Portraits

Saturday night

It was winter, and I was walking through the woods; snow covered the ground. I came upon a clearing and found a very large rectangular block of snow, much taller than I was; it was almost like a monument of some kind. The top half of the rectangle had a beautiful framed color painting of a blue jay attached to it. Over time, passers-by had come to love and appreciate the painting, and had begun to hang their own framed blue jay paintings beneath it.

*****

Yesterday my wife and I took her father to Georgia to tour the Chicamauga battlefield, where we saw many large obelisks and rectangular blocks of stone, commemorating the deeds of various divisions involved in the fighting.

Last night I finished putting together a 500-piece circular jigsaw puzzle called "Familiar Birds," which was made by Springbok in 1970. It features a prominent picture of a blue jay, among many other birds. I'd found it on e-bay, so I'm pretty psyched that it has all of its pieces.