the lost month

I don't know where February went. I can't remember ever missing a whole month of posting on my blog before. I was on a reading rampage-- and when I finally came up for air, it was March. And I feel wonderfully re-charged. 

Oh, by the way, I started an Instagram account if you're interested. @dosankodebbie

going green

Sure, snowscape can be breathtakingly beautiful. But 5~6 months of it is a bit much. By the end of January, my eyes and heart are starved for green. I can't decorate my home with potted plants because my husband's allergist forbids it. So I've been making rich green broccoli or spinach soups from frozen veggies, and re-reading Dr. Seuss's Green Eggs and Ham. But when all's said and done,  painting green etegami is the best medicine for what ails me.

The idea for a tea ceremony etegami came to me when a friend mentioned how much her daughter loves green tea. The words were inspired by the tea master Sen no Rikyu.  The model for the fern etegami is my own backyard, and the inspiration for it is my own longing to see the resurrection of the ostrich ferns that congregate exuberantly in the shade of our maple trees.

I figure the more green the better, so I dug out another green etegami from my archives. May I present the Galaxy Kiwi Fruit inspired by Star Wars.

illustration friday (lost)

If you are a fan of the author Alexander McCall Smith, raise your hand. His charming and thoughtful series The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency first introduced me to the African nation of Botswana and to Rooibos Tea (Red Bush Tea), which has since become my staple drink throughout the year. It has even been featured in my etegami.

Today I was reading The Dog Who Came In From the Cold (a Corduroy Mansions novel) by the same author, and I came across mention of a tea I had never heard of before. I googled "Malawian Lost Tea" and soon traced it to an African tea being sold by the Rare Tea Company under the name of Lost Malawi Tea.

This is how they describe it: "To compare this to an ordinary tea would be like comparing a line-drawing with a sculpture. This is like drinking normal tea but in 3-D."  Wow. Furthermore, "Each tin comes with a short story by Alexander McCall Smith."  Well, well, WELL!

humanizing the quake (belly laugh)

A phrase that we often hear in Japan these days is "Let's help bring back the laughter," or "Let's bring smiles back to their faces." It refers, of course, to the people whose lives were turned upside down and inside out by the recent quake, tsunami, and nuclear reactor troubles.

Miki Ando, who won a gold medal in last week's ISU World Figure Skating Championships (yaaaaay!), said she was pleased to win the medal, but what mattered most to her was helping to restore smiles to the faces of disaster survivors in the Tohoku region. And she really meant it. The sentiment is shared by every last one of us.

I've always been attracted to proverbs and sayings about laughter, and one of my favorites is the one illustrated in today's etegami. The words say "boiling tea with one's belly button." The complete concept might be explained as a situation in which one is laughing so hard that, if you put a kettle on your belly button, you could boil water for tea because it would be quivering so much. May such belly laughs soon return to North Eastern Japan.

tea field photo & art contest

Haiku poet Aki Gibbons brought this photo & art contest to my attention a couple days ago, and though my time and attention have been tied up with house-guests, I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. So today I stole away to draw for a few hours, just to get the etegami part of my mind limber again. The deadline is coming up quickly, but submissions are to be made electronically, so if you're interested in participating, you have till August 31.

I kind of like the teapot etegami myself, but it seems that the contest sponsor is hoping for submissions that have more to do with the planting and picking of tea, rather than the drinking of tea. As I don't feel that landscapes or detailed scenes are well-suited to etegami, I tried focusing on tea flowers.

The one with the green background is an etegami/collage hybrid, and the words are from the Chatsumi-uta (tea-picking song), a well-known tune that I learned as a child: "Pick, pick, pick. The leaves must be picked." The one with the white background is a traditional etegami and I borrowed the words from a pop song: "It's that time of year when the tea flowers are the best for viewing."