Making a Garden Grow

The word palette, according to Dictionary.com, derives from Old French, the diminutive form of pale or shovel, resulting in small potter's shovel. A spade with which the painter mixes pigments, grows new colors, and plants them on a prepared ground.

Today, the palette at my feet invited me to do otherwise: hold it against the beautiful blue ground of sky. Imagine, then, a flower barrage bursting and floating above our heads in brocades and confetti streams and bouquets of intense color.

A garden of the imagination fit for another bitterly cold day.

Edvard Munch at the Spider Bridge

Spiders set up shop all year long along the Lake Cheston trestle bridge.  

In summer, I save dragonflies, butterflies, and moths, pull them flapping and flailing from orb weaver webs.  

Today, the tightrope spider silk spanning one metal support held no prey.  Instead, the stanchion's rusted, chipped coating (paint and iron) captured me, holding me in thrall just as a version of Munch's Scream did many years ago.

You see it, too, don't you?  The artist's palette?