A Sunday Walk in the Polder

Some families spent their Sunday's going to church, we didn't, we took a long walk. If the weather was particularly good we would bicycle. Well, more specifically my parents would bicycle, to some new place to explore at leisure. This was a particularly bright and sunny day in the middle of summer. A real scorcher by Dutch standards. I rode with my father in a child's bicycle seat, one that would have been met with gasps of disapproval by today's standards. It was black metal and red vinyl and collapsed when not in use. Moms bicycle had a large wicker basket in which the family dog rode. Not one person we knew well owned a car, there was always those days a very small number of motor vehicles comprised mostly of the cheapest of Citroens and Volkswagen bugs.

I could smell that we were coming closer to the sea, it was in the air. Sea gulls screeching with delights as their extended wings caught every warm air current, endlessly gliding along. Everything here was either sand coloured or sea green. Only tall patches of grass broke the very flat landscape, all of it an extended quilt of sandy lifeless polders and squares of grass, just occasionally a patch of houses. One such patch of houses was Spijkernisse. There were no new buildings like the ones in Hoogvliet where we lived. Here the air no longer reeked of the refineries. The quiet here was quite shocking to the system. Our normally chatty family was just now silent, we were blending in, at one with the calm.

We came to the very edge of a brand new polder, not a building, a road, or even a blade of grass, nothing. There was only packed sand dotted by small stones and decaying jellyfish. Seagulls were diving for any small thing that moved. As I was being lifted out of my kiddy seat...

the whole story at www.aletta.org/sparrowweb1.shtml#Walk_in_the_Polder

Carnival

these are some carnival themed ATCs I made for another swap. They are collages based on photos I have taken.

Metamorphoses of sorts...

I guess I don't feel much like landscapes, too cold, too harsh and besides that, something else is pushing it's way forward from my subconscious. No time for fairy tales until I've allowed it entrance into this three dimensional world, and somehow tame it to two dimensions. The work is far from finished, I've barely begun, but I do think the heart of it has made contact with me.

I really hope my energies hold, past the banal housekeeping tasks that will no longer stay on hold. I've dedicate the rest of me, whatever there is of me to this work and to the exclusion of all other projects. I will get the housework under control and make sure the lavender continues to weather the end of this winter, as they have so bravely come this far. The sun is up another hour or so, enough to cover them and add a little compost. Considering the season the balcony is still quite green.

Well, enough rambling, just so you don't find me rude because the replies to your emails are long in coming, or when they do they seem overly brief, please understand, I am not as I once was, there is a great reduction in just how much I can accomplish in one day, one week, one month. I am as always lately painfully aware that there is only so much I can likely accomplish, so I set out to nevertheless accomplish ten times that. with any luck St. Jude has a little time left for me.

Summer Flower Show

copyright Monika Roleff 2006.

Wild Apple Study

copyright Monika Roleff 2006.

excerpt - The Weeping Lady

Under certain circumstances, fairies will just see a need to intervene. such was the case with Ms. Millar one warm springtime many years ago. It had not been long before that splendid day that Ms. Millar, they valley's school teacher had to bury her young husband. He had died in a faraway war, in another country far, far away. Ms. Millar was still living in a big city then, she'd just finished going to teacher's college. she was lonely and spent all her evenings in the darkness crying until she finally would fall asleep.

It was her cousin Elizabeth who invited her to come and stay with her in the valley, As it happens, and quite often it does, just then the teacher Mr. Rolf, decided he really needed to stop teaching after thirty years and open a candy shop instead. Perhaps it came about because after years of taking away candy from his pupils he decided he's just much rather make the most wonderful candy for children to enjoy. So he did, within weeks he's rented a store and was making the most wonderful candy.

*** a note: The Unseen is now finished ad posted on my website:www.aletta.org/lukikoko.shtml