Where does Inspiration Come From?
I live in a picture postcard setting. Year round there is the achingly cold beauty of deep snow and ice storms. Fall foliage shows us colors that aren’t in the Crayola box, and spring and summer rejoice with riots of green and everything growing.
I am surrounded by a real live dairy farm, Fairmont Farms, that graciously provides me with picturesque black and white spotted cows right out my back door and I look across golden waves of corn and green stripes of growing hay to the other side of our little valley where more Fairmont milk cows dot the hillside.
Fairmont keeps the pregnant Mama cows in the field behind me. We share a fence and last year the cows broke through it and got into my corn. They are like heavily pregnant mama’s anywhere, time passes too slowly for them. They are uncomfortable and bored and curious to a fault. Last year when we had baby ducks, the cows spent all day watching them through the fence..
Recently, I heard my girls out on the trampoline and it sounded like they were talking to someone. I sidled around to a room where I could hear better and they were putting on a show, performing tricks and MCing in between, complete with patter and jokes. When I got to the window to see who they were talking to I saw seven Holstein cows lined up with their heads hanging over the fence, jostling for position in the front row.
In springtime my crab apple tree blazes bright pink and daffodils and forsythia light the yard with yellow. After a summer rainstorm our valley is prone to rainbows. I draw so much inspiration from these surroundings. This beauty sustains my soul and I hope that some of it comes through in the collections I create.
I like to remind myself how much I get from all this rural beauty when faced with the many inconveniences posed by being so far out. Like riding the school bus for more than an hour down the highway for a class field trip last week. Man, those things are uncomfortable, but it gave me plenty of time to chat with another mom I didn’t know very well. School busses are loud as well as uncomfortable and while we were talking about what we do, this mom misheard me to say that I ship a monthly curated collection of bees to people around the country. We carried on an entire conversation, some of her questions were a bit strange, “Can you do that in winter?” but it wasn’t until she asked if I got stung very often that I realized we were having two very different conversations. We both laughed and moved on, but it got me thinking about various logistics, like packaging, and would you ship a queen every month? because that would soon be too many bees for most people. I love that I live in a place where my fellow field trip mom didn’t even bat an eye when she thought I shipped bees around the country for a living.
Bees are part of the biodiversity on which we all depend for our survival. Click the image for more information.
