2026 Fiesta winds down

Fiesta is drawing to a close, San Antonio's ten-day all-over-the-place party!

Because I was up half the night planning and stacking for the inauguration of Blue Jean Books, Luci and I overslept and missed most of The Pooch Parade and all things dog, but we managed to see the tail end of the parade as the dogs and their families happened to end up coming down Abiso and converging onto Ogden for the final stretch.

So we walked on the other side of the street for a block, as the paraders walked back toward the pool where the parade ended.  We saw cocker spaniels, cow-dogs, retrievers, lots of breeds ending in poo, and terriers of every description.  We saw mutts and Weiner dogs and greyhounds.  Luci only broke into the oncoming line of dogs once--to lick a Corgi's face!  (if that's not proof that she's at least half Corgi, I don't know what is!--maybe she saw her former mama?)

Then we got into the car and drove over to Herwicks, the art supply store, to check out papers in search of some Clairefontane notebooks.  The paper in those notebooks is so smooth and beautiful, and I wanted lines.  I have a few so far and I've taken them apart, divided the signatures into smaller signatures, and they are now in the press awaiting a new life in lined books.

We hadn't been there in months, but the manager remembered her and took lots of pictures and gave her a vigorous back rub.  What a sweet man!  "My lady always wants pictures of all the shop dogs," he said.

Then it was nap time, of course.  And that is now done!

The King William Fair and the Arts and Crafts fairs, the finales of Fiesta, are going on just fine without us there--but used to be not-to-be-missed events.  I prefer this year to work on my own craft instead of walking all day to see others. 

The streets around my house are going to be more fragrant to Luci until it rains again.  She walks with her head down sniffing dog pee every four inches or so, then covering it up with pee of he own.  What an amazement it must have been to her--to have our very own streets filled with dogs from near and far, many dressed up in colorful costumes!  That, for Luci, is the whole of Fiesta every year.  

Prosperity!

I often get up in the middle of the night to play Spelling Bee--but that soon leads me to a video on the Handmade Book Club that keeps me awake until.....whenever!

I have enough art supplies to last me forever and beyond--which is why I feel so prosperous this morning.

Nellie sent me a video of books made of indigo and said she had some and would share.  This started me on a whole new road of this bookbinding journey, inspiring me to make a series of books I'm calling Blue Jean books. 

All of them will be covered in various iterations of shibori fabric, denim, and indigo.  The fabrics will be attached to book board with double-sided interfacing.

Signature wrappers that will show through on the spines will be papers of the same blues, then sewn with red or blue or white thread. 

I have finally figured out how to make lined pages!  I'm buying stapled-spined notebooks and tearing off the cover and removing the staples, then using the paper to build signatures.  (A signature is a bundle of pages--books might have four or ten or however many pages you want)

Beads and buttons, adhesives of all kinds, buttons and cords and waxed linen thread, and an unlimited supply of paper for pages--I've been collecting these things forever, and now have so many ways to incorporate them into books.  This is richness!

Besides all the good things we often take for granted--food and shelter and friends--what makes you feel most rich? 

Wimp to Warrior

That's Luci.  She roars like a warrior at night, then (during these delicious days of rain) hesitates before deciding whether or not to venture forth when there's a light drizzle. 

I encourage the warrior part.  "You go get 'em!" I say--knowing there's rarely any them to get. Or: "Have a fun adventure!"

She reminds me of myself--I can be both too.  

I was a warrior today at the doctor's office.  I was explaining my frustration with side effects of  certain meds. I told her that Gabapentin has cost me a couple of teeth and gives me nightmares.  Some are said to cause kidney or liver damage. 

She says no, they're all safe but IF they do cause damage like that, "we can take care of it."  What, with more drugs? I ask her, my hackles rising.  

"I'm pretty sure you could get your pain doc to increase your Gabapentin by three and you'd get a lot of relief," she says, forgetting, apparently, what I'd just told her.  I felt like Luci growling..The tears in my eyes aren't wimp tears; they're the wet part of speaking up, arguing with an authority, standing up for myself.  It took me way too long to learn not to be wimpy with doctors. 

"By three???" I say, unable to hold back my anger. "No pain but also no teeth??"

One day my children and grands were talking in the voices of their dogs.  Gruff, mischievous, bossy, submissive, or squeaky.  "So what does Luci sound like?" I asked them.  Two grandchildren said simultaneously, "She sounds exactly like you, Yenna!" (One of them did a line in a Southern accent to show me.) 

