Moon Dance

I finally found a puzzle that I want to hang on my wall. It's called "Moon Dance," put out by a company called eeBoo, from their Piece & Love line of puzzles, which are wonderfully inclusive of all the colors of humanity who share our planet. I don't know if you've ever noticed, but people who look like me and my family do not appear in the vast majority of jigsaw puzzles, and so I was enchanted by eeBoo's diverse offerings. I particularly love this painting of women celebrating together in a moonlit garden. It speaks to me of feminine communion and joy. I ordered a frame for the finished puzzle, and am waiting eagerly for its delivery.

I also want to make a record here of those two ceramic plates on my dining table, the blue and the green, which arrived by mail in a box marked fragile, sent to me by the senator whose book I helped write. Clayed and glazed and decorated by her own hands, they are part of her series of "envelope plates," and one of them, the green one, bears the initials of her beloved mother as a design motif. Having worked with the senator on her book published earlier this year, I know what her ceramic art means to her, how deeply claying restores her for the fight for right, and so I know what an inestimable gift it is to receive a pair of these one-of-a-kind works or art. "Please use them," Mazie told me with her usual pragmatic sincerity, and so, with love and appreciation for her heart of fire, I shall.