memories – beckycochrane.com

Photo Friday, No. 940

Current Photo Friday theme: Rustic

Prickly pear cactus and echinacea purpurea (purple cornflower), shot in June 2011, at Green Acres. Lucky that I had this photo, and of course Lynne had purple flowers so I could stick with the week’s purple theme.

When Lynne confirmed for me the names of the plants, I texted her a memory I had about today’s theme word:

And I know this memory won’t surprise you because it’s my weird brain, but the first time I ever heard the word “rustic” spoken aloud was from your mother. I’d only ever read it and in my head mispronounced it, so that’s when I learned how it was pronounced. Furthermore, I remember what she was speaking of—the natural environment of your father’s country club where we used to swim.

This was truly a “country” club where her father and sister played golf, owned and operated by a couple in a rural area in foothills outside our small town. Most of the time, Lynne and I had the pool to ourselves, and the woman made the most delicious sandwiches from her home-baked hams.

Purple is for birthdays

Happy birthday to Mark, far away in England. I had an extra cake layer in the freezer, so I defrosted and gave it purple candles so everyone at the Hall can have a slice to celebrate you this evening.

Today is the day our nephew Aaron was born in 1993. Because he often came to see us, he had his own napkin ring among those I painted for family and friends who visited The Compound and shared meals with us. Every wooden ring was painted a different color, and Aaron’s is purple. It’s kept in one of the display cabinets in the Houndstooth Hall living room. We will love and miss Aaron always.

Aaron and Tom in February 2011 celebrating Debby’s birthday along with her, David, Geri, and Timothy.

Tiny Tuesday!

A small bottle ideal for perfumes and scents. Also purple.

I thought the bottle might pair well with my “Bridgerton” coloring book. Based on the Regency romance book series by Julia Quinn, the fourth season of the TV series returns in 2026.

On this page, the anonymous “Lady Whistledown” is making a surreptitious late-night visit to her printer so all the gossip about London society (and a bit of the royal household) can be consumed by anyone with around five cents to spend. (They were free at first, and once the populace was hooked, she began to charge for her sheets.) This coloring page was a big help to me yesterday.

Regarding the rest of today’s post: I don’t think today is necessarily the best place to share this information, but it’s uppermost on my mind and is impacting what I feel like sharing here and how this kind of thing can dominate my thoughts and my days. For example, I can color, because it’s soothing. I can manage my household and my health because I have to. But I can’t write. Writing fiction demands that I tap into a full range of feelings, many of them including conflict.

I can’t watch anything (movies, television) that will have too much emotional impact.

I don’t easily handle small frustrations (yet I STILL feel grateful for all the things that go well and the wonderful parts of my life, because I’ve hardwired myself to do so).

I’m doing what I can to proceed with Christmas (still don’t have a holiday photo for our Christmas cards/letters this year, and still haven’t mailed out the packages I’m running out of time to send).

I need the normalcy of updating here. I need the structure it provides. I’d rather not be thinking about yesterday’s event or letting it affect me, but these tragedies always do and likely always will. I won’t rant. I’ll just provide a graphic and talk about my website. (After a cut, so if a coloring page and a photo of a bottle is what you can handle today, I completely get it. For me personally, the amount of news and social media exposure I’ve cut out since November is necessary for my emotional and mental health.)

Continue reading “Tiny Tuesday!”

Sunday Sundries and WYR? No. 5

Some random things that are purple:

A Christmas angel. A perfume bottle. An inner self manifestation bowl. An amethyst crystal point. Tiny medicine sachets with herbs and spices. And the 3000 Would You Rather Questions book, from which I chose…

No. 409. WYR take a photo with Santa or the Easter Bunny?
Santa!

Mother, Debby, and me with Santa in Salt Lake City, 1990.

Photo Friday, No. 939

Current Photo Friday theme: Cinematic

I’ve shared this photo before, taken somewhere in the Texas Panhandle in 2014 when Timothy and I traveled from Houston to Colorado and back as part of a rescue animal transport. I kept telling Tim I was looking for “the last picture show,” and in this moment, I found that mood. I converted it to black and white and quoted from Larry McMurtry’s novel, later a movie, The Last Picture Show in my post back then.

