I'm Late! I'm Late, for a Very Important Date!"

It's time for a Mad Tea Party!

"Oh, my ears and whiskers, how late it's getting!"







"No wonder you're late. Why, this watch is exactly two days slow.




What better place for a mad tea party than a garden?





"Oh, but that's nonsense. Flowers can't talk."




"Of course we can talk, my dear."


"If there's anyone worth talking to..."




"...or about!"



"You can learn a lot of things from flowers."





So, let's go down into the cool shade of the garden.....





"Children yet, the tale to hear,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Lovingly shall nestle near.

In a Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die"









Wait, who's that creeping up?




Said Alice, "I don't even know what a Mock Turtle is."

"It's the thing Mock Turtle Soup is made from," said the Queen.

"I never saw one, or heard of one," said Alice.Why did you call him Tortoise, if he wasn't one?"

"We called him Tortoise because he taught us," said the Mock Turtle angrily: "really you are very dull!'





"In that direction,lives a Hatter:"





"And in that direction, lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they're both mad."




Be careful; the queen in this garden is quite mad too...
"Who's been painting my roses red? WHO'S BEEN PAINTING MY ROSES RED? Who dares to taint with vulgar paint the royal flower bed? For painting my roses red Someone will lose his head.

"


"Do you care for tea?"




"Why, yes. I'm very fond of tea. "




"If you don't care for tea, you could at least make polite conversation!"





"When I get home I shall write a book about this place... "






So they sat on, with closed eyes, and half believed themselves in Wonderland, though each knew she had but to open them again, and all would change to dull reality--the grass would be only rustling in the wind, and the pool rippling to the waving of the reeds--the rattling teacups would change to tinkling sheep- bells, and the Queen's shrill cries to the voice of the shepherd boy--and the sneeze of the baby, the shriek of the Gryphon, and all the other queer noises, would change (they knew) to the confused clamour of the busy world in the distance...

Lastly, they pictured themselves how these same sisters would, in the after-time, be themselves grown women; and how they would keep, through all their riper years, the simple and loving hearts of thier childhood: and how they would gather about them other little children, and make THEIR eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long ago: and how they would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys, remembering their own child-lives, and the happy summer days.

"Why don't you start at the begining? Yes and when you reach the end... Stop."

A Very Merry Unbirthday to You

It has come to my attention that some of you have a few concerns about my mental health since Ava blew my cover and outed me yesterday. All I can say is don't believe EVERYTHING Ava wrote about me on Wednesday... Yes, I was in the woods in my nightie, but I Was NOT lurking, thank you very much. I was just getting ready for our Progressive Mad Tea Party Saturday. My mother used to call this kind of thing a "creative fit." (she totally got me.) I simply wanted to take some pictures before the sun got too high and cast a shadow, so I was in a hurry and didn't have time to put on more formal attire. That's all. Makes perfect sense to me. We plan to start here early Saturday morning in our garden with an UNbirthday Party and move on to several other stops along the way for refreshments, winding up at The Mad Tea party over at Vanessa's Fanciful Twist. Aaanyhooo...we've been lucky this week; we've had several sudden rainshowers, so the grass is green and sparkling; Mr. Alberta's been busy with his weedeater and lawnmower, and Rosie, Ava's elderly but valiant Golden Retriever, has kept the deer from grazing on the flowerbeds like those all-you-can-eat salad bars... The bumblebees are buzzing and the hummingbirds are humming. One day to go, and there will be lemon bars and blueberry trifle and strawberries dipped in chocolate and tea, lots and lots of sweet,lemony tea. So join us, won't you, and I promise NOT to wear my nightgown!

Please Join Us For A Mad, Mad Garden Party

Ooooohhhh, we're getting so excited!!!!

Imagine my surprise

When I came home from taking Amaryllis and Magenta to cheer practice and turned in the driveway only to spot Alberta lurking in the woods in a short black satin nightgown. Thinking she'd embarked on some wild Midsummer Night's Dream reprise, I blew the horn and asked her what the hell she was doing.

