A family asked me to paint their beloved cabin in the mountains of New Mexico. I’ve never been to that state, but as I painted the pine forest background I reflected on my childhood camping trips. My parents took me camping from a very young age, mostly to the High Sierras in California. Mom and Dad loved back-packing and mom even made me a little down-filled sleeping bag. If there was no rain, we didn’t pitch a tent, and I remember laying on a bed of pine needles, and looking up at the stars at night. I listened to the crackling campfire and their voices nearby until I fell asleep. Sometime later I’d wake up between them, with a cold face and warm body, secure in their love and happy to be a little girl, outside in the forest.
The wind in the pine needles above, made it’s whooshing sound, and was familiar, because outside my bedroom in Southern California were three big pine trees. But outside, in the forest, the sound of the wind was grander, and deeper. There were many instruments in this beautiful symphony. And here, as the dead pine needles were blown from the trees, they would not have to be raked off our driveway at home, so let the wind blow, and do it’s work, adding to the softness of the forest floor, preparing a little bed for the next sleepy-head to rest upon...look up...and listen.