Like me, Luci is very friendly.  She loves people, and she's rarely met one she doesn't hope to befriend--except for the evil postman who throws bombs in our door that she must shake and shred.  When a stranger speaks to her, ever, anywhere--or even to me about her, she gently stretches her whole body onto their legs, all the way up to their knees.  

I was voted "friendliest" in my senior class.  Luci and I share a Southern accent and a friendly disposition. According to a documentary on dogs, that's the quality that best explains why dogs and humans have always worked well as companions.  From the beginning of time, dogs have approached humans around campfires and offered to break bread together--or steak or fish or stewed rabbit bones. 

"I call it," the documentarian said, "survival of the friendliest." We humans go ga-ga over their big friendly eyes and the way they nuzzle up close for pats. Dogs know--if they hope for a bone or a pat--they better be their friendliest selves. 

Luci and I both love to look at things. When we walk, she stops and stands stock still and stares at everything.  Could be an Amazon delivery man putting a box on someone's porch, a little kid riding a bicycle, or dogs taking their people for walks.  Certain dogs she looks and looks and looks at and whines plaintively to inform me that she would like to meet them up close.  

Others she sizes up as not-friend-material  and we move on down the street.  

Of all the countless dogs we've met on our walks, I've only once seen her respond with loud and irrational rage toward one of them. 

An innocent little cocker spaniel approached--attached by leash to its person--and Luci lunged toward it barking with all her might.  

"A cocker frickin' spaniel?" I asked her.  "What's up with that?"

She never told me.

Another parallel: while Luci and I love favors and treats and gifts, we have a hard time asking for them.  We basically wait and see what shows up and then be grateful. We like others to read our minds.

Luci never asks for anything.  She uses her eyes and body language to let it be known that she'd like to go outside or have a slice of turkey.  If I don't respond immediately or pretend to ignore her, she gets in the yoga doggie pose and her eyes say, "Come on, Ma!  You know what I want!  It's not rocket science!" 

We are friendly wimps, we are warriors. We are lookers.  We usually get what we want. 

Sprouts and Seeds

The last couple of weeks have been, physically, challenging.  In between the necessary chores of living, I calculate an average of two hours a day I can devote to making things like meals and books.  This week I have two doctors' appointments that make me hopeful for some answers.  

I continue to collect materials and arrange my instruction sheets from the Handmade Book Club--tangible signs of hope for better back and foot days.  I continue to spin ideas for when my body says yes again. 

Thanks to my wonderful daughter-in-law Bonnie, my yard is now planted for spring!  She chose and arranged beautiful plants and Will helped with the unloading and arranging. Then a couple of days ago, Orlando dug the holes, spread the mulch, and got those babies into the softened earth. I couldn't be happier with the results! 

I love flowers but neither of my thumbs is green.  Bonnie loves and knows plants like I know paper.  She picked dianthus, sage, salvia and other native plants that will require less attention once they get settled in.   In the front, we filled a pot with petunias and pansies, more sage and purple in the flower bed.  

Orlando spread poppy seeds and strung solar fairy lights from casita to the house and wound a string of tiny ones with jasmine around the gate.  Before going to bed last night, I looked outside and saw a wonderland of twinkles.  

Dozens of goldfinch feast at one feeder of Nyger seed, along with cardinals and doves.  It'a feathered peaceable kingdom and queendom right outside my window. We added a hummingbird feeder and hope that the  ones I've' seen in the front yard's pomegranate blooms will soon find it. 

It's a cool cloudy day today, so I'll wait until these plants grow a bit bigger before trying to capture the beauty of them in a photo.

For now, just picture pink, purple, yellow, and white along with all the greens of grasses and leaves.  The colors and the constant chirping of birds--it's already enough to take my breath away!

Knowing what rewards are for

Luci's got it right.

In most canine-human relationships, treats and slices of turkey are rewards for good behavior, following directions, and whatnot.

Luci and I never started that silliness.

Instead, she has taught me this: Get rewarded for what's fun, what's joyful, what makes your day. 

For example, her favorite thing in the middle of the night is "You wanna go outside?" And when she does, she's a wild girl, fearless, running with all the speed of her puppy years.  She's out to capture a fox or a raccoon or whatever, but she never does.  Then she does whatever she does outside my view for a few minutes and comes back, beaming.

