Life Vacation

I. Madeline: The 'Fight Club' Edition

Jenny Baker, Penny Cooper's cousin, went to live with Emily and her little boy. Theoretically, more than enough girlettes remain, but an absence made itself felt.
I looked online.

There are always lots of "Madeline" dolls, but most are not for us. And then, THIS ONE:
obviously a member of the scrappy Duquette family, looks like she's been running her own Fight Club.

Of course she is coming here.

Life Vacation

And I am taking the bus to Duluth today, for the weekend. It's a mini Art Retreat--I'm taking my printmaking kit.
I have ideas ("The Escape"), but I'm open to inspiration from the place itself. I don't see myself making prints of nature, but it might show up... Who knows?

I took this photo, below, last time I was in Duluth (ten days ago). It's soon to go again, but the weather is perfect and I am unemployed...
= I'm on Life Vacation!

It's different being older, isn't it?
I keep feeling aware that I only have about twenty more years to live, more or less. Twenty-three, if I live to eighty-six like my father.

If I were to live as long as my mother, I'd have only five more years.
Though she didn't die of natural causes, dying at sixty-eight isn't really unnaturally young. "The average American celebrates just one healthy birthday after the age of sixty-five". [--New Yorker, "How to Die in Good Health"] She had three--though not mentally healthy ones.

The awareness of being a relative short-timer doesn't scare or depress me, it's . . . maybe an impetus? A prioritizer? It's not very much time to create a Body of Work of printed ephemera.
I must get on it!

This woman, Barbara Scully, turned up on my Instagram feed. Scullly is a journalist in Dublin, Ireland, born in 1962, a year after me, and author of Wise Up: Power, Wisdom, and the Older Woman (2022).

She's unkown to me, but I instantly loved seeing her face and gray hair on IG, which is full of people with real bodies, but almost all young.
She talks about stuff like, what kind of funeral do you want?

Speaking of getting on it, I must pack. Printmaking supplies!