 reel boxes and a shoe box of little boxes and random letters. That means there could be 5,840 slides.
Three projectors and more slides.
My sister and I purged hundreds of inherited slides when we emptied our parents’ house. These inherited slides were mostly of people we did not know in places we had not been. There were even hundreds of double slides and a binocular stereoscope viewer. At first we were careful and respectful in our purging. By the end we were thinking these folks were self-absorbed and took way too many photos of their dog and cat.
My plan is to purge and color-code these thousands of slides while I am snowed in this winter. I will keep a fire going in Daddy’s big stove as I sort through sixty years of slides. This sounds like a great way to spend snowy days. Mr. Flower bought me a lovely blue Lodge pan for cooking on the stove if there is a power outage. Daddy would have loved that.
I have done some sorting before when old friends were coming to stay here on the mountain. We hiked Grandfather Mountain with this family in our younger years. We made a slide show just for them. Their color was purple.
It was a wonderful visit. The last before my parents passed. We suspected such and wanted it to be perfect.
I am determined not to leave this purging task for my children to tackle. I will confess that the inheritance of stuff has changed the course of my life. I do not want my two children to be overwhelmed by what I leave behind. They have too much stuff of their own right now.
I will bravely tackle this task for the sake of the family that follows, so they won’t have to wonder, ‘”Who are these folks? Where are they? and ” Who is that spoiled beagle in all these photos?”
floweralley 