Picture me, dear friend, in my new yellow bathing suit and movie-star sunglasses, toes painted a bright & sassy pink, iced tea in hand, reclining on a chaise lounge on a stereotypical beach in Hawaii. Sketching spring icons, all things Easter bunnyish and gardeny (rather an unlikely topic for a beachside sketching session, but I am working on spring giftware and a chocolate bunny fabric collection.) Sweet rounded tummies appeared in my sketch pad as I sat dreaming and planning out the basic elements for a pregnancy journal.
Suddenly, in the blink of an eye, the gentle trade winds turned nasty, and my papers, stashed beneath a giant bottle of sunscreen and a rather large novel, were snatched up and flung willy nilly over the beach and tumbled down the lava rocks past the sandy shore. Instant disaster!
Thank goodness I married the sweetest man in the universe. Who else would scramble heroically after my missing papers? Who else would shout encouragement as I stretched my leg down between boulders, trying to retrieve a sketchpad trapped between boulders in the pounding surf using those pink toes with the polish barely dry?
Most of what we got back dry was blank paper. The rest was a soggy mass too blurry to use. Russell is a smart man as well as a kind one, so he mumbled sympathy as I dumped the dripping mess into the nearby garbage.
Much as I hate to start over, I have to admit that usually when I trash something, accidentally or otherwise, the next batch is usually better than the one I lost. So once I got past the frustration of throwing away so much work, I trotted out to the beach, with fins and mask and my for-sissies-only wet suit shirt, ready for another snorkeling adventure.
Tomorrow will find me exploring the botanical gardens in the morning, snapping photos galore. That will provide more creative fodder than I could exhaust in months. Then in the afternoon I plan to tackle those spring icons and the pregnant mommies again.
Picture me, dear friend, on the beach in that sweet yellow bathing suit, bright pink toes, iced tea in hand, reclining on a chaise lounge and making sure I anchor the next set of papers so securely that even a rogue wind can not possibly whip it away.
Drawing on the beach in Hawaii alongside my very own Mr. Right. Bliss. Pure bliss.
