(Inside A Black Apple)

Time Magic

Later this week, I'll be signing (real, bound, & very early!) copies of  Dream Animals at Book Expo America. And now that it's feeling like a very real, fully grown book, I started thinking about what the book was doing this time, last year. I checked my email archives just to be sure, and my feeling was right: This time last year, the book was just a handful of pencil sketches.

This is one of those sketches, and there are dozens more (and, as these things go, drawings of things that were discarded as well as different incarnations of each sketch.)

Even though sometimes a year seems like a very long time, it's still astonishing to me what can happen in one set of twelve months. From nothing, a book can come true, an entire person can come true.

The sketch above was probably made the year before last (So, some time in 2011...I think.) Just little thumbnails from the first inklings of Dream Animals.

These are just ramblings that come on when I look at drawings like this, these wispy things trying to become something and the way some of them grow and some of them don't. Ramblings about the magic of time, and something where there was nothing.

Ramshackle Bouquets & Lemon Cake

You're tuned into the flower channel, didn't you know?

Today it is my wonderful Amy's birthday.
I made her a ramshackle bouquet from my garden (possibly, no, certainly with a few small bonus bugs included.)

I also made her my favorite lemon poppyseed cake.

It's nice little loaf, very much a little cake-baby when it's all bundled in waxed paper. 

I use Mark Bittman's recipe from How to Cook Everything (I checked around online for it, but I wasn't able to sleuth it out.) I make a few changes, like subbing oil for half the butter, mainly because I just can't bring myself to use two sticks in something that ends up so small. I am also very heavy-handed with the poppyseeds & the lemon.

One of the best things about liking to bake is that (given the ingredients) you always have the wherewithal to bring someone something nice.

Growing flowers is that way, too, if the time is right. They're similar that way. Both humble things, cakes and flowers, and the kind of things you bring to someone to make their day a little nicer. I wish it was blooming season all year 'round just for that reason, but we then we'd lose pumpkins and snow flurries and it really wouldn't be right.

Very lucky for us, then, you can bake someone a lemon cake any time of year.

Heavy-headed Roses

Right now, it's barely an exaggeration to say that my flowers and my drawings and paintings are my whole life. They run my days and rule my mind.
I think that's just the month of May, for me.



These roses were so heavy, they were threatening to snap off a whole cane of my best and most favorite rosebush. (I'm resisting, with everything, saying: mo roses/mo problems. But now I guess I've said it.)

The best problem to have! They're budding and blooming like gangbusters, almost all of my flowers are. Enough to fill all my bottles and jars for days.

I finally feel like I finally have a little foothold as a gardener. It makes the Mays (and Aprils and Junes) so much nicer. For the first few years, I was scrabbling and scrambling just to get a little start, with no understanding of how things grow, gauging shade & sun, finding the plants themselves, tending them. So I've been building them (the garden and my understanding) a bit at a time. It's a lot. But as Josiah always reminds me/reassures me: "You can't figure out everything at once."

Some things have to wait their turn, and even when it comes, it takes a while. Then, days go by and months go by and years go by, and you find yourself with a foothold.
A tiny one, but all your own.

More flowers, more of everything soon!

One of These Days, I'll Sail in a Sea Monster Carriage

(A detail of a painting)

I've realized that an awful lot of my work is about improved & more spectacular modes of transportation (Dream Animals is about this, in a big way.)

And I've been thinking about what my impetus is to make pictures and stories, and I never come to anything more elaborate than the simplest reason:
"I just wish this (person/place/thing/Sea Monster Carriage) was real."

But that's why we make anything, right? Besides necessity, it might be the only reason.
And even if it doesn't conjure up the wished-for thing, it's the next best consolation prize to have a picture of it, or a story about it.
The souvenir, rather than the visit.

I wish we could travel by bear rather than bus. I wish we could sail in a sea monster carriage instead of putter down the street in a station wagon.
Until we can, I'll keep stealing snapshots from the better place.