Fall

Pumpkin coffee, bright leaves, cool weather-- all dreams in Texas. So here is my tribute to autumn further north. 

When I fact, this is what's happening in my neighborhood:

New projects

Several of my friends have birthdays, so I am cranking up the paint projects. 

Still obsessed with old doors, i'm learning about shadows and rocks and when to quit. 

I got a new paint table. It's actually a drafting table from World Market. 

It's supposed to be used tilted, but I use it more often as shown above. 

It's a handsome piece of woodwork. So naturally, I've covered it with a cheap plastic tablecloth so as not to get it all nasty with acrylics. 

This is an unusually large picture of blackberries. No one likes it but me. I adore it. Maybe it reminds me of blackberry pie? Yes, Mom's blackberry pie.  We used to go in the woods with our boots on and longsleeved shirts, buckets belted around our waists.  You could pick buckets and buckets of berries at the right time of year. 

This is a painting of an old grist mill. It reminds me of the ruins of an old powder mill that used to be behind our house in New Florence, Pennsylvania. 

Our house was up Furnace Lane road, several miles out of town.  We had 50 acres in the middle of State Gamelands.  If you hiked to our upper field, then took off through the woods, you'd come to huge rocks, a briskly flowing stream that was almost a little river, and the ruins of an old powder mill. Some old-timer told us when we moved there in 1972 that it had been a place where gunpowder was manufactured during the Civil or Revolutionary War. There were big rocks that formed a sheltered area, which, it was rumored, had been inhabited by Indians years and years ago.  

Any way, this mill reminds me of that area.  A little nostalgia with fall colors.