my wHY BE normal friends

I made three entire collages this week, and rejected the first two of them. I guess they were aesthetically fine, but they were about subjects I'd touched on before, and I was dissatisfied that I was saying anything new and didn't feel like rehashing everything.

My problem was partly that I didn't feel I had much to work with this week, because I fell ill partway through the week, and everything dissolved into that. At first, I was afraid I had contracted Covid, as some of the symptoms matched. Everything became a blur, and I was barely able to care for myself (Eric, bless him, did do an emergency grocery run for me). I did order Covid tests from the drugstore and had them delivered, but I kept testing negative.

After three days of blurred and surreal misery, I recovered. Eventually, I decided it was just a particularly virulent general bug with a heaping side of extremely gross gastrointestinal effects.

Okay, not very interesting to do yet another collage about being sick, either. But what particularly struck me about falling ill this time was how very helpless and isolated I felt. And that, more than the illness itself, is what I tried to capture in the images I used.

I experimented with technical effects to do this, extracting the figure on the bed and mixing it with an image of bare tree branches, and then overlaying the result back over the same position on the bed (keeping the bed itself in clear focus). I then used the same tree branches as a scrim overlay in the background. I was trying to capture the sense of dissolving, the fear that I might actually fade into nothingness and not be able to come back.

I did come back. This time.

I always have a lurking fear that I won't manage to do so the next time.

Image description: Foreground: a woman lies on a bed, either asleep or ill. The bed is focused but the woman is indistinct, as if run through by cracks. Background above the bed: the blurred image of a woman with closed eyes, overlaid by a scrim of semitransparent leafless branches.


Dissolving



Click on the links to see the 2026, 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

There is an archaic Scottish term that I have become rather fond of as of late: "hurkle durkling," which refers to the practice of lingering in bed, long past the hour that one should be getting up and busy with daily affairs.

This past weekend, the Twin Cities experienced a snowstorm. I ran errands and went to the grocery store (what a madhouse) on Saturday.

On Sunday, everything was cancelled. The newspaper was cancelled. Church was cancelled. All the stores were closed. The day involved some serious lounging about. I did eventually get out and shovel the front and back walk. I had a kind neighbor who took his snowblower to my driveway and the sidewalk in front of the house, however, so I managed to avoid the worst of the chore.

The snow wasn't as deep as some of the weather predictions had speculated it might be, but it was enough to grind the city to a halt. And it turned out that I didn't mind. A quiet descended over everything: call it winter's last hurrah.

Yes, indeed: I found that I really didn't mind a bit.

Image description: background: a city street where the road and all the parked cars are covered with snow. Lower third: rumpled bed covers with a tray holding a teapot and cookies resting on top. A woman's feet in red and white striped socks are stretched out beside the tray.

Hurkle Durkling



Click on the links to see the 2026, 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.