Daily Evil: Z is for Zzzzz

Sleep is not evil. Nor is snoring, though you might think someone is evil at 2 am if their snoring is keeping you up.

This is a small watercolor, 9 by 6 inches. Again, no date, but it is a view near my parent’s house in Chimacum. They loved that house and the views. They moved there in 1996 and my mother was diagnosed with cancer a year later. I want to end with this painting because they were so happy there, even with the cancer. They had wanted to move to the northwest for years, but waited until my grandmother died. She was in her 90s and they were afraid to move her. After she died, it took three years to find a place and sort things and move.

So let’s end with them sleeping and waking to morning and the sun coming over the mountains and the farms around them and the views.

Daily Evil: X is for Xenophobic

Are phobias evil? A fear of strangers or of foreigners. I think a phobia can make someone behave strangely or dangerously and harm others. I think that the isolation of the pandemic has increased our fear, so it may well exacerbate xenophobia. Not only the pandemic, but inflammatory news and war and changing weather patterns and the news that one in five trees is dying in part of California, unable to survive the warming.

This is a watercolor, again no date, but I think it is of the Olympic Mountains. That means it was painted in the last four years of her life, between 1996 and 2000. She and my father bought five acres with a house and barn in Chimacum, off of Center Valley Road. She loved the views up and down the valley. She was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 1997 and died in 2000.

The mountains look like they have a crosshatching, Xes to indicate snow and valleys and places where the snow can’t stick. Or has fallen down.

Daily Evil: M is for moan

M for moan and maudlin and mourn and mountain.

Another watercolor, 14 by 27, 1987. There is another older watercolor, no year, on the reverse. Misty mountains. This could be West Virginia, the panhandle where my grandmother lived for a while, or a trip to the northwest.

M is for mother, too. I miss her.

Soft cloak

The sparkling water distracts, while she is shy above it, cloaked. She waits for the moisture that remains after Mount Olympus has taken her share from the clouds as they roll over. Over the year Mount Olympus and her sisters take hundreds of inches before the clouds pass on to Tahoma, but she catches the moisture left and builds a soft cloak. She is nearly hidden in the blues and pale blues. Look for her.

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It doesn’t fit, but I wrote it for the Ragtag Daily Prompt: risque.