My Life As A Business Card

Single digit temperatures, led to boredom with being inside, which led to light-headedness, which  caused me to take out a deck of cards.

I started designing my own business cards many years ago, many professions ago, but not many places ago.  My homes have always been New York and Vermont.  That old cliche that says "as much as things change, they stay the same" is somehow eerily true looking at the aesthetic informing these cards.

The very first card was typeset; I remember my surprise when I picked it up at a local Vermont printer. It actually looked the way I imagined.

The next card was brought on by a fit of laughter walking down a street in New York and seeing this painted mural, especially after being rejected for a grant that would have legitimatized my title of artist.

I needed a pair of silver pumps for a party, not a new business card. However, this high-end Italian shoemaker, offered customers a little tiny "calling card." Of course, it took months to get the card, printed in Italy or so they said.  This card was a losable card, it didn't fit in a rolodex, easily fell to the floor and no one could ever remember what they did with it.

Once you enter the world as a person with a website, you need a card that "matches" your website.  Subsequently, the latest, if not the greatest was born.

Sitting on the sofa, on a cold winter day, I am thinking not of sugarplums, but of the next design.

But I am NOT done with apple picking

For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.

Excerpt from Apple Picking by Robert Frost.

Some stuff does stick in your brain.

The red balls (aka apples) in the orchard on my road reminded me of the Robert Frost poem, After Picking Apples.

This poem, like all good poems, is a metaphor for something else entirely. And something else forced me to concentrate on what those strawberry-colored bombs signified in my landscape of bronze, gray and amethyst.

After cutting back and raking the garden, I began my list of what I needed to move, to buy, to remove and to coddle. Most importantly, I paused and thought about what I want my garden to be. Part of that wanting is an ideal that can never be realized.

Disappointment is often what I feel at the end of the year. Next comes ambition and desire. I garden, to garden another day. There is always another cultivar, perhaps an entirely different plant, certainly better compost or more of it and definitely new ideas. Seeing is integral to gardening and the orchard on my road invites me to look again and imagine a more perfect garden, perhaps in 2010 or 2011.