Goodbye Autumn. I'll Miss You. But I've Got My Art To Keep Me Warm.

Like so many places in the northern hemisphere, we've had our first snow of the season. In fact, we had a couple snow events one after another.

Unlike many of those other places, we did not get an unbearable amount of snow. But it was wet and it was heavy and it made the roads very slippery.

In this photo we had just received a dusting, and it was late, so everything is kind of grey and colourless. But it has its own kind of beauty, I think.

But just before I turn my thoughts too far toward snow and ice and cold, there's something I need to do.

I need to have one last look at autumn.

The reds

The yellows

Sunrise on a cool morning

Birds flocking in the trees (those black dots in the bare branches). If you click on the picture it should get bigger and hopefully make it easier to distinguish the birds from the leaves (the leaves being the brown dots).

Different day, more birds flocking ... they're getting ready to go south.

I just like this picture. Repetitious, I know.

Those birds are a noisy bunch. They swoop down on lawns, peck bugs out of the grass, chatter to each other. I'd love to know what they're saying. These pictures show only a small part of the flock that was around that day.

And last of all, just before I wave goodbye to colour until, say probably April or May, I want to show you one more thing.

I already posted this picture here:

When I took this shot, I had something in mind.

From Grade Primary to Grade Six, I attended a rural two-room school. We had one teacher for Grades Primary to Three, and a different teacher for Grades Four to Six. In the "Little Room," as we called it (Gr. P to 3), we had Art class every Friday afternoon. I looked forward to it so much. It was a break from the 3Rs, and even though my artistic talent was confined to my baby fingernail, I loved to mess around with paint and chalk and collage materials.

Here is one of the pieces we did in Art class. It is a sponge painting of "Woods in Autumn" - the teacher showed us how to take a small square of sponge and different colours of paint to create what we felt were masterpieces. With the advantage of a few decades of experience, I can see mine was not nearly so; nevertheless, I hold this and all the other little pages in my art book close to my heart.

I'm guessing I was about seven or eight at this point in my art career. Penmanship was never my strong point either.

I'm saving a post about our teacher for another day. She was a remarkable lady and deserves her own space.

Here's the cover of my art book, by the way. We used a potato stamp (really) to make the pattern of circles.  You can see how I started every line with a load of paint on the stamp, and kept grimly using the same paint to the other side, growing fainter and fainter!

Apparently, my scissors skills were on par with my painting and penmanship!! Just look at that label :)

This isn't the first thing I would grab if I had to evacuate our house (people and pets would be first, of course) but it's irreplaceable, to me, and would be a serious contender for top five.

How about you? Did any of your childhood creations, in or out of school, survive the years to the current day? Did you create something that you can't bear to give up, that says "I did this, and it makes me happy to look at it"? Or did your abilities tend toward activities and games and such?

As I may have mentioned at some point, I was neither coordinated nor competitive, so my achievements did not run to sports or teams ... but if yours did, please tell me about it. Or maybe you were what we called well-rounded, you lucky devil - good at everything! Tell me that, too :)