She goes to the treat drawer and looks at me hopefully--and is never disappointed.  Then she goes to the refrigerator door--this was a night (as every night of running is) deserving of two treats.

I learn so much from this love bug of a dog:   When something is really really good, cap it off with something worthy of joy.  

Collaging my life in a house

When I was twelve, my daddy couldn't speak due to an ulcer on his vocal cords.  He carried around one of those small leatherette notebooks you might remember-- with six small silver rings that held lined paper. I kept that notebook, of course, and am using parts of it this morning in a collage.  

This fills one page:

"Linda's girl friend was at our house all week.  She lives in Jonesboro--I brought her home today.  Her name is Patsy Adamson."

On the other side of that page:

"Grant and I went fishing and caught 9--weighed 27 pounds.  I caught 6 of them--biggest one 5 1/4 pounds."

Most of Lloyd Harris' loves are hinted at in these two tiny pages: home, hospitality, fishing, and friends. I treasure his handwriting because it captures who he was, what he cared about.  To anyone who showed up at the back door (only the Avon Lady used the front door) he'd say, "Come in this house!" as if whoever it was was exactly who he'd hoped it would be. 

I fondly remember how when any of us (or anyone at work or church) asked him a question, he'd pull out his little book to respond with his U.S. Government ballpoint pen. 

My book of the month in the Handmade Book Club is shaped like a house and made of recycled materials.  When I get mine finished, I'll show you.

Its base is cut out to look like a house, gessoed, and folded, and I'm arranging papers and bits of writing to collage on its front and back, windows and doors.

Just choosing the papers is a trip!  

It occurs to me that a house book, like a house, is a container of so many memories and treasures with meaning to the maker of the home.  Maybe everything we are is embedded in everything we make in this life--though to viewers the pieces we choose may just appear to be squiggles? 

After Sunday night church, our parents, or someone else's parents, would say, "Y'all come home with us."  Nobody had to get home to watch a program on TV or check emails or anything.  Nobody said "no" to spontaneous hospitality. 

My parents would make something simple like ham and biscuits.  After dinner, my daddy and the other men would ask me to play the piano so they could sing a quartet.  Or the adults would talk and the kids would play in the yard, catching "lightning bugs" or listening to music in somebody's carport or playing "Ain't no buggers out tonight, Grandpa killed them all last night."

I'm not sure what a bugger was--but it was dangerous, and we were safe.  My daddy called me "Bugger" as a term of endearment--but in that context, it meant something cute and adorable.  

He also called me Sugar.  

In homage to my daddy and nicknames, I'll sign off for now:

Sugar Bugger

Two weeks ago, a man Elena knows from her coach's barn asked if she would  ride his horse in one of her barrel races.  Working almost every afternoon with her riding coach, she's gotten to be a spectacular rider. 

A freak accident that occurred riding this man's horse had nothing to do with her skill.  On the second barrel the horse tripped.  (Her own horse fell just like that a few weeks ago, but managed to get up without injury, but this handsome one was not so fortunate.)

Her mother knew what the outcome would be and she walked Elena away from the field while the vet checked out the horse.  Long story short, it was his last ride.  

Elena was devastated.  At first, she felt that she'd done something wrong--but everyone, from the EMTs to the coach and all who saw it assured her that it wasn't.  

It took her several days to get past it enough to want to ride again.  She's told me that she cried more in that week than she's ever cried before.  We all felt heartbroken that she had to experience this terrible tragedy at fourteen. 

Her coach said, "He was ending his riding years and he wanted to go out in a blaze of glory,"--suggesting that the horse, on some level, chose how his life would end. 

"He'll be back, but it will take a minute," she said. "He's going to come back as a frisky young colt.  In the meanwhile, he's going to be watching over you."

From the beginning of time, when we humans lose the humans and animals we love, we look for comfort in the stories of our tribes.  

We may also grasp for lesson straws--not that the terrible event "happened for a reason," but since it happened, tragic as it may be, horrible as we feel, we look for lessons.

Elena is now back in the saddle, literally.  She will never forget what happened.  "But since I'm going toe a vet,  I need to know the good and the bad parts." 

April, Already?

Who can count the times, in childhood, that we made Crayola umbrellas and big fat rain drops on construction paper, gray clouds in the sky?  Underneath, the teacher had printed "April Showers."

T.S. Eliot wrote that April is "the cruelest month." 

It begins with April Fool's Day--which is now every day of the year....

