Things in threes and 3’s in Things

 

  Harness the power. Palindromic 12/21 today! Use Feng shui. Make it divine. Group by threes. Love every minute.

   Have dreaded tasks? Break it up. Three simple steps.

   Errands to run? List top three. Get it done.

   Undecided on something? List three pros; list three cons. Add more notes. Weigh the sides. Get the picture.

   Choices to make? Narrow to three.  Mix them up. Pick the middle. Or the first. Or the third.

   Green light, yellow light, red light. Go to where? Why go there? Travel how fast? Why slow down? Where is danger? Why use caution? Why not stop? Stop on dime. Time doesn’t stop.

   If you add an H to trees, you get threes. Both are green. Both are wood. Muerto is dead. Eliminate dead wood. Travel Rio Grande. Flower is compass. Wellsville in center for health. Finger Lakes, finger tips and tips of leaves making z’s. Never bored. Always happy.

Blue herons, blue tree

   Water feeds wood. Tree decorating time at the park. Keith Beck takes a step back to evaluate his work thus far. The tree they wrap with blue lights is fifty per cent done. It is a perennial crowd pleasing favorite. He likes the new LED lights they have this year, they are efficent. They can string 44 strands together.

   “We actually eliminated a power harness,” said Beck. “We’re doing a lot of cost saving! That gives us power to use somewhere else.”

Elsewhere on my walk, a heron in the landscape and a female mallard duck in trouble. From afar I am seeing a different shape, a different color as one duck swims in the canal with half a dozen others. “there’s something different about that duck.”

Sure enough, at closer range it becomes clear the duck is wearing a sycamore leaf, like a ruff around its neck and this has it agitated while making it look like a queen or a courtier.

   “

Silhouette

    Fasten your seatbelts: Art group Thursday night.  The leader of our meeting, having abstained from work on the theme, Silhouette, instead provides a seasonal picture – a pastel drawing of a rainspotted maple leaf drafted in gentle fall colors. We all ooh and ahh.

    Next: a photo of the oddest and most intriguing kapok-like clouds and silhouetted trees. Somehow the bumps in the sky associate with the rain drops in the previous work. Where is Bette Davis? Can it be going to be a bumpy night?

    A handsome pair of linoleum prints are trotted out: a composition of fall leaves done in black and white and in color. We like these, too, and are interested in the process.

   Another member of the group produces a seasonal, i.e. Hallowe’en, card made with an iris folding technique and  a silhouette theme. Accompanying these, my own little nitwit puzzle, from a tract left by someone at the Y, a dictionary page, and the mental looping of lyrics from A Fine Romance, the fine song by Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields which I like sung by Rosemary Clooney.

   One person provides the piece de resistance, a postage stamp quilt. A showpiece. It is derived from a photograph taken by someone she knows, a factory maintenance worker. The sunset sky is composed of  batik fabric: purple and orange and red and yellow, with an overstitched black tree silhouette. Although the finished product has an authentic Asian look and feel, it is not a tree in a Chinese or Japanese painting, it is a tree crown at the botanical gardens in Allentown.

   The one-inch squares make it measure about 23″ x 17″ plus double-mat and frame. She has sold it, too. We marvel at her gift for turning an idea or a picture into a fabric design and executing it, all in the past six weeks. She receives our highest honors. Here is an artist showing and sharing the power of making wise choices and in making something lovely, beautiful and desirable. It’s like a trip to bountiful that we all want a view to admire.

Real Simple

Real Simple by Allison Huyett

 

 

   Honey locust leaves all over the trail.  It’s real simple.

   A heron at the half-mile rapids. Rain again, prompting use of umbrella, a rare but necessary accessory for the fact. Just the facts, Ma’am. Ready for the sun to come out.

    This is my to-to list for the day because I really got to be about my business. Who else in the entire world makes a honey locust leaf to do list? No one. Who gets it done better than you? No one!

    Oh, you can get a honeydew melon. You can put “ honeydew” on the list. You can find and make a  Honey Do List. ”Honey, do this.” But this? Only I can do this, that and the other thing this way.

