Parts of Art

       My dear sister recently reminded me that of us three children, I was the one who was most content to stay inside and color while my siblings craved being outside.  Okay, she was right. I remember being 6 or 7 and spending time in the closet. And by closet I  mean the toy closet, so it was a cool place to hang out. But I wasn’t in there just to play with toys; it was mostly to make art. Once a friend of my mom’s came for a visit and her young daughter was with her, so the girl came into the closet with me and we made jewelry out of newspaper. Go figure, it was fun!         Now don’t get me wrong. I spent plenty of time outside. We lived at the end of  long dead-end street. Between our house and our neighbors there was a vacant wooded lot, across the street there were two vacant wooded lots, and behind our home was a huge open field.       It really was the perfect place to grow up and be out...

      One night in the late fall David and I decided to go out in the woods and choose some trees that we would later transplant. Actually it was early spring or late winter, too soon for the leaves to be on the trees, which meant it was too early to identify the species of tree.  But we set out with boots and jackets on into the woods.  O n this one day that we came out to pick trees, our cats followed us out into the woods. I don’t think they’d ever ventured out this far, but being the faithful pups that they are, they must’ve felt obligated to come with us. So we’re out in the woods with our cats looking at little beginnings of trees and guessing what species they are, when we realize we are not alone. Our neighbor’s big German Shepherd was out there too; he probably came out there all the time, but we never did, so he was a little concerned by the intrusion. The cats reacted to the stranger quite differently. One of them (the tree c...