I Remember

by Abraham Lincoln

I remember rain hitting our tin roof;
And how windows rattled in the winter.
Shaking the grates filled the pan with ashes,
And made the stove pipe glow a cherry red.

I remember wind howling through window cracks
And powdered snow flying by, bending dry grass low.
How quick my feet got cold walking to the store.
And 1, 2 or 3 pairs of socks didn’t make my toes any warmer.

I remember coal slack, and how my mother worried;
Because slack could explode and send hot cinders everywhere.
She warned me many times; never cover the bed with coal slack,
Unless you want to burn the house down.

I remember how my fingers froze
Wearing cotton gloves to school;
The girls wore mittens and their fingers never froze.
Boys never wore mittens to school.

Boys wore Long Johns with a buttoned flap;
Girls wore long underwear with a slit in back.
Of course us boys never saw them on the girls,
But boys with sisters said they do.

And their flap was just a slit
That opened when they sat down.
Now that sounded pretty good to me,
If they had hole in front to pee.

Wash Drawing

I guess this is one of the more difficult things to do—make a wash drawing using India ink and water and a small red sable brush. At the time I was making drawings for magazines and most were just black ink on white paper drawings because those are called, "Line Drawings" and a figure created with those tools (red sable brush, water, India ink, white paper) is the same as black and white printed text when it comes to making printing plates. The artwork above is the same as a photograph because it has lots of different shades of black—it is called a "halftone" like a photo. This was done back in the early 1970s when I did a lot of artwork for western magazines.

Gusty

The first time I saw this picture, somewhere, I copied and saved it. It reminds me of that photo of Marilyn Monroe's dress flying up when she walked across a grate in a sidewalk. I do think that a photographer should be looking for the unusual around him and hold off on just snapping the shutter at any and everything they come across. Try to capture the moment and don't create to photograph.

Birdhouses

I used to go to the local Aullwood Store and buy a ready-to-assemble birdhouse. I went to a local sawmill and asked them to plane down a cedar board to 1/2 inch thick and I used that wood to cut the different parts of a birdhouse from. These are some examples of old ones that I painted and hung on the old board fence as a colorful winter treat.