I love the aesthetic of Portland General Store. The ingredients, the package design, the product names.
Myself, I love masculine scents, and many of these products are "for men, but..." which always makes me covetous. I am dying to try the Moss or Wood eau de cologne, but I hate to buy scents without smelling them first.
Still, some of these products are too good to pass up, particularly the vintage-style shaving products, and...well...lets just say there may be some valentine's day-ing in the offing here ;

So, while we were upstate, we had this crazy-big car.

The whole reason for the big car was that it was supposed to snow the day we arrived, our flight arrived late-ish, and we had to drive from Newark to Woodstock, two hours on the highway. To be on the safe side, we decided to go with AWD. The rental place at Newark had two AWD vehicles, a Murano, and a brand-spankin-new Jeep model that no one had tried yet. It had 7 miles on it when we packed into it. We decided to give it a go.

I have to say this is not what either of us would choose to drive on a regular basis. It felt a lot like driving a tank on the freeway...unwieldy, and not exactly what you'd call aerodynamic. It was, however, kind of fun to clamber into that huge thing every morning for a few days.
We have fun on our trips. Can you tell?

So, back to my mum's beautiful house...
She has what she describes as a plague of ladybugs in and around her home. To those of us in the international adoption community, ladybugs are a symbol of good fortune. This, as far as I can tell, is based on the fact that the ladybug overpopulation in the US came initially from China. I realize that this is just another superstition, however I have always loved ladybugs, and their inclusion in the mythology of our adoption community has only served to secure their place in my heart. We were thrilled, then, to find ladybugs in our bedclothes, on our windowsills, and invading our luggage during our stay in Woodstock. In Colorado, it bears mentioning, the ladybug population increased multifold last summer. But in my mother's house, they have no season. They are as plentiful in mid-winter as in summer, breeding in the walls and thriving on the central heating.
A luncheon of homemade chicken salad made from the leftovers of my mother's traditional French roast rosemary chicken, a dish she has excelled at for as long as I can remember. The gorgeous salad tongs came from one of her trips to Africa, and the pelts a gift from a fishing trip in deepest Siberia.
My mother's house is 200 years old, and the artifacts dating back to many eras and many countries.
Art libraries, Indian fetishes, Moroccan jewelry boxes.
Fetishes, charms, and lost-wax sculptures made by me in my early childhood (my mother was a jeweler at the time, and had a small kiln).
Coral necklaces, handcrafted beads, and winter grasses.

Wednesday's Corner View: "Sweets"
These may not be sweets in the edible sense, but they are certainly sweets in the sense of a rare treat for purely self-indulgent purposes! Two little handmade candy-boxed flowers from emersonmade.

If you've been around on the internet lately, you will most likely have heard of indie accessory designer emersonmade. Her site is luscious, and each of her little handmade linen flower accessories a confection in itself.
I ordered two "ballet dahlias" for the hair, but naturally Q got hold of them and transformed them into her own kind of accessory.


And wouldn't you know it, they looks so perfectly lovely on her that I didn't have the heart to deny her.
Ah well... maybe she'll let me wear one of them from time to time.

ps - they're even more delightful when pleasantly rumpled!

For more Corner Views from around the world, check in on the lovely Jane at Spain Daily.

Another blast from the past...this is Woodstock's sled hill, where children have sledded for as long as any of us can remember. I sledded here as a child, and I'm sure my mother did as well. This time, it was Q's turn.
Q has never been sledding downhill before, so we weren't sure what to expect by way of reaction. The hill is a fairly fast one, and with all the cold temps the snow was hard. But I watched her face all the way down and there wasn't so much as a moment of apprehension, even on the first run. She looked absolutely confident that this was something she could handle.
And of course, as soon as the sled stopped, there was a "More, more, more!" From Q. She still signs in addition to speaking even if it's a word she is confident in pronouncing, so "more" is a very emphatic double statement from the Q!

It was late afternoon and beautiful light. Really, we could not have experienced lovelier winter weather on the East Coast this time.

I have so enjoyed making memories all over again in the place where my first memories were formed.

I don't know about you, but I have a huge crush right now on illustrator Sophie Blackall's wonderful blog Missed Connections. This is a series of illustrations based on notes posted on online "missed connections" websites, where people post messages to others that they encountered on the fly, in hopes that they might reconnect. The illustrations she creates based on these brief, hopeful messages in the ether are lovely, sad, touching, funny, and ultimately deeply human. I don't remember where I found the first link to her blog, but since then it seems she has been popping up everywhichwhere in the blogosphere. Obviously, I am not the only one enchanted.

Sophie also illustrates children's books, among other things, and not long after discovering her work I came across a series of books she'd illustrated called Ivy + Bean. The series targets school-aged children, so it's a little too old for the Q, but I couldn't resist buying one to read to her later when she's ready. I set it on my bedside table to read for myself, and Q discovered it there and took it down. Despite the fact that the books are a bit complex for her level, Q was instantly captured by the illustrations, which she pored over at length. Every morning when she comes into our bedroom, she takes it down off my stack of reading and leafs through it with a furrowed brow and a bright gaze.

One morning, after gazing at length at the cover illustration, where the two friends dig up a dinosaur bone, Q made an elaborate and apparently urgent series of signs to me (most of them signs she has invented) which I did not immediately understand. After several repetitions, she was at last able to convey to me the fact that she wished the two girls in the cover illustration would come and knock at our door, so that she could play with them.

