The main thing is that we are not sick, though we seem to know several people now who have been ill.

Biden and Harris won the election. Trump is sulking and raking in all the money he can. The pandemic has exploded due to small (careless) gatherings. There is a divorce coming in our family (not Gary and me). And last night was stormy. The power went out. Gary made coffee the instant it came back on in the middle of the night. Emailed a former student. Two people from my MFA program reached out. I have lost eleven pounds, gained back two—I expected that my weight would move up and down, but I still hope to reach my goal next June. We gave up seafood this year and that is going well but I am considering a sockeye fillet for our small Thanksgiving. Yesterday I began weaving the third of three shawls on an “Olive” warp.

I found this painting title “The Gardener” on Ace’s website, just “Gardener” on her local gallery’s website, but on the back of the painting it says “Weed Gardener,” so I’m going with that.

Pinterest allowed me to suspend magazine subscriptions. I visit that site to find images and to save images. Sometimes I revisit what I have saved. Mostly I never look at it again, but I preserve the illusion of ownership. Last month I became aware that a number of favorite paintings I had “collected” were all by the same person. These are mostly magical realist pictures, often with birds and women. Women with birds on their heads or a stack of stones. Illustrative paintings of folktale characters. I put “Feather” on my desktop, the only time I have used an image that I had not created myself. Once I went looking it took me only a short time to find the artist’s name and local representative gallery. I had missed a Portland show by a week. I cannot afford the paintings.

“Weed Gardener” looked to me like a self portrait from the Face to Face show. The artist often uses a similar face, but this one felt deliberate—not similar a real person but an actual portrait. I looked at her and looked again, the more I studied her face and the dandelion in her hand, the more I felt she was a cancer survivor with her plushy hair just coming back in. Imagine my lack of surprise to discover the artist lives in Portland and is indeed a cancer survivor. (So is one of my dearest friends.)

That’s why I called Visa to raise my credit limit and we drove to Portland to pick her up from the gallery. (That gallery visit, masked, is another absurd story. Suffice to say, I will not go there again.)

A neighbor has kindly shared her sourdough start, in her family since the 60s. I have sent over rhubarb and apricot jams. She is offering salal, which I did not manage to make this year. We have not actually seen one another in months.

I will add more here on the website, later.

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