We took a roadtrip to Delaware with the intention of filling up the car with thrifted frames for my art and retro (borderline tacky) 70's style "paintings" for Matt to screenprint on. It was nice to revisit the place I called home for a couple months. The land is so flat, so many fields that had just been harvested when I moved there last fall are now lush with corn and soybeans and wheat. The road there and back is a familiar one. I've probably driven down it with my family as a kid a hundred or more times. This time, we stopped at every single antique shop that dots the flatness of the road. Every thrift shop, every junk filled barn... all of them.
My life is so different from what it used to be and I am immensely thankful for it. Last week I taught the ten year old how to sew and she made six doll dresses and a quilt. Seeing her creative energy building and forming confidence within was amazing. I listened to the five year old play for hours upstairs, not alone, but with a little stuffed duck she stitched by hand and gave a name and a personality to. I took the nine year old (and the others) to a 400 acre park on the bay where she caught frogs on the sandy trail and jumped in mud with hundreds of dragonflies buzzing in the quiet of the forest.
I come home to someone who is just as manic about creative passions as I am. Someone who gets awesome ideas for things to build or paint or orchestrate and then makes them happen right then with exuberance. Someone who encourages me to do the same! There's something about creating with your partner that's irreplaceable and necessary. At least it's necessary for me. And now I find myself creating something I never imagined could be part of my reality. You know how you're a teenager and all emo and wanting to be a famous folk songwriter so you get a guitar and try with solitary desperation in your bedroom to play it and sing along but all that actually happens is that you write angsty poems in a composition book and learn to fingerpick along to your favorite Nick Drake song? Ha. Yeah. That was me. At some point I put my "reality cap" on and stopped trying. But there's always been a little (or secretly big) part of me that wanted to make music somehow.
And then one day, Matt built me a kalimba. By the end of the week we decided to form a little band. We named it Canopy and sat on the bed playing duets every night. Then I remembered singing scales in choir class and got the itch to tune them properly. We started with two in the scale of "d" and then moved on to "g" and then "hokkaido" and most recently "middle east in alto." It's my new obsession and I kind of really don't want to do anything else but tune and play kalimbas for the rest of my life. Its really, really rewarding.
So this band thing. I have a band. (What?!) We've played in public quite a lot now too. Small gigs here and there, even in the middle of a huge crowd blasting over the loud speakers at Artscape. We actually have three shows booked this week too! It's funny how going onstage for choir concerts in school have helped me transition into being confident playing live improvised music. If you told me back then that I'd be doing this so willingly now, I would most likely never believe you. Anyway, here's our Bandcamp page and a studio tour we did with Baltimore by Hand. (photo below from that tour)
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