Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)
Sunset over the land on the far side of the harbor of the Port of Galilee in Narragansett RI. We’re standing in the parking lot. The sun has just touched the earth and is putting up a fight. The center of the sun is too-bright-to-look-at white but it’s bleeding red to the sides, the remains of the day spreads, bright yellow into pale yellow into a tired rose, spreading to the right and left. The color, more hues and shades than primary colors, stands out against the dark line of the earth. The top third of the scene is comprised of evening gray clouds against the previous afternoon’s blue sky, settling downwards, like blankets on an un-made bed. In the immediate foreground is water, bracketed by boats tied up to docks. There is a single, vertically-serrated line of sunlight that crosses the water in the middle of scene. If you’re inclined to think that this line (which almost touches the setting sun) is a support, a pylon for the still too bright to see sun, you’d be disappointed. If you stare at the light in the water, you end up feeling certain that it, (the line of sunlight), is a hopeless lifeline thrown towards shore.
This is the Ten Things of Thankful bloghop. Organized and presented by Josie Two Shoes every weekend, the TToT is a grat ‘hop with a difference. As the title suggests, the idea is to relate to readers and fellow writers the people, places and things for which you are grateful. What sets this grat blog apart is that the only true requirement (for participation) is ‘good intent’. (Yes, that is a rather vague term. It is also a hugely inclusive, wildly open-ended term, which is why I use it. A very simple ambition, though, to act with good intent. But now I run the risk of stem winding*, so on with the show.)
Lets begin with something simple… (someone tell zoe that ‘guffaw’ is not, in most circles, the optimal response)
2) A Friday Walk with Una (unplugged)
3) What do you mean, ‘Where did Number 1 go?’ How would I know?! Here I am, sitting at my computer on a Sunday morning looking for a photo of Phyllis to anchor it’s own Item and I realize that not only am I out of sequence, there are numbers missing!
5) Hey! Go to Amazon at this link and treat yerself to a muy coolita** coloring book created by our friend Cynthia, she is a living example that with determination and a willingness to follow the path no matter what, a person can totally self-develop themselfs. Go to her site ‘Intuitive and Spiritual‘ she’ll show you how.
Una sitting at the dining room table. In front of her (she is facing to the left in the spindle-back chair), on a white tablecloth with a field of small rose-colored squares, is a black laptop computer. On top of the laptop is a gift from Friend of the Doctrine Cynthia. It’s copy of her just-published adult coloring book, ‘The Tree of Life’. The cover has a tree taking up the top 2/3s. The tree is a very simple trunk, two parallel lines rising and curling apart to blend in with the individual leaves of the tree. These leaves are elongated ovals with smaller colorful ovals contained within. It is a very cool thing.
6) Phyllis and Una
Phyllis and Una. Phyllis has her hand on Una’s head and laughing at the camera, in part, and you have to look closely, due to the fact that Una, for reasons known only to her, is sticking her tongue out.
8) Garden Update:
A photo in portrait orientation (taller than it is wide by half). We’re standing before the Una garden, the ‘U’ is easily discerned with it’s brown, raw soil cut out of the pale green of the lawn. From where we stand, the ‘U’ could be an ‘n’. The open part of the letter is to the left, the bottom is to the right. The other letters, due to the angle, are visible only as thin brown lines shrinking into the distance. (The space within both the ‘n’ and the ‘a’ of ‘Una’ is foreshortened so much as to be non-distinguishable). Above and beyond the letters the lawn continues until it runs into a wall of tall pine trees. The horizontal branches of the trees are lighter and almost fuzzy green. The trunks of the trees are black and very straight, parallel lines. In the immediate foreground left, is our cairn. The pile of stones and rocks. They are roughly rounded in texture and the predominate shape is cubes-trying-to-be-squares. There is an oval stone, long axis upright, in the front of the pile from our perspective. Colors fall victim to texture, grayish white, turning dark from shades formed by their own surfaces. They look old and common, but friendly enough.
View of the garden from the house. Actually from a second story window. The letters are clearly letters, (capital ‘U’, small ‘n’ and small ‘a’). The brown of the raw soil ranges from dark, (where the soil appears damp), to light brown. The cairn is to the far left side of the photo and the rocks look pretty much all white, but that ‘stone white’ rather than chalk white. It’s easy to see the individual stones, being as ‘simply solid’ as stones tend to be, what little space might be between the individual rock are full of shadow black, contrasting nicely, even at this distance.
9) Home and Heart (a Sister Margaret Ryan story). Double Chapter week this week! Chapters 11 and 12 will be out tomorrow morning. (For those falling behind on our tale, Sister Margaret is having lunch with her mother and her brother, Father Matthew Stephen, (yeah, seems to run in the family). She is asked to do something about the foreclosure on the family home. Meanwhile, Sister Catherine is with Roanne Avila getting similar bad news from an attorney about the recently-windowed young woman’s home and, worse, there appears to be a problem reaching her daughter, Patrice. Finally, Arlen Mayhew (yes, a descendant of the Thomas Mayhew, who established the first settlement on Martha’s Vineyard) and Drusilla Renaude (of Renaude and Associates, the brokerage selected by the Bernebau Company to market their newest development to be located in and around Crisfield MD), are on a corporate jet headed to Miami. There. All caught up. Join us at ‘Home and Heart’ things are about to get curiouser and curiouser
7) Lets go for a quick visit to the 1980s for a little music to get out of this admittedly odd TToT post.
