Life and after- excerpts from The Beet Queen

“…Everything that happened to him in his life," she said, "all the things we said and did. Where did it go?"

I didn't have an answer, so I just drove. Once I had caused a miracle by smashing my face on ice, but now I was an ordinary person. In the few miles we had left I could not help drawing out Celestine's strange ideas in my mind. In my line of work I've seen thousands of brains that belonged to sheep, pork, steers. They were all gray lumps like ours. Where did everything go? What was really inside? The flat fields unfolded, the shallow ditches ran beside the road. I felt the live thoughts hum inside me, and I pictured tiny bees, insects made of blue electricity, in a colony so fragile that it would scatter at the slightest touch. I imagined a blow, like a mallet to the sheep, or a stroke, and I saw the whole swarm vibrating out.

Who could stop them? Who could catch them in their hands?”

—Mary Adare in The Beet Queen, by Louise Erdrich

I'm back to trying oils again, on artboard. A bit messy for my kitchen table ‘studio’, but I like how they blend and how I can go overtop mistakes without messing the whole thing up and overworking it.

Back to school and work tomorrow for us. The world keeps turning.