Precipice

Calm before the storm. Not calm exactly but a steady drone of calls for this and that, playing on every feeling one might be having. (The best are modest - Only if you can afford it - or combos: WE'RE CRYING tears of joy...) 

It's too much to handle, as if my $3 or postcards or whatever alone could save every seat in congress. A nervous tango of dread and hope, each trailing its own indecisive polls and prediction, has come to a still point. 

Tomorrow the real trouble begins, even if our better angels clearly prevail. Pray for peace.

Snap!

Me disappearing into a tree

Sprigs of understanding

What a pleasure to find at the American Folk Art Museum the originals of some of the Shaker Gift Drawings I found reproduced in a book when we visited Canterbury Shaker Village last year! This "Sprig of Understanding" appears in Polly Jane Reed's "A Present from Mother Lucy to Eliza Ann Taylor" (1849), one of several drawings in which every image is labeled.

Some trees from drawings already shared with this blog: 

A new one: Polly Collins' "The Gospel Union, Fruit-Bearing Tree" (1855)

It's not all trees, of course, most conspicuously in Semantha Fairbanks and Mary Wicks' "Sacred Sheet"(1843), a calligraphy of tongues!