Author Archives

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Painted sky

I think the sky and water here are more sophisticated than I anything I can imagine.

After my mother died, I wrote a poem about her and my kids. Her part:

I keep wondering
what the art supplies are like
and if you work on sunsets
or mountains
or lakes

The rest of the poem is here https://drkottaway.com/2021/09/23/painting-angels-2/.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: sophisticated.

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Ages

Here is my daughter on the lap of her great grandmother Evelyn Ottaway. I think my daughter was a little over one and my grandmother was 90 or very close. We flew from Colorado and visited friends and family. My grandmother was living with my aunt Pat right then. My daughter was very relieved when we got home, but she let many people that she didn’t know hold her. This was the only time she saw her great grandmother.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: age.

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No tomatoes today

No tomatoes today. Squash, yes, but it’s a long time to tomato season. But the squash is delicious!

I went to a March 17 party. I wanted to bring a vegetable and looked at my Immigrant cookbook, but potatoes were already taken. I took squash baba ghanoush and it was delicious!

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: tomatoes.

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Air and water

I took a wonderful limnology class at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in college. The study of inland aquatic ecosystems, lakes, reservoirs, ponds, rivers, springs, wetlands and so forth. I loved this course because it is such a generalist course. We talked about the chemistry of water, the physics, the ecology, the geography. The plants and animals, microscopic to bigger than us. And lakes that freeze, the ice floats on top, because it is most dense at 4 degrees C and less so at 0 degrees C. This oxygenates the entire lake as the water turns over until the entire lake is 4 degrees. Tropical lakes do not do this.

The photograph is of the Salish Sea, so not an inland space. The liminal space for me is the surface, the border between water and air. Sometimes swimming, if air and water are both warm, it’s hard to feel the exact liminal space, wet skin in the air and then the water.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: liminal.