Odd Ones

These are a few odd fellows.  You know you work on a certain thing an image that speaks to you, yet on some days you hear nothing no voice comes through and you paint anyway.  And on those days something else happens, a different experience as you rush to finish them.  They speak a foreign tongue and you hardly look at them.  Not at the time.  And later you look and they seem interesting.

They have a unity of course.  They always have that though you never expect it.  Maybe they express something you haven't thought about.  I don't know.  I don't even have any idea what I think of them.

Funny too, I know I began thinking about something I hadn't thought about for years.  I mean it's simple not some wild experience.  I was thinking about my grandmother.  She was young at the turn of the century.  An Irish girl in an Irish community.

She got very sick as a young girl and had a high fever.  They thought she would die.  So a few of the neighborhood women went out that night and caught a skunk.  They cut out its stink sack and used it to rub all over her skin.  She began to get better right away.  Her fever cut and in a day or two she was cured.

One of her brothers made his living on skunks.  He started by selling the fur to the Russians.  How he did that I have no idea.  But it didn't last long as it was soon the time of the Russian revolution and styles changed.  But by then he had figured out to sell skunk oil which he got by baking them and having a pan to catch the oil.   The stink sacks he continued to sell also, and now he had the baked skunks which some people would eat, especially thru out the depression.

Her other brother decided he might work overseas and left to go to China.  He returned 35 years later and retired in Arizona.

It is always odd what it turns out people do.