Her story (and she's stuck to it for two hours now) is that frolicking about the woods involved neither Mr. Alberta and their impending 25th wedding anniversary nor the UPS man; instead,she claims it has something to do with taking pictures for a tea party. I don't pretend to understand, but I'd rather not delve farther into the matter. I only say that I don't think it is necessarily wise to comport oneself so close to a busy road in one's ah, loungewear. But then I'm the prudent sister.

"I do have my camera in my purse, you realize," I told Alberta. She's fairly certain I didn't snap a quick shot of her, and I assured her (just a little too fervently so she'd be uneasy) that I would never, ever do such a thing. However, I found this nightie on ebay. Draw your own conclusions.

In her defense (credit where credit's due), she wasn't wearing the pearls. I handed her my flipflops out the car window so she wouldn't come back with stickers in her feet and went on in the house.
Ava

Our Garden (or Couples' Therapy)

I've been working on two pieces for the past few weeks: one a large abstract, which I will post a peek of later, and one an illustration-type watercolor, about far-away places. Neither is finished, however, and I wanted to enter something for the Mixed Media Monday challenge "Places." So here are two pictures of one of my favorite places: our garden. The main reason I love our garden is that it was inspired by the gardens of the grandmothers of Mr. Alberta and me and created entirely by the two of us. We live on twelve acres in the middle of a forest, the most beautiful piece of land we could find on which to build our dream house eleven years ago. If the house was our dream, the garden was even more so. Gardening is the one thing that the very left-brained Mr. Alberta and I have in common. (He's an accountant; I'm an artist. He keeps lists in his head; I can't remember what I'm supposed to do 10 minutes from now. I'm a crybaby; he's stoic. He's an introvert; I'm an ...well, YOU know!) but we both love old-fashioned gardens, thanks to our very southern grandmothers, who grew figs and roses and wisteria and most important of all: tomatoes! The first thing I ever planted was in my grandmother's yard: a watermelon directly under my swing which hung from a branch of a crepe myrtle tree. To tell you the truth, I think I just spit some seeds into the dust there, but Mumu tended them carefully and transplanted the seedlings into her flowerbed. Weeks later my whole family celebrated by eating the one watermelon I produced, which turned out to be one of the rare yellow ones. Well, I was hooked from then on. Mr. Alberta shared a similar childhood experience in his granny's yard, and, since then, I think we have both simply tried to recreate that childhood magic by planting every single thing we could remember our grandmothers growing. I planted roses and hostas and hydrangeas; he planted strawberries and camellias and magnolias. Each year, in the fall, we take a day off from work to garden together. We have iris from his great-grandparents' homeplace and muscadines like the ones on Mumu's arbor. I discovered, at some point during the last 25 years, that, surprisingly, unlike me, Mr. Alberta has TWO well-developed sides of his brain. In addition to his quantitative and organizational skills, he also has a lovely talent for landscape design. After trips we've taken, he's created areas in our yard in different garden styles. We have a secret little Charleston battery bench surrounded by camellias and crepe myrtles and a woodland hellebore garden complete with stone faun and rhododendrons. There are boxwood hedges and a stone wall that echo the ones we saw when we visited the Cotswolds for our 20th anniversary. I think our little heaven overlooking a small pond surrounded by oaks and willows and honeysuckle is the most beautiful place on earth. It's our sanctuary, a place so secluded I can garden in my nightgown, if I want to, and Mr. Alberta can escape the deadlines and pressures of the IRS. Our garden is just about the only common "ground" (pardon the pun) we share, and I think it's probably the biggest reason we'll be celebrating our 25th anniversary next month. We designed it together from sweet memories of sunrises on our grandmothers' sleeping porches and lightening bug twilights in their backyards, from Nehi Grape Colas iced in their birdbaths and Easter Eggs hidden among the buttercups, from surprise lilies that pop up like magic overnight and autumn Saturday morning pecan-picking-up contests. We're an unbeatable combination: he grows the tomatoes, and I won't give him my recipe for spaghetti sauce. He will never leave me!