I’ll post the McMurtry excerpt here, too.

Sometimes Sonny felt like he was the only human creature in the town. It was a bad feeling, and it usually came on him in the mornings early, when the streets were completely empty, the way they were one Saturday morning in late November. The night before Sonny had played his last game of football for Thalia High School, but it wasn’t that that made him feel so strange and alone. It was just the look of the town.
Larry McMurtry, The Last Picture Show

Tiny Tuesday!

Yesterday brought good mail. One of the first things that showed up was my 2024 sleigh bell. Tom and I still haven’t decided exactly which decorations we’ll put out this year (at least the tree is already up), but seeing the new bell made me look forward to all of them hanging on their garland again.

Back in December 2022, I put a couple of photos on Instagram showing most of the many paper angels that I’ve colored or have been colored and given to me through the years.

Coloring angels dates back to when Steve R was alive (early 90s) and introduced me to Catherine Stock’s A Christmas Angel Collection coloring books. A friend commented on my Instagram post that she really liked them, and I offered to send her a few if she wanted to choose one to color.

I’ll share this in the most privacy-respecting way possible, but my friend had some big life changes coming her way, and it turned out coloring an angel added to the stress. A lot of people find coloring stressful. In fact, several years ago, at the fundraiser Debby and I went to that reignited my interest in coloring, one of the other people attending got so stressed out that she had to stop. What’s calming for some of us is the exact opposite for others.

My friend’s angel was the other thing that arrived with the mail, along with her explanation for why she never finished it. There’s nothing wrong with stopping a project that doesn’t bring you happiness. I was excited to see the angel and the colors my friend used to start her.

All of the angels in Stock’s book are based on great works of art, and this one is derivative of the artwork St. Macarius of Alexandria, from the School of Rublev, Russia, late 16th century. Angel colors are completely up to the person coloring (i.e., it’s not important to try to imitate the art, because it would be so boring if all my angels looked alike).

I finished my friend’s angel using her colors and my additions, and now this angel can join the others when I unpack them and put them out this year.

Sunday Sundries

I will put this Instagram link here and hope very much that it works for you, because this video is not yet on youtube, or at least I couldn’t find it. If you watch “Labs of the Mohicans,” make sure the sound is on, and you might understand what motivated me to make today’s sundries include book, movie, soundtrack. All amazing in unique ways, much like Stella the yellow lab.

You could read the book. I confess, I didn’t read it when it was on the syllabus of one of my favorite classes taught by one of my favorite professors. I have the good memory of being taught it, but many English majors may remember the drawback of taking on extra classes because you love literature. If you multiply four lit classes by the number of books for each class, and add all the reading and requirements of your non-major classes, you have to make choices. I read parts of it, and in atonement, I plan to read it in its entirety now. I’ll see how that goes.

You could watch it. Because, good grief, Daniel Day Lewis. Madeleine Stowe. The rest of an outstanding cast. I plan to watch this again soon (not in lieu of reading the novel!).

You could listen to the soundtrack, some of the music so sweeping and powerful that unrelated movies have used it for their advertising trailers. I already listened to it again on Friday and have kept the CD handy to listen again while I’m writing.

You write it

From this coloring book, back in April and May of 2021, I colored this page (using a photo of a particular surfer for my color choices):

Blue Sky Boy recently suggested “seaside/surfing” as a theme, so here’s another page I just colored from that book.

I didn’t write any flash fiction about it. I did find a prompt in the Write The Poem book, if you’d like to write poetry or prose using the coloring page as your subject. You can share it in comments or keep it only for yourself. In addition to the words the book provided, I’m adding: sailboats, camera, rocky coast, beach plums, and inlets. Enjoy a burst of creativity!

Sunday Sundries: World AIDS Day 2024

On December 1, the World Health Organization (WHO) joins partners and communities to commemorate World AIDS Day 2024. Under the theme Take the rights path: My health, my right, WHO is calling on global leaders and citizens to champion the right to health by addressing the inequalities that hinder progress in ending AIDS.

