and now it's December

        So, being a romantic, who grew up with historic fiction (the above image so reminds me of the winter scenes in Farmer Boy and Little House in the Big Woods  and heaven knows, I've certainly painted more than a few winter sleigh rides.), this was always my idea of December. But here in Independence, MO, today it's more like a damp, grey morning in April, which is glorious, but I can't help wondering, after the seething cauldron of a summer we've so recently survived, what does this suggest for the health of our planet? Is there menace in this loveliness?  Perhaps. So I reckon I'll continue to recycle. Switch off the lights when I leave the room. Go for a walk and savor this lovely spring day in December. Which happens to be, incidentally, the 251st anniversary of the day Anna Maria Grosholtz was born to her widowed mother, in 1761, in Strasbourg, France, a town I passed through back in 1977, I think, when I first went to Europe, with my long gone friend, Phyllis Dove.

Mme. Tussaud

       Anna Maria G. came to be better known as Madame Marie Tussaud, famed for the wax death masks and figures she created back in the hellish days of the French Revolution, in which her own living head was nearly cut off. Some of the works she created are still to be seen in London, where she lived until she died when she was 88, having seen much that she would just as soon have forgotten. Mme. Tussaud shares a birthday, by the way, w/ the complex comic, Woody Allen; and the great Bette Midler, one of the best entertainers ever. Lemme tell you one of my happier memories is seeing her in concert in Kansas City in the 1970s. Slender, young Barry Manilow, her pianist, walked out onto the stage, a long chiffon scarf drifting & floating out behind him.

And the last man I ever was silly enough to marry is having a birthday today, his 71st, that is if he's not dead or something. Oh yeah, and the great detective writer, creator of sleuth Nero Wolfe, Rex Stout came into the world on this day in 1886. Here's something he said with which I totally agree: 

 "I still can't decide which is more fun – reading or writing."

        Either one is a perfect way to spend a December day in Spring.