Birds Of a Feather

I've hoarded this photo that Ava took of her oldest daughter, Emily, for 21 years. I once helped Em enter a literary-themed Jack O'Lantern decorating contest at the public library with a pumpkin that looked like Pippi Longstocking. She won first place (of course)!!!!! Since Emily's been on my mind lately, I did some journal pages about her, and I've included many of Patricia J. Mosca's affirmations from http://writingaffirmations.blogspot.com/ from her blog at "From the Inside Out," as well as a Hindu prayer for hope. All my favorite elements are also here: a precious girl, watercolor, pink, yellow, a feather boa, and black and white checkerboard! I love you Emma Bean.

Wild Thing

This is so much fun that I'm having trouble just doing one journal spread a day! I know it's not my very best art but, for some reason, experimenting with new things in a journal, rather than in a "painting," is so non-threatening it's habit-forming! There are so many techniques that all of you out there have inspired to want to try that sometimes I just get overwhelmed and don't know where to begin. Do I make my owl's wings out of textured paper or should I use watercolors to shade the feathers delicately? I've decided that every day I'm going to try just one new thing. It might be a color scheme or a whole new medium, but, when when I decide if it works for me, I can use that new technique in a painting or an illustration in my own style.

I have a large collection of pictures, bits of paper and fabric that I've saved, for no apparent reason, and there are so many quotes that are meaningful to me. (I don't think I can find a way to use my extensive coffee can collection here, much to Mr. Albert's dismay). This art journal is the perfect place for me to use these images to illustrate those quotations or to express my not so deep thoughts. Thanks for putting up with my learning process and for sharing your creations. You are MY muses.

Try Something New

The challenge at Mixed Media Monday this week is "Try Something New,"and, since I was inspired by Kira at "A Girl and Her Journal http://samanthakira.typepad.com/ and by "Teesha Moore at http://www.teeshamoore.com/teeshasjournalpgs.com. I thought I might give art journaling a try. Just think, my own person coloring book with attitude!Here are the inside cover pages I made for my journal.

Polka Dot Mermaid Sisters

Happy Birthday, Ava! You can still do the Hawaiian Seat Bump better than anyone.
(watercolor, collage, and Prismacolor)

Faces: Roses in her cheeks

For the last week I've been working on a very large abstract painting for Ava. While, it's been fun, it's a little out of my comfort zone, so I thought I'd indulge in some "comfort drawing" today.

Outwitted by cell phone design

While hashing out the children's summer visitation arrangements with the former Mr. Ava, I made some surprising discoveries about technology. A cell phone is woefully inefficient as an instrument of suicide. I thought I was resourceful, but just look at the following methods I tried, and those engineers were a step ahead of me all the way:

--you can't beat yourself to death with a cell phone. I tried smartly banging myself on the head, but it's just too light. Maybe if I had one of those big old ones with the antennae like you see the characters using on Seinfeld? At the very least I could poke my eyes out like Oedipus, but it was no go with my cute little red Nokia.

--nor can I figure out how to electrocute myself with the cell phone. Because Mother, aka XLo05, never let me bathe when it was raining and filled me with tales of my cousins taking refuge in a ditch during a thunderstorm (maybe it was a tornado?), I have always believed it's just a thin layer of prudence that separates you from the kind of fiery death you see over and over in The Green Mile, with sparks flying out of your head. No. My cell phone case seems to have stellar qualities of impermeability, and I unloaded the dishwasher and didn't even dry my hands afterwards.

--cell phones are also too blunt to pierce the addomen or even solar plexus. I guess I could have relied on my early TaeKwondo training and held the cell phone rigid and aimed for my trachea, but remember, I was trying to finish a conversation even as I attempted to off myself, and I needed the trachea for that.

So there you go. The soft rounded edges and the lightweight design of my phone have thwarted me. I was forced to give up and talk to Mr. Ava. On the positive side, the children have concrete visitation plans for June, and I have a new lease on life from having gotten through that conversation. Damn those cell phone designers, though.

Imagine if those cell phone designers and crisis counselors got together. Talk about a hotline.
Ava

P.S. Alberta is so much sweeter than I. Just look at that drawing down there. Together we're like the moon, with a definite dark and light side. M-O-O-N, that spells Alberta and Ava.

