What an awesome name for a website or anything else. My absolutely favorite artist is Stephanie Pui-Mun Law. Her delicate, colorful, and evocative paintings just send me. So, naturally when she announced that her 2008 calendar was out, I fell all over myself to buy it. It arrived a couple of days ago and I’m still just smitten. It is a really large calendar and the print quality is really some of the best I’ve ever seen on a calendar. I can see every pencil mark she made before she painted, which, as a fellow artist, really knocks my socks off. I love that these pictures are full sized and true to life size or bigger.

One of the other things I am waiting on tenterhooks for (do you know what a tenter is?? not to mention it’s hook? )  is her cards. Yes, stretched tight and can’t wait for release, that is I. Because in 2009 her Tarot deck will be published. Oh yes, indeedy, I look forward to that day.

Anyway, I thought, with the shadows lengthening I would tell you about that a bit. I noticed the cool moisture on the air Monday night as I left for an 8pm meeting. The shadows were long and I thought for just a moment that I was late… Ahhhhhh, Autumn cometh. This morning my toothbrush was still partly purple from the brushing last night. Why? Because of all the delicious blackberries I ate in the dark while watering the garden.

Those berries are precious to me. The first year in thisplace, I rent, my landlord came one day when I wasn’t home and had his minions cut all the blackberries to the ground. We had an agreement that he would do no maintenance beside mow the lawn and storm clean up. This wasn’t the first or last time he was to break that agreement. But those vines were cut a week before harvest.  What about fresh, organic, free, fruit do you not understand? What about the bounty of Gaia?

His wife won’t let him cut them any more but the last few years we’ve had a bit of a drought here in the Pacific Northwest and my berries have, wait for it…. withered on the vine. Before ever being edible. *sigh*

One other year I was able to get some berries and the night that I planned on harvesting them I found that same landlord outside in my garden eating the berries that until I came along never existed. Oh. My. God. I was beside myself.  “It’s my property, I can do what I like.”  Does that mean I get a reduction on my rent?

So this year when I noticed that I was really going to have a harvest I was just ecstatic. I began wearing my gold grape vine earrings in honor of the fruit harvest. And last night, my tongue was so dark purple it was black. And it stained my toothbrush.  Which was a very smiley thing to find first thing this morning.

Tonight is a full harvest.

I? Am eating blackberry cobbler this weekend.  Happy Purple Tongue