The Interloper Artist

Gimme Fall.

Gimme Vegetable Soup Saturdays and Roast Beef and Potato Dinner Sundays and a great big pile of covers where I'm crowded up with shivering fat wiener dogs and a very dubious husband who really doesn't want to watch Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho again, but will.

Gimme warm Angel Food Cake when the neighbors come for Bible Study... all covered over in the last of the years' strawberries and whipped cream that begins to steam when it touches the cake. Lord willing, we will always meet together.

Gimme a fire too hot for good sense in our old black rusty wood-burning stove that billows smoke into the house and into our clothes and into our lungs. (The number of years added to our lives by the warmth from that old stove vastly outnumber the days taken from inhaling all the smoke.)

Gimme windows that are shoved all the way open and propped with broken dowel rods on days too cold for such as that and clear black nights when the stars aren't drowning in humidity.

Gimme an end to this Summer Hibernation when the days are too long and too hot and too sticky and too many.

When I began working on a revision for The Frame Shop's website, (trying to update it for a sort of seasonal look with colors, etc.) I came down with such a homesickness for Fall. I feel this antsyness every year in August but this year has seemed inordinately hard. I don't know why but yes, I really do...

My whole life: I wish it away.

I wish it wasn't so hot. I wish it wasn't so late. I wish it would hurry up and be Fall then Thanksgiving then Christmas then Spring. I wish dinner was ready and I was done working and I had this office cleaned up and my thank you cards out and my dogs washed and my laundry finished and...

Somehow, I always think it's going to be better as soon as...

And what needs to be better?

Well. I don't know.

If only I had a cool night and could breath then I'm sure things would be better.

One time, fifteen or more years ago, a woman I worked with told me to stop wishing away my life. She said one day I would no longer be young and I would have wished it all away.

Ten years before that, I had a boss tell me the same thing.

When I was in high school, my grandmother told me to stop wishing away my life.

I'm not a young woman anymore. The woman who told me that fifteen years ago has been dead now for half a decade.

While I'm wishing and waiting and saying Gimme Gimme Gimme, my life is going by and I think I'm missing the majority of it.

I wished away today. There were too many problems at work. Too many hard things to do.  Too many interruptions.  Too many aggravations.

I came home and cooked green beans and roasted ears from my uncle's garden and mindlessly gobbled it while impatiently waiting for the computer software to catch up from the changes I'd made while editing a huge photo. The only thing I know about dinner was that the green beans were limp from overcooking and the corn was so hot I couldn't stand it. Because I missed it.

And so, I came to think about all this because of the picture I decided to use for the header on The Frame Shop's website. I regularly draw these intense pictures with millions of things happening all at once, but I can only handle about a half thing at a time in my own life. When it gets to be more than that, I just wish it would all get over.

Wonder why that is?

Why do I like such chaos in those pictures but I long for simplicity and peace?

It occurs to me that maybe I live this stupid way on purpose?