Quick Trip to Maryland
I spent last weekend in Maryland with my artsy friends Erin and Rhonda (still waiting on the photo of all of us). Rhonda drove up from North Carolina and picked me up at the Baltimore airport for a post-chemo celebration with Erin, who’s battling breast cancer.
She has an uber-supportive hubby and three fab girls, whom she has somehow managed to educate at home. I kept announcing, “I want to go to your school!” They do the coolest stuff. It was amazing to have a deeply intellectual conversation about Ephesus, Pompeii, and Rome with a fourteen-year-old and her two younger sisters.
We had superb weather, and their spread was full of green with a big dogwood next door. On the first morning we sat in the sun in jammies drinking coffee and talking till noon. After slathering lotion on burns, we dressed and went out to Five Guys for burgers. The rest of the day we spent strolling along the canal in Frederick, window shopping, and scoping out art exhibits and a library full of art books at the Delaplaine Visual Arts Ed Center.
Erin makes a mean Chesapeake Bay crab chowder. This fact deserves its own paragraph.
Rhonda is a computer geek who’s designing me a program to he
lp writers identify boring verbs so we can beef up our writing. We spent some time tinkering with that between sipping coffee, downing chowder, and singing along with “Mamma Mia!”
A highlight of our evenings was watching “Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time.” Thomas Riedelsheimer shadows sculptor Andy Goldsworthy as he works outdoors to create his art. Tools include ice, driftwood, leaves, stone, dirt, dandelions, and snow. And his location is anything from an open fields, beaches and tide pools to rivers, streams and forests.
Goldsworthy studies the flow of energy and transition with each new creation, working to come up with something that ‘fits” with its environment. The film won the Golden Gate Award Grand Prize for Best Documentary at the 2003 San Francisco International Film Festival. Fabulosa.