Watercolor sky

June 2 Debi: Western Sky
Originally uploaded by jhhymas

This small landscape from last fall is to remind me how much I like to paint. I just filled a fountain pen with good ink. And got out my sketchbook. And, as so often, planned to sketch tomorrow, not tonight. There comes a time each evening when it seems too late to start stuff.
Today I drove out to Calero Reservoir and sat overlooking the water. A gull flew over, and at my feet as I got out of the car was a clam shell, half whole and half shattered. The gull wheeled above me. I brought the whole half-shell home and it's in the dishwasher now. I love shells! Gradually, over the past few years, am upstairs bathroom has become a haven for shells. I keep bits of broken clam and abalone shell and other ocean-smoothed treasures in a clear glass jar with a lid my mother left for me. I have shell-shaped, peach-colored soaps in a small compote of Fostoria glass in the pattern my sister-in-law had. She used the pieces as part of her banquet service for the catered banquets she held in the basement of the small town cafe she ran with her husband. The sad part of this memory thread (she died two years ago) is that the bathrooms for the cafe were also in the basement and gradually someone stole most of her crystal, a piece at a time. My younger sister gave me an abalone shell(I put sand dollars in it)--and other shells came from here and there. My granddaughters like to look at them. I bought towels for this bath in that pinkish color that sometimes touches the inside of a white shell.
A tremendous flock of red-wing blackbirds lifted and settled three times on the grass beside the road as I moved the car slowly forward out of the reservoir parking lot. Coming home I saw a Black-shouldered kite wheeling above a field. Tonight I am writing haiku.