building the torso:
rolling snowballs round and round
breaking sticks for limbs.

clay-pot hat, slight tilt…
sly mouth and a crooked nose
quizzical eyebrows.

—

Yesterday afternoon, when I switched on the TV to check out the storm track, our local weatherman relayed the exciting news… 3-4 inches of snow an hour!! At the time, we had a little sleet on the ground and some snow from a few hours before. I feared that we wouldn’t get anything, as is usually the case here in the Mid-Atlantic (I should note that I was not here last year for “Snowmageddon”– I was in Boston– the one place that ironically had an uncharacteristic winter… READ: LACK OF CRAZY SNOW… much to my dismay). While I waited for the snow, I decided it would be best to start on an art project I had been putting off for about two weeks.

A friend of mine from college commissioned me to photograph a pomegranate. I know what you’re thinking… easy (here was one of my early attempts.) Poms look like the product of a particularly nasty argument between an uppity citrus and a passion fruit. I like the juice well enough, but it’s a messy fruit. Its dismemberment is a sort of carnage… and I’ve had a tough time conceptualizing how to make this whole project work.

Let me just say that it reminded me of the scene from the film “Sleepy Hollow”– when Ichabod Crane chops up the roots of the tree and gets splattered with blood. I had to wipe off the exterior of my mini softbox a few times (have yet to process these images, but when I do I’ll post the finals). I emerged from the downstairs with a tray of sanguine pomegranate pieces and rosy fingers to find sideways snow crusting windows and weighing down trees.

—
I’ll leave you with a list of things I’ve done on this true snow day:
-knitting
-about 10 “hard” Sudoku puzzles
-accepted a job offer
-shoveled the driveway
-built a snowman
-tried to brush my kitten’s teeth… with malt-flavored toothpaste