Author Archives: dawnkinster
The birth of summer
Katie and I went on an early morning walk around the yard today. It was already hot, the kind of hot that reminds me of summers growing up. Some of you remember those days, oppressive heat pressing down on you even early in the morning. Sweaty sleepless nights with a rattling box fan ineffectively moving the stifling air.
Morning light slices through our backyard.
As kids all four of us got to spend a week at grandma’s house on the farm each summer. No air conditioning there either, but I don’t remember being so insufferably hot in the big old farmhouse. We each got to choose the week, though I remember in later years my uncle requesting my brothers during certain harvest weeks.
Neighbor’s flag celebrating in morning light.
I usually tried to be there when the wild black raspberries were in season. They grew behind my grandpa’s work shed and every morning I’d go out and pick a small bowl of them, and grandma and I would put them on our breakfast cereal. So good.
Katie and I shared these in the backyard.
And I remember the summers when I was much younger and my folks bought a lake lot with the intention of building a cabin someday. I remember the orange lilies blooming in the ditches on the road to the lake.
Bringing back memories.
They always represented summer to me. Now when I see them I am instantly transported back to that lake lot and the summer days spent swimming off the dock and rowing the big green rowboat.
Queen Anne’s lace getting ready to spring into summer.
This morning while Katie was busy sniffing I was noticing so many reminders of summers past, right in my own back yard. Lots of evidence, too, that summer is progressing regardless of the craziness happening in the world.
Looking for something to cling to.
Even as we stay home, curtailing plans, missing family, time is moving and mother nature is pushing forward. A lesson, I guess, for all of us not to give up hope either. For more than sixty years I’ve watched summer unfold, leaf by leaf, petal by petal.
I guess I should stop worrying about what tomorrow will bring and just let it be.
Sneaking quietly into summer.
So about that spunky little bird
A few of you are wondering, still, what the story is about that spunky little bird you saw in a previous post.
He was a quick little painting to do, all wet paint on wet paint running together. I really liked him, and didn’t mail him off right away, though I did post him on Facebook saying something like “I think he’s ready to fly.” He got a lot of comments, naturally, as he is very very cute.
I considered keeping him, he made me smile so much, but he was created to fly off to a forever home so eventually I scrolled through my address book and chose a place for him to land.
His new mom is a member of my Truck Safety family. Her son and her ex-husband were killed when the car they were in was rear ended by a semi a few years ago. She’s using her unrelenting grief to work with the Truck Safety Coalition as we try to make safety a priority.
I thought of her because she’s spunky too. She’s not a very big person, but she’s so strong and eloquent and unafraid to make waves. She’s just the kind of spark we need and I so appreciate her.
So I wrote a note on the back of the painting saying he reminded me of her and mailed him off. A few days later I received a Facebook message from her, thanking me for the gift of her little bird and telling me this story:
She noticed ‘her’ bird on my Facebook post, and said, aloud, “Oh I want you little bird,” but she didn’t comment on the post. She figured I had made him for someone, and had already decided where he was going.
But she connected with him.
So she squealed when she opened the unexpected envelope and the little bird hopped out. Her husband wanted to know what was up…and she told him I had sent her the bird she’d wanted. He figured she had asked me if she could have him. But she hadn’t.
No, she never commented on him at all, I randomly picked her name out of all the names in my address book. I think this little bird was destined to find his forever home with this mom. I think he was meant to help her her with her unbearable sadness.
And I don’t believe it was a coincidence.
Do you?
A photo a week challenge: Dusk
Sunset this week over the neighboring wetlands.
Dusk during early summer in Michigan. Pretty wonderful.
Painting smiles, one day at a time.
I started making little paintings when the Covid craziness started, back in the middle of March. Originally I thought I was going to send a card to someone each day, in the hopes that it would make them smile amidst what felt like panic and fear. Then I realized I’d have to go to a store to buy cards. And they were expensive.
Nature in all it’s colorful forms
I don’t exactly remember the first time I googled ‘easy water color pictures,’ but there were a bunch of ideas. I started saving ideas into a folder, not anything specific for people, just little things I thought I could replicate. And I had some old, dried up watercolors on a pallet from years ago…and some paper somewhere in a bin in the basement.