But besides all that, it's a good month in Texas with weather that goes from moderate to summer hot in a day, the month of three of my friends' birthdays, the month when maybe it might possibly rain one day, and the month of San Antonio's Fiesta.

A tenth of the population of the U.S. participated in No Kings Marches on Saturday--which I would have done if my feet could march.

I'm enjoying several excellent shows on PBS: Thoreau, The Forsytes, and The Mount of Monte Cristo.

At the moment I'm eating a thin slice of white toast with blackberry jam. I prefer blackberry over any other topping because it reminds me of childhood in Georgia when blackberries grew abundantly.  Mamas made blackberry cobbler and jams, seeds in, cementing it in my flavor memory as the best of all fruits.   

Writings About Dogs

The minute I read the New York Times book review sent by Janet, I ordered this lovely book, a collection of essays by various writers collected by Alice Hoffman.  

the best dog in the world Alice hoffman

I could easily find her enough excellent writers to do a Volume 2--including Ann Patchett, Geraldine Brooks,  Alexandra Horowitz, and almost every one of my writer friends.  

It goes in my stack of dog books:

The Book of Dog Poems, Sarah Maycock and Ana Sampson

E.B. White (of Charlotte's Web) On Dogs

A Three Dog Life, Abigail Thomas

For the Love of a Dog, Patricia McConnell

I have no books on dog training.  

This morning Luci and I were walking, unattached by a leash.  A man in my neighborhood who always walks his German Shepherd off-leash commented, "Wow, you're a good trainer!" 

"She's training me," I said.  I just walk beside her and go where she goes. 

My friend Bonnie Lyons has written wonderful poems about dogs.  She and Grant have recently adopted a young Airedale named Baela. This poem comes from her book, Bedrock, 2011--a couple of Airedale generations ago. 

    Dog Training

    Sometimes I think

    the only lessons I ever learned

    were from my dogs.

    So here is the accumulated wisdom

    of Sancho, Max and Zorba

    three sage Airedales

    First, yelp when you're in pain

    but let it go when it's gone.

    Second, travel the earth

    with a quivering nose.

    Third, answer the needs of your body

    with seamless relish

    but then go right on 

    with the real purpose of the day: play

    And, finally, whenever possible

    leap right

    into the arms of someone 

    who loves you. 

Books: #1, #2, #3

 Okay, here goes:

Making a list of books I'm currently reading is similar to constructing a family tree, the lines of one leading to another, including the ways the books showed up for me. 

Let's start with Geraldine Brooks.  I'm sorry to say I haven't read her fiction, but after reading this lovely memoir, Memorial Days, shared with me by Freda, I will start with Horse. 

I love reading writers' personal stories before reading their poems and fiction and essays.  I can picture Geraldine now almost like a friend I've actually met, living on Martha's Vineyard.  Her writing is so vivid that it takes you there.  She talks like we talk, only better on paper.  In person, she tells us she's shy, but her friends are a bunch of rowdy women.  She throws parties, because Tony loves them, but he's the gregarious life of every party--while she prefers serving the food. 

I wish that back in the day, when I was a child and reading every book I could find by Lois Lensky, I had known that Lois was a real person who lived a certain kind of life.  I wish I could have gone to You Tube and looked for speeches and interviews, or gone online to see if she'd written a memoir or autobiography. Back then, it would have been called the latter. 

Geraldine and Tony Horowitz, her Pulitzer Prize winning husband, live a fascinating life--two renowned journalists who traveled the world writing for esteemed magazines and newspapers.  He had just completed his book, Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide, when he suffered a massive heart attack on a book tour in Chevy Chase, Maryland.  

Geraldine and Tony had met in the Columbia school of journalism and had been married for 31 years.  His death was devastating for her and their two sons.

After three years of doing all the minutiae required to deal with the death of a spouse, she realizes that she's never had the full-throated expression of grief that she yearns for.  So she goes back to her homeland in Australia and stays in a media-free rustic cabin on Flinders Island.  

"This will be, finally, the time when I will not have to prepare a face for the faces that I meet.  The place where I will not have to present that things are normal and that I am okay.  Because it has been more than three years and, contrary to appearances, I am not at all okay."

I have now ordered one of Geraldine's novels (she's also a prolific novelist and Pulitzer Prize winning one) and the kindle edition of Tony Horowitz' last book, Spying on The South.  

Thanks to the internet, I can track down interviews and book talks--so the lines in the tree are taking me all over the place on this Sunday morning.