Here I am

Home again! Had a fabulous week away. Nothing like a change of scenery to recharge the batteries. Of course, there's no better scenery than there is outside my door, but I don't have a stunning Acer tree in my garden - it would spend it's life in tatters. (I do have a couple of little ones 2' high, practically kept in an outside cupboard!)

I was able to sit on a little window seat, quietly gazing at these beautiful autumn colors with my coffee or breakfast. Very calming, especially necessary after a trip using a car, train, bus, plane coach & car to get to my parents house. (my mother has oft said it would have been easier if I'd moved to the States!)


One of my favorite places in the center of Oxford is the outdoor market. I've always loved trawling thru others castoffs, feeling I could give something that's precious to me a new life. I don't think I realised back then that it would become part of my artistic expression.

I forgot to ask how much the printer trays were, love those things! My Grandfather was a printer at the OUP (Oxford University Press) & his retirement job was at the Pitt Rivers museum, full of facinating things like shrunken heads that horrified me as a child! When I have a few more spare hours, I'll visit again with my sketch book. I mention my grandfather, as whenever I go to Oxford, the second main home in my life I feel so full of family, quite validating, really & I get such a feeling of quiet warm hugs.

Love the way they stack things around the maple trees & the pic 2 up is hat net from the 30's, I think. Beautiful things. I could have all those rugs, too!

My second favorite place is the Covered Market. I'm so at home here!

No wonder,I've been going there since my teenage years. & drinking in this cafe for over 30 years. Hasn't changed ONE bit!

A bike parked up against a facade, crumbling but incorporated into the framework of Oxford life. & the High (as in street).

A bit of a grey day brightened up by the inevitable buskers, old & young. I admit I sang along to the Jason Moran song & feltI I was listening to my youngest (yes, he has the hat, too!)

A lovely morning, wore out my patient mother!

Last part of the walk!

You must think I've been travelling for miles on this walk - it probably only takes half an hour & I'd be happy to take all those kind people who've commented on what a lovely place I live. (you could always camp on the (small)lawn ;) I do, & I'm looking at it thru new eyes doing this little excercise - I'm so glad people share their walks in blogworld, it's a great record for me, too.

At the Point are some rock pools & of course, more lichen. What fantastic shapes in Nature

Some primroses, of course

A view of part of the village thru those favorite trees of mine, from the other side.

Tam's favorite watering hole.

And finally, on the home stretch. My house is the one nearest the telegraph pole - the actual pole is opposite my neighbors but the wires are in fron of my house along the track. I designed a Christmas card of robins on the wire, love the higledypigldy behavoir of starlings on the wire & am saddened when the swallows gather there in the Autumn, but they aren't even here yet! The odd crow dominates the wire sometimes & the buzzard generally sits on the pole next to the wire.

My six squares (despite the fact that my parents are staying in a cottage down the road!)

My favorite potato packaging, a sorry attempt at rust dying, a piece of rust, the pink & turquoise squares were using bits of my painted papers that I'd made into Christmas decorations last year, but they looked like very expensive labels,so didn't do well - they're cards, now & second from the end, bits from my box.