10) SR 1.3
* ‘Stem winding’, hey! I thought the phrase meant, to indicate, by the winding of a watch, that a speech is going long. Apparently there is more, including it’s first usage as a statement of high quality, from back when a wristwatch was a luxury. Here… read it for yourself.
** probably not ‘real’ Spanish… heck, probably not real words in any langauge
Click on this here icon here and come join us at the TToT (“tell ’em the Doctrine sent ya’)
About clarkscottroger
Snort….well it’s not gaffaw! Love me some Una!
lol damn! avoided it on a technicality! lol
All pictures very excellent and I enjoyed the walk….peaceful.
Garden looks great! I particularly like the cairn :)
Una do enjoy our little walks.
Glad you got the book! Hooray!!! I’m thankful for the Doctrine and only a few weeks til I get to meet Una! :) Grateful, thankful, appreciative I am! :)
Thank you (for the book) and Una is the most sociable of the dogs we’ve had, she totally enjoys meeting new people.
The “vertically-serrated line of sunlight” being “a hopeless lifeline thrown toward the shore,” is very poetic.
Perhaps Una is sticking out her tongue “because she can,” or maybe it is dog speak for “keep patting my head, Phyllis.”
That pile of stones looks like a perfect hiding spot for a lizard or a snake.
That is some interesting information about stem winding. I had only associated it with the winding of a watch. One has to be careful with these blog posts or your readers just might learn something.
funny how this ‘describe the photo’ can make a person think about what otherwise be somewhat everyday, even common, in terms that might not ordinarily be used.
Fortunately snakes while present are fairly rare, lizards I don’t believe live in these parts.
Yeah, the whole google, wikipedia instant access to information is one of the most fun parts of the internet.
Oh, Clark, I can’t tell you how much I love that sunset description. May I include it in my TToT post next time?
I love that you have a garden dedicated to Una. So unconventional. I totally would have ordered a copy of that colouring book for myself if I could still see to colour like I loved to do as a child. It sounds lovely.
You are certainly welcome to do so. In fact, the photo is one my own that I took with my phone and you are also welcome to use that. If you can copy the whole thing or, if it helps, I’ll be happy to email it out to you, let me know on Facebook messages if there is an address I should use.
Your thankfuls have me smiling.
cool
It is such a pleasure to end my reading here, Clark! There is always something fun and interesting. I think that your wonderful intro photo clearly qualifies to be Item #1, it is such a wonderful capture at the perfect moment! I agree with you that “good intent” is the most important quality of our TToT posts, there seems to be so little of that among the masses nowadays. One simply cannot read a series of TToT posts without feeling hopeful and uplifted. We find things to count as reasons to be thankful because we intend to focus on that, it works!
I totally enjoyed my car ride with Una. Did you see my head hanging out the window alongside hers? I was fascinated by those tall spikey things festooned with green stuff… OH, I remember now… they are trees, aren’t they?? I remember trees… and how I miss them and the wonderful shadows they cast!
Cynthia’s color book with a purpose is indeed wonderful. You should share a page you’ve colored with us next week! It seemed like for decades adults didn’t color, or certainly didn’t tell anyone if they did, and now almost everyone I know dabbles in it a bit in some fashion, and it is such wonderful therapy!
The Una garden is progressing right along! What is growing now? I love the cairn of unimposing rocks. My mother used to make rock gardens of such rocks covering a mound of dirt with flowers planted in the crevices, I always thought them simple and lovely!
Phyllis has such a beautiful smile, it truly lights up the photo! I had to smile at Una’s poking out her tongue, our cats do that sometimes, and then leave it that way for a bit as if they are stuck, it looks so funny!
Thank you for the Home and Heart notes, I MUST start reading! This reading block in my head is becoming ridiculous. I love to read and have been known to read several books a week, yet in recent times it never gets to the top of my priorities list. Something wrong with that. Perhaps I need to take it up with our resident therapist, Zoe. :-) I love that you are continuing on with it at a steady pace, clearly you have a vision for where this story is headed.
The expression “stem winding” is new to me, so I read your link and also learned about the source of getting “wound up”, I had never associated that with a timepiece. You learn something new every week at the TToT! I hope this week is being good to you, see you again in a few days! :-)
always glad to provide some non-struggle-that-seems-to-bean-increasingly-wide-spread-element-in-all-our-daily-lives, and such.
That photo was Saturday Night during the Saturday Night Drive call-in (upper right of the home page) call us up some Saturday evening (8-8:45 EDST)
The couple of times I’ve been to Texas, it’s not so much the lack of trees, but the scale of the landscape (one very much being the function of the other)… very impressive.
Beginning to see some activity in the garden, shouldn’t be long before they look like the pictures on the seed envelops.
Cynthia is one amazing person creative (as all clarks tend to be) but able to bring the things she creates out into the ‘real’ world. v cool.
loves this internet with its endless aisles of old books and magazines
Cynthia is tres cool. I really like the un-aerial view of the Una garden. It looks like things will grow there. The fencing adds a lot. The 80’s were an odd generation.
lol yes, yes they were. Beginning to feel a lot like summer. (and the answer is always an emphatic ‘No’ in response to the perennial question of temperature.)
What are you growing in your garden, Farmer Clark? Around here, the wheat is almost ready to harvest, the corn is tall and starting to tassel, and it’s time to put in soy beans.
might be easier to show than to tell (ayiiee the story of my writing life…not)
this photo taken on the week of planting, about 2 3 weeks ago.