Palm Sculpture and Spring Delights

Today I worked on a coconut palm sculpture most of the day.  The clients who commissioned it visited the studio in the afternoon and we discussed the progress.  They gave me the go-ahead to finish it along the line I am heading.  This has been a very interesting and challenging project for me and I feel I have learned a lot and there are still a few experiments I want to do.  I don’t charge clients for my learning time.  I got that notion from Francis Whitaker.  He said something like this.  “A person comes to you and requests a job.  That person expects you to know you business.  If you need to study and figure out how to do it that cost is on your time - not their time.”

It was cloudy, cool, windy and we got a little bit of rain today.  Spring arrives it “fits and starts” - whatever that means.  We might yet get a dusting of snow, but the march to summer is inevitable.  Is that why we call it March?  Oh well.

Behind Fall I favor Spring most.  I think that I watch every detail of the arrival of the new signs of life and growth.  The first green buds.  The first bloom of this and that.  Now baby squirrels are scampering throughout the tree branches,  Baby bunnies are bounding around the garden border.

I have seen the house wrens this week and orioles and a wood thrush.  The turkey vultures came back a couple of weeks ago.  But, the two snake hibernaculums I watch are still closed.

Betty is cutting fresh asparagus every day and it is delicious.  This bed is only a few years old but it looks like it will be a really good one.  Two previous attempts in other locations didn’t work well.  The peas are growing but the spinach is similar to the Kansas wheat crop - spotty.

A robin pair has nested on the east end of my studio north porch on the east side in a 100 pound roll of 12 gauge wire.  Momma flew off when I approached but I took a photo of her three eggs,

American Robins are thrushes and abundant in most of the US.  Several pair nest on my property each year and some overwinter down by the river.  They seem almost social.  I can be watering and a worm-stalking robin will come up within a few feet of me.

All my cognizant life I have known robin eggs were blue.  I could pick that blue out of a lineup.  But when I heard Francis Whitaker say “quench it when the color is robin’s egg blue” that color took on a different meaning in my mind.  My long time love of nature had one more link to my love of the blacksmithing craft. 

This morning we leave early to attend the BAM conference in Sedalia, Missouri.  We will begin the four-day adventure with a day trip with dear friends to a site which is significant in the history of my Father's relatives.