To kick off Lent, a walk down memory lane.
Tag: Pen&Ink
Mardi Gras
It’s that day again. Party while you can!
Wishing for Snow
Today is the birthday of one of my childhood heroines, Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867-1957), and for a comic (created during the Snowmageddon of 2010) and a mini-bio, please see A Long Winter.
Toss Those Beans
Have you hung your garlic or fish head on the front door? Do you have your roasted soybeans ready? Today is Setsubun, Japan’s annual demon-expelling festival. To prepare yourself, please see Demons Out! Happiness In!
Rise and Shine
I’m afraid this is where our family will be found tonight—snuggled up in our cozy burrow observing what has come to be an annual tradition.
For another picture of the groundhog at home, please see GroundhogCandlemas.
Roshan (“Bright Light”)
Marius
Elaine
Dreams
In honor of the birthday today of Langston Hughes, a poem and and a picture. For another Hughes poem, and a mini-bio, please see Rivers.
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.
—Langston Hughes
Dawn
Skating Season?
In late December or January, I usually take my daughter once or twice for a day of ice-skating at Washington DC’s Sculpture Garden rink, followed by hot cocoa and a cozy stroll through the National Gallery of Art or Museum of Natural History. As an urban skating experience, it’s hard to beat gliding round on a sunny winter day under an icy blue sky among sculptural masterpieces, with distant views of museum facades, the U.S. Capitol, and the Washington Monument.
However, since I fell and fractured my patella just before New Year’s Eve (no drinking was involved, I assure you!), our skating excursions have been put on hold… only temporarily, I hope. But DC’s “winter” weather has been so oddly and disconcertingly balmy this year that it feels more like roller-skating season. Fingers are crossed here for a snowy February.
This illustration is not from DC’s rink, but is my imagined depiction of the rink that existed on the World Trade Center plaza before September 11th, 2001. It was created for the book The Survivor Tree, about which I posted on the ten-year anniversary on September 11th, 2011.
And today is the birthday of Alexander Robey “Boss” Shepherd (1835–1902), whom Washington DC has to thank for much of its 19th-century infrastructure, however unconventionally (some might say illegally) it was obtained. For a mini-bio, please see “Boss” Shepherd.
Birthday Splash
Today is the birthday of painter Jackson Pollock (1912-1956). For a comic and mini-bio, please see Action Jackson.
And for the story of another artist born on this day, please see It’s an Oldenburg.
Alexander
It Works!
The Christmas before last, our friend Martha gave us a beautiful poinsettia plant that I repotted and set outside for the summer. It grew so large and bushy that, in November, I decided to try something I had never before attempted: getting it to bloom again.
To achieve this, one must fool the innocent poinsettia into thinking it has been suddenly transported to, say, Reykjavik, by keeping it in complete darkness from 5pm to 8am for ten weeks. This would mean: 1. putting it into a dark closet, assuming there was space among the family shoes, umbrellas, and vacuum cleaner; or, 2. lugging it downstairs to the basement every night and remembering to bring it up each morning (ha!); or, 3. covering it with an opaque material.
I opted for the third option. Every night (well, that is, when I remembered), I immersed the long-suffering poinsettia in a double layer of trash bags—kind of like covering a bird cage—and removed them in the morning. I stopped before Christmas, by which time, according to the instructions, “you should see flower buds.” Hmmm. No flower buds. Oh, well, I thought, I suppose I forgot to cover it too many times, and I returned it to its sunny alcove with other wintering-over plants. What a lot of bother for nothing.
When I went to water the plants this week, lo and behold: there were BUDS, some of them beginning to open! I am thrilled, and ready to try it again next winter.
Megan
Sister Mary Daniel
Déjeuner of the Dragon
I hope you have paid your debts, hung your lucky couplets on the door, swept your house clean of ill-fortune, and decked it and yourself in red, because today is the first day of Chinese New Year celebrations, and you have fifteen days of festivities ahead of you. Our own culinary interpretation of this holiday: tonight I will make crispy tofu and stir-fried broccoli and ginger but will order spicy eggplant and vegetarian dumplings from Mr. Chen’s Organic Chinese Restaurant around the corner. We’ve already prepared our New Year fortunes—more on that later.
2012 is the Year of the Dragon, and if you were born in a Dragon year, you are (according to Mr. Chen’s placemats) eccentric, and your life complex. You have a very passionate nature and abundant health. Marry a Monkey or Rat late in life, and avoid the Dog!
Today is also the birthday of painter Édouard Manet (1832-1883), who was himself born in the Year of the Dragon. I hope that, in addition to his other qualities, he had a sense of humor.