Color Me October, please.
Color Me October, Please
Color me tons of golden maple leaves and red sumac;
Color me purple and red and green and blue football jerseys, and flashing, bold, bright band uniforms on fresh-faced kids.
Color me Indian corn and pumpkins and squash.
Color me rosy-fingered dawn and a purple-hazy sunset.
Find me putting away lawn furniture; putting the last hamburger on the outdoor grill as twilight descends; getting out the popcorn popper, and washing the big, brown cider mugs.
And find me browsing through Christmas catalogs and day dreaming of other Octobers when my children and my grandchildren were excited over another new school year and another season of Thanksgiving, Christmas, and beautiful moments.
Best of all, it is October - the most colorful, beautiful, happy, sad month of the year.
Color me October, please.
-Jean Schwarzwalder, October, 1987
I am a mixed media artist. I like to mess around in the studio or my art journals.
Click on each category to see more. And there are many more in Collections, top menu. l page.
In the late 80s, I made a blank book for my mom, who was very creative, to use for her poems, artwork, and such.
“To Mom:
for hopethoughts
dreamvisions
wisewords
memorywhispers
ideacollects
.”
And as I knew she would, she filled many pages with original poems, lovely lists (“Solace? It is easy to find - just look around - it has happened to you many times. We just don’t take the time to recognize it.”). And “Christmas Traditions.” And some more beautifully-penned essays.
After she died in 2003, I claimed the book. I keep it with the coffee table collection and pull it out often to enjoy. My mom, was a caring, thoughtful woman. But as adults, my mom and I had an erratic and sometimes-confusing partnership. (The novel I will write one day will be titled “On the Diagonal,” relating to a comment she made once to my sister about me. That’s a whole other story.) I always always loved and knew how creative and artistic she was, that she started many wonderful artistic things and abandoned them midway as a lifetime habit, seeming to always want or need something more. Isn’t that poem just so lovely, though? Visual images to knock your socks off.