The weather has been complicating daily life here for a while now. It's a waste of time to complain about weather but the simple fact is, there is nothing - not one thing - made easier in my life by rain. So when it goes on for days and weeks, it becomes wearing. Even the goats have been uncharacteristically subdued, when they are not being frustrated and short-tempered. It's a tough emotional range. I understand completely.
BUT.
Today the sun (the sun!) is shining and the sky is astonishingly clear. There's a breathability to the atmosphere that has all the exquisite quality of a very fine wine. Even more exquisite to me, since I rarely drink wine these days, and I breath frequently.
When I stepped outside this morning I stopped dead in my tracks, inhaled, and sighed in relief. "Let's savor this, shall we, goats?" I called out to the herd. "Let's all live in the moment and breath frequently!"
By the way, do these look different than my usual line drawings? They do to me. Back in June I tried a "micro tip brush pen." I thought it would be like my longtime favorite Micron 0.25mm pens, just with a bendy feel because of the brush tip. Well, it is certainly bendy but not very micro. At first it felt like drawing with a fat Sharpie. I stuck with it, adjusted my approach, and began aiming for quick, bold lines, instead of my usual slow, delicate lines. It's been a really useful exercise.
These flowers - daylilies, milkweed, spiderwort - were drawn from photographs taken during the rare moments in the past two weeks when it was not raining. Even so, every flower in every photograph was wearing raindrops. I don't want to sound mean about it, but I felt no inclination to include the raindrops in the drawings.
I decided to post a few of these drawings because this afternoon I did something I haven't been able to do in weeks: I took my sketchbook outside, sat in a dry chaise, chatted with several goats who ambled cheerfully over to see what I was up to, and made this sketch of one of the black birches:
