Mars: Day 10, 11

I feel like I landed on Mars. A Mars that needs to be ushered into the 21st century. A dusty Mars. A Mars with moths and moles and carpenter bees. I've seen more insect varieties in one week than I recall seeing over my lifetime. I am not a gardener, though on occasion, I have raised tomatoes in 5-gallon buckets and brought near dead plants back to life with nothing more than water. I decided to plant a hydrangea and some tomatoes, but succeeded only in getting the tomatoes in the ground. If the hydrangea does not die before it goes in the ground, it will be a miracle. The neighbors gave it to me after my mom passed and I guess they figured I'd plop it in the ground immediately. I still owe thank-you notes to people. My stuff has not arrived from LA. In order to make room, I am tossing old clothes and clearing out closets. I am reminded of a former student's drawing in which she stated that "death is just another change of clothes." I used to take comfort in that phrase, but I would hate to come back in moth-eaten clothes, so now I'm not so sure. I am grateful to have a roof over my head, a roof that needs repairing or replaced, but a roof nonetheless. I have taken electricity for granted. Yesterday during a power outage, I polished a candelabrum and contemplated being off the grid. I am in suburbia, less than a mile from metropolitan Nashville and just about 2 miles from Trader Joe's and Anthropologie. I swept and vacuumed a portion of the garage, and noticed this morning, in what I perceived to be a declaration of territorial dispute, that a spider had reinstalled cobwebs across my nice clean patch of garage. The big dog has a secret compartment located somewhere in his coat where he tarries dirt and twigs from the outside and deposits them on the inside. I yield a broom 75% of the day.

I can't imagine getting the house and garage clean enough to resume what I considered to be an ideal environment for working. I am lowering my standards. I saw Sherie' Franssen's video of her studio on facebook and was reminded of what it was like to have a painterly studio. I miss paint. I miss my easel and I didn't even use my easel much. I miss my palette. The moving van is due here next week. I still need to vacuum the silt in the garage.

Today I found an X-acto knife circa 1980 in its original packaging, a penny from 1857, and a black plastic bag filled with something lumpy hanging in the closet. I gently opened the plastic bag and couldn't figure out what I was looking at. It seemed to be possibly a shirt or jacket, but mostly there was dark gray fluffy matter and it smelled. It was too creepy to even poke at, so I double-bagged it and and threw it away. I'm not even going to hazard a guess.

I found this twig on Otto

I found a cart, pulled it into the kitchen, and officially have a makeshift studio. I started a painting, but mostly out of rote, which is to say, I wasn't challenging myself to shift focus, although it's a decent start. These things change, so starts are just starts. I assume at some point this experience will filter into my paintings, but I still cannot say how. I guess that's why it's visual. A friend thought that I would break with tradition and turn the living room into a studio. It's a radical idea but deserves more thought. Meanwhile the kitchen seems doable. Does this mean I've been demoted? I've never worked at a kitchen table. I'm slow to challenge the authority and inherent structure of the house. I threw away a bunch of dust rags-old shirts and baby undies that had been stashed in the linen closet for obviously a very long time. I didn't feel like keeping them. The logic that everything is useful tries to take over. I resist. Since the flood, I am concerned the garage will not make a good studio. The house is naturally dark. As a painter, I am desperate for natural light.

Perhaps it's not as bad as I'm portraying it to be, or maybe it is. It's certainly more than what I imagined.
So far:
Possibility of needing a new roof.
Crawl space has mold and fungus.
Crawl space has crickets. The good news is that the crickets eat the fungus. Nice ecosystem.
The pool needs to be filled in. Meanwhile, some yet-to-be-seen, semi-aquatic creature calls it a home. Perhaps, it too, is eating fungus.
Electrical system functional, but needs updating.
Moths.

I am here until I figure out what's next, and maybe then some. Sometimes I am uncertain.

Dusk is nice. The colors are different here. I need to paint.