The Rainbow

 Grandma Moses was a big deal in the 1950s. Anna Robertson Moses was a farm wife who bore ten children and never forgot her childhood interest in art. Late in life, after her hands grew too bad for embroidery, she took up painting, creating canvas after canvas showing the way things were when she was a younger woman. Her paintings do not adhere to the basic rules of scale or perspective but they are full of life and her keen observances. I realized that her rainbows are exactly as a rainbow truly appears. When was the last time you saw a rainbow NOT painted in bright primary colors? The houses and barns that Grandma Moses painted may not look quite three-dimensional but her rainbows are honest and true.

We All Scream For Ice Cream

 Ice cream can be the perfect summer treat. But on a hot day, a rapidly melting ice cream cone can be more soupily stressful than enjoyable. So why not choose a pint (or three) to enjoy at home. Among chocolate lovers, Graeters is renowned for including massive chocolate boulders in their "chip" flavors. But the tangy refreshing stars of the summer, if you can find them, are lemon meringue pie or key lime pie.

Queen Anne's Lace

 This is a plant that lives up to its name, a radiating multiplication of tiny flowers forming patterns like snowflakes on stems. Growing in drifts along roadsides and in untended meadows, each one might as well be a crocheted or tatted doily or perhaps a circle of bobbin or needle lace. Surely it inspired past artists to interpret flowers into thread. Their life cycle takes each flower through all the colors in which lace can be found: white, cream, beige, ecru. They are nature’s ultimate version of Punto In Aria, Stitches in the Air

Ghost Signs Charlottesville Virginia

 Have you ever seen a building with the faded remains of an old painted advertisement? Sometimes there are layers, markings that represent the history of what was happening in that particular spot over a period of years. Some cities are beginning to preserve ghost signs, realizing that there is a special beauty and patina to an old wall or facade that hints at its past life. We can take the time to puzzle out what was there before each one completely disappears.