So what the heck, I hand cut some rectangles the size that would fit into a small envelope and started out. I’d paint something and if it wasn’t too awful I think about who in my address book might like it. And then I’d send it off.
One a day, a little bit of a smile, sent through the post office, to someone who might be surprised and happy to get mail that wasn’t advertising or a bill.
A rustic little scene of a friend’s favorite beach in Maine.
Eventually I started looking for specific things for people I knew. A crane for someone who always has a family of cranes she watches each year. Musical instruments for musicians I know. A black cat for a friend that has three of them at home. Another black kitty for someone who’s black furbaby just died.
This little goldfinch just popped off the page and definitely made me smile.
I started watching youtube tutorials and trying to recreate the fun things I saw there. A lot of that is abstract, filled with doodles and color. Those are so fun, but harder to place in good homes.
I’m still doing this, though now I don’t mail one every day. It’s taking me longer to get them done, some of them are getting more complicated and have required more than one attempt.
Different kinds of art, something for everyone.
I haven’t shown you the failures yet.
Still, I’m plugging along. I posted on Facebook a week or more ago that I had completed a few, and now I have a list of people hoping to find smiles in their mailboxes someday. I’m working through the list…but I’m also just doing stuff for fun.
Remind me to tell you the story of this little bird.
My biggest challenges are those for people where I have a specific idea and I’m having trouble executing what’s in my head. Some of you may fall in this category. At this stage if you haven’t seen a smile it’s because I’m stuck on something that isn’t working and I’m still trying to figure it out.
Sometimes I get in my own way, you know?
These went to family in Norway, representing things we saw on our visit last year.
And, of course, if I don’t have your address, well, it’s hard to mail you a smile. I just sent some to our family in Norway, and I have one ready to go to Canada, but I’m not showing you that one because it hasn’t left yet and I wouldn’t want to ruin the surprise.
These were all so fun to do!
Anyway, this is a rambling post just to share with you all the fun stuff I’ve been doing. The pictures in this post are the latest pieces, done since my last post about all of this. I’ve sent 80 so far, but I’m definitely slowing down.
Guess this was my purple and blue period.
If you’ve received one of my smiles I hope it worked and you’re smiling still. If you haven’t, and you would like to, well, message me on FB or email me, and I’ll add you to the list.
Be patient though…you just never know when a smile will strike!
An osprey a day…no wait, that’s not how it goes…
Camping makes us smile, no matter where we are
I don’t know how it happens that a week can slip away before I realize it. But here it is Saturday morning, almost afternoon, and I still haven’t posted a smile for Trent’s Weekly Smile compilation. If you haven’t read his weekly smile post from Monday yet you should. He has the most beautiful foxglove flowering over there.
So anyway. Katie and I have been sleeping in the tent in our backyard almost every night for the past week. It’s been beautifully cool with clear skies and she loves it, even though some nights I am kind of cold.
Katie here, this is my “I’m going camping!” smile!
She starts prancing around the back door and whining as soon as the sun even begins to think about heading for the horizon. I’m never ready to go to bed that early and sometimes I just ignore her, in which case she’ll sigh in disappointment and go to sleep somewhere else.
Once I’m ready to head to bed I change into several layers of clothing, grab her leash and wake her up. When she sees me dressed in sweats and holding her leash she gets so excited and she happily pulls me across the back lawn to our tent.
Silly girl.
But it’s not just her, I’m pretty happy to be sleeping outside too. She gets me up every morning between 3 and 4:30 and we head back to the house where she settles in to snooze with her dad and I go back out to the tent to finish my own sleeping. Those three hours of early morning sleep are usually my best sleep each night.
Hey mama, are you awake yet? Cause I’d like to go pee please.
Who’d have thought that sleeping in a tent on a narrow sleeping pad would garner a great night of sleep!
Katie and I put the tent away yesterday afternoon in preparation for a few days of bad weather. They predicted 60 mph winds and potential hail. Of course, as usual, the weather people got overly excited and all we got was a little rain. But it is going to be much warmer this week, so we’ll probably stay inside with the air conditioning for a few days. But when we get the tent back out both Katie and I are going to smile!
Guaranteed.
Me and my tent!
