8:59 p.m. - 2004-08-19
Stickbugs and Flying Wee Wees
"It looks like a flying wee wee." Bruce is puzzled.
I'm torn between laughing and straggling him. Since it's the most honest assessment I think I've ever gotten from him about my art, I decide to give him the benefit of the doubt.
He's checking out my latest adventure in paper mache, which is not, in fact, a flying wee wee. Instead it's the armature for a monarch butterfly. It's for the Day of the Dead celebration at the gallery, and I've had it worked out in my head for weeks.
It consists of a plastic Nouriche bottle, with plastic Easter Eggs and part of an egg carton taped on in strategic places. The wings are floppy cardboard.
To my dismay, when I look at it objectively, it does in fact look like a flying wee wee. A very well-endowed flying wee wee.
Sigh. I can rearrange it but I'm not sure it'll help. Maybe a monarch butterfly paint job will take care of the problem.
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We had our first stickbug sighting of the year yesterday. I was so excited I made Bruce come over from fixing the roof.
It was a brown one, about seven inches long, and he was crawling along the chain link fence. He's right on time, too. I think the last two years we've started seeing them just after the figs went by.
We've been getting the very last of the figs this week. It was a slightly early year for Figgie, and the crop seemed a little smaller.
But despite this, Mr. Stickbug is on time.
I realise I have gotten very tuned in to the plants and land the years we've been here. I notice the cycles of things much more than I have anywhere else I've lived since I was a child in New Hampshire.
It's somehow comforting to feel that there's an order to things - that first will come the tomatoes, then the figs, then the stickbugs show up, then the chestnuts ripen. Gives me thoughts that there are some predictable things in this chaotic world.
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