Head in a bucket

I'm working on a short story right now. It's a ghost story, coming out of an assignment about peace from my writing workshop this week. I'm not sure how that happened,but it did. I've written several stories this week, and I was inordinately proud of my ghost story, but then Alberta told me it was only eerie, not scary. Damn it.

I told her I had been going for spine-chilling, and she attempted to make me feel better by saying it was "faintly ominous." Whatever.

So while Alberta's been painting the Planter's Peanut Moon, I've been trying make my ghost story scarier, what Alberta and I call more "head in a bucket." Any time we can't find a serial killer show on tv that's grisly enough, we say it needs "more head in a bucket." It may have come from Cold Case Files; some girl called the police because on their date, her boyfriend kept reaching into the back seat and fiddling with something in a bucket, which turned out to be...well, you can figure it out.

So in my story I made the grandfather hang himself and the little girl find him dangling above the sideboard. Is that head in a bucket enough, Alberta? You remind me of Christopher Walken on Saturday Night Live, yelling, "More cowbell!"

When I finish it, I'll put it on the itmustbemice blog. But I have to run. My goal is to mail off two other stories to literary contests this week, and it appears to be Friday already. Keep your heads up and out of buckets. Ciao!
Ava

A Night at the Dream Theatre

Here's my entry for Theme Thursday. This was an actual challenge for me because I don't draw men. I thought The Man in the Moon deserved a special night out, though, because "Every girl's crazy 'bout a sharp-dressed man."

The Spy Who Loved Me (or How To Put the Fun Back in Dysfunction)

During the Cold War, spies were all the rage. There was James Bond, The Man From Uncle, and Maxwell Smart. There was Emma Peel, Agent 99, and Jethro, the Double-Naught Spy, but, most notorious of all, was XLo05. Ava and I had a slightly dysfunctional, somewhat unpredictable, magically creative childhood. The magically creative parts were due to one lovely, irreverent crazy woman we fondly call "Mother." Other mothers in the '60's, were known as "Mama" or "Mom," but our grandfather insisted that we address her by the very formal "Mother." There was little else formal about her, except, perhaps, her manners. Almost all of her other appellations, suited her better. There was "Pot," (a nickname given her by her sorority sisters in college, mysterious because it was a decade too early to have today's connotation). Then, there was the affectionate "Nan-nan," a name I invented as a toddler, attempting to pronounce her real name, Katherine Ann. This was also the name her grandchildren would be allowed to call her, since my grandfather wasn't around to encourage the use of the very proper title "Grandmother." To her high school students, she was "Flash Gordon," the hip, five-time Star Teacher of Shakespeare, Bob Dylan, romantic poetry and American transcendentalism, yearbook sponsor, Scholastic Bowl coach, and stage director of high school theater and beauty pageants.

But to Ava and me, behind closed doors, she was.....XLo05! On muggy summer afternoons, when it got too hot to read or decoupage purses in the carport or even run through the sprinkler, she would beckon us into her bedroom, turn on her window unit, shut the door, and dole out a strange blue candy we'd never before seen. The candy looked like Jolly Ranchers, but Jolly Ranchers didn't come in that color. No matter how we begged, she refused to tell us where she bought them. She remained enigmatic on that subject, and, with a barely straight face, she informed us we didn't have proper clearance. She would divulge the name of the candy, however: XLo05. In the murky underwater dimness of her bedroom, we whispered and giggled and gossiped. She told us stories of secret missions and dangerous feats in which we were the heroes; alter egos for the all of us were born; we were intrepid spies of international fame and fortune. On those afternoons, she was quite a different person, nothing at all like the other mothers we knew, who played Bridge and attended Junior Auxiliary meetings. She was a co-conspirator of silliness, a collaborator of folly, a spinner of tales of mischief and adventure. Behind her closed door, in the the damp frigid air of her bedroom, she created a secret triumvirate of superheroes. She instructed us in the martial arts of spreading magic and mirth throughout the universe. She gave us the armor of laughter and imagination. She made us believe we could do anything. We were undefeatable.

Shhhhh.... Top Level Clearance Required

I'm working on a Double Secret Project.....(Hint: Ava has a birthday coming up...)Clues to follow.

Agent XLo05/a