I bet you miss me
Katie here. I know it’s be quite a long time since I’ve visited my mama’s blog. It’s not that I haven’t had plenty of stuff to talk about. I’m a sheltie. I always have something to talk about.
Nope, it’s all mama’s fault. See she got a new ‘puter and she’s been trying to figure it out. Mostly she’s had a problem getting her pictures to download to the new laptop, and mama said I couldn’t talk about our latest walk in the woods unless she could add the pictures she took.
Of course.
After all, what’s a blog post without pictures of me? What? You say you’ve seen plenty of posts that weren’t about me? Huh. That just boggles my mind.
Ahem.
So a couple of weeks ago mama said it was nice and cool outside, maybe in the 50s (10 C), and did I want to go for a walk in the woods? Silly mama. She keeps forgetting I’m a sheltie. Of course I wanted to go for a walk in the woods!
Mama said she was going to drive to the back of the park cause it was a weekend and there were too many people at the front. But the road was closed where she was gonna go, so she parked in a different spot. I should have started worrying right there.
We explored a bit and found a trail. Mama figured we’d walk along it for awhile and then turn around and go back the way we’d come.
But it was so pretty, and I was so happy we just kept on going.
And eventually the trail turned back in the direction we’d come so mama figured it would be shorter just to follow it back out to the road and then we’d just walk up the road a bit to where we were parked.
Yea. Good plan mama.
Cause, as you guessed, that trail didn’t go entirely back the way we had come. No it wound around another little lake and up and down hills. Mama thought we were still going in the direction of the road, she was keeping the sun over her right shoulder, but she had no idea how much longer it would be before we saw the road. She did, however, know it was a long way back if we turned around.
I, however, was blissfully oblivious to the whole dilemma.
Luckily mama had brought me lots of water and I drank it every time she offered it to me. I drank a lot, but mama didn’t, she was afraid she’d need it for me later. She’s a good mama, other then her propensity for getting lost.
Finally, a long time later mama caught a glimpse of the road through the trees and she hauled me over there even though that’s not where the trail went. I tried to tell her we were supposed to be following the trail, but she said she was the mama and we weren’t going that way.
But once we got out to the road mama wasn’t 100% sure which way we should go to get pack to our car. She used the sun again to make a guess, she figured we weren’t that far, and she had a 50% chance of guessing right.
She began to doubt herself after we walked up and down hills, in and out of shade and the road just kept going. She didn’t think we had walked that far in the woods, and she was worried about me walking in the sun. If she had guessed wrong we were going to have to walk all this way back and then who knows how much further. Still…there was no proof, yet, that we were going in the wrong direction.
So we kept on walking. Mama would stop when we got to shade and give me more water. I still thought we were on a grand adventure but mama was getting stressed.
Finally a red car went zooming by, and then came back the other way in a few minutes. The lady driver wanted to know where the beach was. (The beach is way up at the front of the park, and mama knew we were parked way at the back of the park.) So mama told the lady the beach was up where the guard shack was…and then she asked, just to be certain, if the lady was currently now facing the front of the park? The lady said yes…so we knew we were still walking toward the back of the park.
We walked some more, up and down more hills, around more curves, each time mama thought she’d see the parking lot where we parked. But she didn’t see anything but more trees. Finally we came to a fork in the road and she had no idea which way to walk. She didn’t remember driving by a fork when we first drove through the park.
As we were standing there trying to figure out what to do a park truck drove by! Mama flagged that young man right down and explained we’d been walking for a long time and we needed to know if we were going in the right direction, toward the very end of the road. He looked confused, then said yes we were.
So we started to walk again. And do you know what? Around the very next corner, only a few yards away, there was the end of the road and our car! Mama was so relieved.
Me? I thought the whole thing was a big adventure. Mama was proud of how well I did on a long walk. And our way out of the park mama stopped at the place we usually walk and took a picture of the map so she could figure out where we had been.
She’s been studying that map and she still has no idea. My advice for mama is maybe we should just stay on the trail we already know. And to always bring lots of water. And maybe bug spray.
Just sayin.
Mama says to let you know that her new ‘puter doesn’t have her photo editing software on it yet. So these pictures from our walk are straight out of the camera. And to top it all off WordPress changed their format and she had to figure that out too. So far she can’t figure out how to change the size of the images so they’re all huge!
