Enoughsville update, with dried fruit

 Life continues to be rich and full enough, here in Enoughsville.   

The earth shakers across the street seem to be tuckered out; they've been hunched over, sleeping on the street with their scoops tucked in like birds' heads under their wings.  The ground that they had been doing their thump-y dances on is now covered over with giant concrete slabs, and posts that look like the start of metal fencing have been erected like sentries around the dance floor.  I guess the party's over, and maybe the beasts will go home to sleep it off soon.  Shhh!  Don't wake them up, anyone.  

I don't like to think of myself as a materialistic kind of person, but just in this week alone I've asked my husband to get me all sorts of things I've been yearning for.  And without even batting at eye at the resulting expense, he turned right around and bought me

• a personal amplifier (with a mike that goes under my mask, and a speaker I can wear on my belt, to make it easier for my students to understand me while I'm teaching),
• a watch battery that cost more than the watch (which I'm pretty sure I got for free, so that's not saying anything),
• raisins (How is it I keep running out of raisins?), and  
• postal stamps.  

These last, even though I asked for them, came with a planned surprise:  who or what might the stamps feature?  To my delight I now have two sheets of Edmonia Lewis stamps,  which cause me to go down an internet rabbit hole figuring out more about who she is.  Was.  (She lived a really interesting life to read about!) And so these were perfect for Black History month, and also for getting me a sculpture fix.  

Edmonia spent much of her adult life in Rome, and so after my husband bought me the stamps, he up-and-left and flew to France.  (Okay, the stamps aren't the reason he's going; and it's not because he misses the noise the diggers across the street used to make, nor because it's romantic to spend Valentine's Day in Paris, an ocean away from your spouse -- the reason he went is for some kind of History of Science conference).   I'll miss him during these ten or so days that he's away, but more raisins for me, I guess.

Somewhat on the same theme as "artist" and "family tree" and "stuff people got for free", I want to share this picture of a tree wall-hanging that Kinderling made from torn-up sheets and other pre-cycled materials.   I have a cast-iron tree above my mantel, and so I love hers, too:

Let's see if I can get a close-up here.

Voila!

And that's a bit of the news from our family, which continues to have quite enough adventures in the family tree to make us feel wealthy.  May you and yours be similarly prosperous.