Never have I seen a more vivid indication of the power of an illustration over the imagination of a child.

So it was that when I saw that Sophie Blackall had an Etsy shop, I was thrilled. After long and careful consideration, and many changes of mind, I picked a print to order, intending to hang it in Q's room.
I chose the "We shared a bear suit" illustration from Sophie's Missed Connections collection.

The package arrived on our doorstep with lightening speed, and when Q and I opened it...oh, to our great suprise, there were gifts inside in addition to the gorgeous print, which was even more lovely "in the flesh". One of the surprise gifts was a card and envelope which, amazingly, featured the iceskating print that had been my second choice, and over which I had deliberated for a long time before ordering. The second gift - oh, joy! - was one of the books that Sophie has illustrated, with a note for Q.
The book was "The Big Red Lollipop", the story of a Pakistani family that doesn't yet understand the American ritual of birthday parties, and a little girl whose desire for a single lollipop party favor is thwarted - at least initially - by the inclusion at the party of her little sister.
Blackall's eloquent and magical illustrations flesh out the story...
...and Q, a sucker fan to the core, was nearly as absorbed by the beautiful book as her mother.
Yup, shirtless again in this post. I just don't know what to tell you about that.
Slightly annoyed at mommy's insistence on documenting her every move with the "big camera".
But not annoyed enough to set down her new book.
Thank you, Sophie! We will no doubt be poring over this daily for much time to come.

My apologies for the plethora of posts lately, but I'm having one of those moments when I realize that my recent library of fabulous photos (all Q photos are fabulous, to my eye at least) is so overflowing, so bulging-at-the-seams, that I am in danger of running into the next season before I finish posting them. I know that it's only just barely February, but trust me, it's a real and present danger. And I know from past experience (all those beautiful flower photos from last summer!) that if I run into the next season before finishing my current season of photos, those unused photos just sink into obscurity somewhere in a disc file, never to be seen again. Which is, let's face it, a little bit tragic. So, the story I have to tell in this post is about a flat file cabinet.
Not intrigued?
Well, my drafter's soul thrills to the words "flat file". And in fact this was an item that has been missing from my studio for far too long. I have a lot of drawings and paintings - some of them quite large for watercolor, which have been floating around on random shelves and in unkempt stacks in our garage for far, far too long. This is no way to treat beloved paintings. I needed a flat file. I have needed a flat file for years. Relief came in the form of an early birthday present from my mum - a beautiful hardwood mission-style flat file which arrived in a delivery truck with only one driver, so that I (with my puny arms) had to wrestle the darned thing myself up a flight of stairs and through several sets of narrow doors into my studio.

Q came upon me in the process of unwrapping the piece, and was distractable only by dint of several yards of bubble wrap while I readied it for use. Distractable, that is, until she observed me screwing in the drawer handles (I'd bought my own) with a screwdriver.

My little tomboy, this riveted her instantly. She watched for all of fifteen seconds before wresting the screw driver from me and...
yup, she nailed it.
My little cabinet builder. I was going to take it away from her, but her skill was so fine and so instantaneous that I just let her go at it while I took up the camera and documented the whole thing.
This kid is TWO, might I remind you.
Sorry about her sartorial state these days. It's all, I'm afraid, down to Little Bear, the Minarik-written, Sendak-illustrated bear cub who learns that he doesn't need to wear clothes in the winter because he already has his very own natural fur coat. This story has been the bane of my existence this winter. I wish Little Bear had never darkened our door.

That said...do you just love her primal gesture of triumph in the last shot, after successfully mastering the screwdriver and the drawer-pulls? I'm going to have to get her a little toddler-sized tool belt, I think. Anyone know where I can find one?
Ahhhhhhhhh. Now that's more like it!

Just to brag a little on my talented mother...she just sent me her two latest paintings from her recent trip to Africa (you may remember my posting some of her stunning photos from the trip) and I can't resist posting them. I just love these elephants and their attendant birds!
This one you will have seen in progress in her studio when I posted shots of her beautiful house.

Editing these photos, I couldn't help but think about how I see my erstwhile hometown through very different eyes in recent years. I suppose I see all of life through different eyes, after all...I'm a big fan of aging, which may sound odd in this day and age, and coming from an American. Americans don't value age, but I think they should. I heard my mother say it long before I ever experienced it myself - that each decade was better than the last. From my perspective now, I'd have to say that's true, and I hope it continues to be true.
In my very young years, I was too preoccupied, too caught up in some image of the glittering unattainable to see the beauty in what lay all around me, in the cracks of a sidewalk, in the arch of the eves, in the rustle of dry leaves on the snow.
I dearly appreciate these fresh eyes that maturity has given me. There were so many details I missed, so much splendor in the moment.
This place is the Gilded Carriage, which I spoke of in a previous post. It was a favorite haunt from my childhood, and still holds all the wonders of those early years for me.
It's still a beautiful place full of treasures.
This window on the side of the building, for some reason, is the one that has always held the most magic for me...gazing in at all those translucent, crystalline rows of fine glassware, so artfully arranged. This is an image I see echoed time and again in the years that make up my past.
And then there are the details that I only notice now with my more careful eye.
There's a great joy in layering the experience of a child, the next generation, over all those layers of memory from the past. It's funny to say that I never understood the "attraction" of having children until Q came along. I just didn't get it. It all seems so obvious now.