    Stick out your can, here comes the garbage man. Got that to do too! Git R Done.

  Gotta run!

All Things Considered Reconsidered

 

All Things Considered Reconsidered by Allison Huyett

 

 

 

  Today is complete before it even locates the opening. Incomplete when ending. Down arrows abounding and bringing us to earth. Gravity. Up arrows shooting sky high. Ecstasy. 

   Trapped in the middle – agony! Free. Seeking center, driven with centripetal force. Sometimes going with centrifugal movement. Every which way but loose.

  Consider now the lily that neither toils nor spins. Let me be. Beautiful.

  There sits a heron on a dead branch, five or six feet above the creek. The morning mist wafts up from the water and envelopes the still creature, crisscrossing it with an overlay of mystery and macabre.

   Simple condensation swirling around a perched fishing bird. Let the dust settle. All things considered, things are going according to plan and according to not being planned.

Juglans nigra

 

Poplar & Walnut -12 by Allison Huyett

    This green parking garage stub Poplar & Walnut – 12 makes the pick of the litter, to pick up where we left off. The black walnut grows here; Juglans nigra, with its round green nut casings aplenty, secreting pungent messages. The tulip poplar is one of the more dominant trees in these forests. Tall and proud and straight. The flowers that look like tulips and leaves that second the motion. But the parking stub is from Philadelphia, travelling here like a burr on wheels.

    Two boatlike wooden shapes are stacked near the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers sign at the upper lot. The bottoms of the skiffs are wire mesh, like large dirt sifters, what are they for and why are they here?

    It’s a dark day on the trail, overcast and damp, yet dry. It could rain but it isn’t now. A heron stands perfect and straight on a midstream stone near the pipline, it looks like a yin-yang symbol stretched tall, the way its neck bends and the legs descend. It is curvature & armature – 12. (Today is a twelve day).

Ron, Walk

Nuts on the Rise by Allison Huyett

 

 

   A rise in nuts. Tears from fears. Can the squirrels keep up? Can I get back on the horse? Woe is not me! Whoa, maybe.

   Ron reports he thinks there are more black walnuts on the ground this year than ever before. He says take care walking or running on the trail, not to turn an ankle. A non-walnut related injury (and the doctors) curtailed his running for now in favor of walking, the kinder, gentler exercise.

   The quasi-cruciform scarlet and pin oak leaves have dropped like fallen soldiers. Today is all water, path and relationships, with a hint of center: earth and fame. Intense and negative thoughts have given way, thanks to Ron’s company for two miles and a sharing of troubles of the last two weeks. Feel almost human again. One heron waits on fallen limb.

Sorry, This Box is Not a Winner

Sorry, This Box Is Not A Winner by Allison Huyett

Faded Cloth

 

Faded Cloth by Allison Huyett

  Overcast day. What shall we have? Tall coffee and a smile. Pick of the litter: packet of on-the-go clean up cloth and a bit of bark in great shape. It’s October! Squirrel in the knot of tree nibbles on nut. Leaves a plenty. Heron roars like lion on Tully turn and swoops over the creek like stealth plane. Helicopters in air last night and now. What’s up? Overcast and castaway. Castaway all cares. Care for. Far and away the best.

Notorius Super Big Bol, Wrapper

  We are nothing if not our associations. Constructs and connections, web of thoughts. A prime heron establishes itself on a prominent rock upstream of the overpass. Commanding attention, commanding a view. The rock upon which it stands is split-level and big enough to be a small island. Someone has left behind a candy wrapper, to sustain my existence. It is a BIG BOL wrapper, something you don’t see every day. SUPER is encircled or surrounded by an oval line. Combines with a crushed hickory hull – six pieces – that has a football shape. BIG BOL, super bowl, Notorius B.I.G., the rapper, BIG GLO, BIG BLO, BIG BLOW, fellatio or a crush. Crush proof box, New! BIG OIL, big oil producers. Big lob or a big glob. Bigeloil and Bigelow and a great big globe. Super. Super. Very BIG. GO. Pass go, collect 200 dollars and go outside and play.