Day 106

Lily trying to look up at me but the sun is too bright. According to Jess she is over 100 years old in people years.  Such a little moth-eaten bag-of-bones, with a sway-back and hanging belly like an old old horse.

I am fetching Tim tonight from the airport.  Every time we are reunited after an absence is exciting, which sounds pathetically sentimental, but there you are.....

This afternoon I fed the birds, as I hadn't done for two days because of school, although there was still food there.  But there were no peanuts,which are beloved by the jaunty tufted titmouses, the ingenious nuthatches, the hopeful downy woodpeckers, and of course the belligerent blue jays.  It is funny to watch the birds try to get the last nut, which is invariably virtually impossible to extract.  It eludes them, sliding from one side to the out-of-reach other when they peck at it.  Sometimes the blue jays retire to a nearby branch and contemplate the nut-feeder for a while.  You can see them considering the problem, trying to work it out.

Every morning I feed all these old animals, the Lily-cat, the old rhinitic piggie, the aging black dog, and wonder at their survival.  I hope they don't all die at the same time.  The piggie has lived in her little cage for her whole life. 

I loathe cages and never allowed my daughters an animal in a cage.  When the boys were seven years old they wanted a guinea pig so badly that I eventually said that if they picked up all the dog-poo in the garden for a month, they could each have one.  Lo and behold, they religiously picked it all up for a whole month, never forgetting once!  So then we had two guinea-pigs, and Tim built them a lovely bottomless cage that you could move around on the grass.  After a bit, we just left the cage open all day and they wandered around the garden at will.  Every evening we would have to find them and chase them back into their cage for the night, so basically, the boys had two wild guinea-pigs.  Once we could not get the crazy piggie, Blackfoot, to come out of the woodpile.  Eventually Matthew suggested spraying her with a hose, and that last resort resulted in a soaked black piggie streaking for the sanctuary of her cage!

My portrait today is my latest demonstration figure, still unfinished and starkly white.  She hasn't become herself yet, just like the students I teach.  She is becoming.  She will grow more flesh.  She will put on more colours.