NOW AND THEN--

 Your girl walked the walk at about 7:00 pm and never will again, at least not at this time of year. Don't know how it is in your neck of the woods, but in Austin, Fiorella is toasted inside and out. 

Fio did get some good work in on a couple of unfinished portraits, though. No more procrastinating, although neither of the portraits had been commissioned. But what the heck--someone might like Fio'sy style and retain her.

Did Fiorella tell you she's lost her trademark big pink hat? Her last hope is to check up with her choir church this Sunday--pray for her. (She likes that hat!)

Hey, hey, hey! The camera your girl wanted has finally come through, and Son L has committed himself to teaching Fio how to use it to so she can rejoin the modern world and (1) take pictures that of her family and art projects and (2) post onto Facebook like she used to do. Yes, step by step, your girl is trying to reenter the modern world again.

This is a poem Fio wrote this sad poem long ago, probably when she was in high school or early college, and she's printing it because it's falling apart:

    I watched a laughing child in years gone by

Beneath my window gather bits of spring--

Arbutus whiter that the moon could cry

The joyous news of life's awakening 

    A child would touch the vine about my door

And just as quickly, shed it its coat of frost--

Her feet had scarcely trod the forest floor

Before the winter's hard campaign was lost

    The seasons roll themselves up into years

As springtime swiftly burns away to fall--

And an aged woman clothed in black appears

And walks the dying world within my wall.