Crisis and Recovery

My pop-in-law has been hospitalized for nearly a month now.  It's been a very tough ride for him and difficult to watch.  However, within a week he will be released to a nursing facility for continued recovery and rehab.  This is wonderful news!

The tractor sketch in the previous post was done hours before we took him back to the hospital in April.  Since that time, my heart hasn't been in a creative place.  While my sisters-in-law were in town & on hospital duty one evening, I rode along to help my husband with farming tasks.  A little time sitting in the pickup resulted in the first pages in 3 weeks.  My fingers felt heavy and the voice in my head was awfully loud about how not-so-great it was, but whatever.  In the end, it was a bit of needed therapy.

These are both in my little Moleskine - first pen & watercolor of a houseless farm in the distance.  Those little brown things are box cars, which are often used for storage.  This paper doesn't like watercolor washes.  The second page was fairly quick - recording what I could see in the side mirror as my husband finished up the field.  Didn't have time to add the bottom half.

There is hope again.  We look forward to some sense of normalcy and a little bit of boredom.  As I told my sister today, considering the past two months, boring is awesome!  Maybe we can get back to the house updating soon and I can move into the studio room and my pop-in-law can sit in his living room again and cuss about the wheat price.