Mama says it’s almost too much that her laptop and her blog software has all changed at the same time. After all, she says, change is hard.
Another Father’s Day
When your dad dies you’re in the moment of loss and you don’t really consider how permanent it is. But dead is forever and that’s a very long time.
In the beginning you get through each day, each moment really, one moment at a time and you try to accomplish all the things you have to do, from arranging a funeral to cancelling his next doctor appointment, and you don’t think about what it will be like sixteen Father’s Days later.
But I can tell you what it’s like. It’s like the first one, just a little softer around the edges. Less the slice of a knife, more the dull ache of a bruise.
Dad would have turned 91 last February. There’s no guarantee he’d still be alive today, but I know for certain that a sleepy truck driver took several years from him — and us — sixteen years ago when he failed to see dad stopped on the freeway ahead.
I wonder if that driver ever thinks of dad. Or us. I think of him often; he’s a father too, and I am sure there will be some Father’s Day thing happening for him this weekend. I don’t begrudge him that. I just wish…I wish he had pulled over when he got sleepy that morning.
I know you all expected some sort of uplifting Father’s Day post, but that’s not where I am this year. Grief ebbs and flows, but the work remains.
In fact I’m working on some truck safety stuff over the weekend. In some ways that’s in honor of my dad. I guess, for me, just about every day is Father’s Day as we fight to improve safety on our roads. Can’t give up, though sometimes it feels futile.
I like to think of him up in heaven sitting with some of your folks who have gone on too, sitting around in easy chairs telling stories about all of us, sharing experiences. Smiling a lot. Don’t see why this isn’t possible, after all, most of us met over the internet, just as unlikely as our folks meeting in the afterlife, right?
Anyway, now I’m rambling. I hope those of you that still have your dad here get the chance to give him a hug or a call or a card. Sometimes dads get lost in our busy worlds, but time is not infinite. Don’t waste any of it.
Happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there. No matter where you are.
Smiling in the night
Katie and I have been camping, though it’s just been in the backyard during these Covid-19 days. She starts crying and circling near the backdoor around 8 every evening, so excited to sleep in her tent. Of course that means she goes to bed early.
Mama was a little slow.
So she gets me up between 3:30 and 4:30 every morning. We wander back into the house after she does her jobs, and then, usually, I go back out to the tent to finish sleeping.
Sleeping under the stars.
But the past two nights I’ve spent about an hour taking pictures of the night, honing my night photography skills before I head back to sleep.
The neighbor’s house with a couple planets above.
Last night was really, really cool.
I was taking a picture of the house with a band of clouds and a couple stars overhead. The camera, sitting on it’s tripod was going through the 25 seconds shoot and then the lengthy noise reduction process, and I was staring at the sky directly above me while I waited. And the most spectacular shooting star blazed across the sky. No, it didn’t cross into my picture, darn it, but I saw it and that made me smile.
A layer of clouds was beginning to obscure the stars.
The next shot I pointed the camera straight up, knowing there wouldn’t be another shooting star right there, but wondering what I’d capture. And while the camera was going through it’s process I was watching the cloud bank climb higher in the sky just above the house.
And that’s when I saw the oddest thing.
The sky above.
A line of small dots, lights about the same size and brightness as a star, were moving from south to north, right above the cloud bank, quite fast, but slow enough for me to blink a couple times, adjust my glasses, and process that I was seeing something strange. I had time to consider whipping the camera back from it’s upward image capturing, and to swear at myself for moving it away from the house in the first place, but not long enough to actually do anything but watch, fascinated, until they all moved off into the clouds.
There were probably at least 20 lights, a long straight line of them, then a break and then 5 or 6 more. It was 4:20 in the morning. I’d been shooting the sky since about 3:45. I wasn’t sleepy and I wasn’t hallucinating. I don’t know what they were, but I’m hoping someone else saw them too and has an explanation.
Meanwhile, I’ve figured some more stuff out about night photography and someday I hope I’ll be able to stare at the stars and whatever else is up there from a more exotic location than my backyard.
And then I’ll really be smiling. Guaranteed.
Edit: I found out what it was! Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starlink Satelite Train. You can put in your data and find out when it will be flying near you!
Gee, I always miss the good stuff.
Change Is Hard 