December 1 is not only a call to activism and awareness on behalf of those living with HIV and AIDS, it’s a time to remember and honor lives lost to this pandemic.

Tom began setting up our tree a few days ago, while I unpacked ornaments. I took a photo of these.

The Santa was a gift to Tom and me from Amy after the three of us went to Washington, D.C., in 1996 to volunteer for the last full display of the NAMES Quilt. Steven’s House was a residential facility for people with HIV/AIDS where Tom volunteered his time for several years. The Support AIDS Research red ribbon fundraising ornament I bought from a national retailer (who now gets boycotted if they show compassion or support for the marginalized in their merchandise). Tom painted the little wooden ornament with the red ribbon for me one Christmas. The quilt ornament was a gift from my mother after she joined Tom, me, and several others–including Amy, Lynne, Nora, Vicki, Debby, and Lisa K–who assisted in making quilt panels that Tom and I gave to the NAMES Project (Tom donated his time to the Houston chapter for years).

Our panels:

The “Twelve Names” panel honors our friends Steve and Jeff, along with friends of friends: Fred, Dennis, Bill, Andy, Steven, and Jim were friends of Steve’s; Michael was Steve’s first boyfriend and Don was his partner who predeceased him; Jody, a high school friend of my co-worker Shawn; Ato was a friend of Tom and his family.

In addition, Tom, our friend James, and I hosted a gathering at The Compound to contribute our signed reflections about John, James’s partner and our beloved friend, to a panel created by the NAMES Foundation’s Pete Martinez.

Pete was tireless in the time and energy he gave on behalf of so many people who died because of AIDS and the partners, friends, and families they left behind. He was a good friend to Tom and me. Pete died in 2001, a loss to the community and to all those whose lives he impacted.

How to make…

This year I’ve been mostly on my own to start decorating our large tree, and let me tell you… I MISS MY THREE TO SIX ELVES. I used to call myself the Christmas hooker, because all I did was put hooks on ornaments and hand them over to volunteers who’d work for fun, food, and good tunes to hang them on the tree.

There are so many bins of ornaments that I was overwhelmed, so this year, I made the decision to leave a whole lot of them in the bins, and that included most of the beautiful ornaments that have been made for us by children and gifted stitchers and other arts and crafts friends through the decades. THEY ARE STILL HERE AND STILL LOVED. They’ll be hanging and beautiful again on future trees.

On the other hand, I’ll offer a Saturday morning pictorial of How To Create An Ornament That Nobody Will Want*.

Back in July of last year, I had a bunch of 2-inch by 2-inch canvases and painted all of them on the same day, for future use as wanted, with acrylics. I picked one of those for An Ornament That Nobody Will Want. Enjoy!

Step 1. Do an online search for free downloadable mini mandalas, and find a 2015 set from Tiffany Hastie. Be very grateful, download it, and print it on regular paper so you can check the size.

Step 2. Adjust the size (down, in this case) to print on cardstock. Do that and pick your pens.

Step 3. Get to coloring and realize you don’t need those sticking-out circles for what you’re doing. Oh, well.

Step 4. Cut out the mini mandala and pick a canvas.

Step 5. Pick your glue. Be grateful for your friends who have taught you from their experience to organize and label all your craft supplies.

Step 6. When the glue is dry, take your wee canvas outside with your preferred spray finish (in this case, matte), spray it, and leave it outside to dry.

Step 7. Time to call in the muscle, in my case, Tom, to find the right hook and insert it into the wood frame of the canvas.

Step 8. Find and cut the right piece of ribbon from this mess.

Step 8. When the ribbon is on the hook, hang it on the Christmas tree. Festive fun!

*An Ornament That Nobody Will Want is not a bitter name. It is a truth universally acknowledged that crafting is in the pleasure, art is subjective, and experience is a teacher. Also, Becky is not a perfectionist unless she is ruthlessly editing someone’s (including her own) writing. Which she’s about to get back to doing.