Merry Christmas!
December has been a good month for us. December 6th and 7th, Luminaria Nights in the art colony of Tubac AZ, saw us signing and selling copies of Maya and the Turtle not far from Santa’s big armchair. Venue was the virtual center of town, the Tubac Center of the Arts. (Thank you Santa for pulling in the crowds.) We never enjoyed such an event, it was crazy. By the end of the second evening we’d sold an entire case of books!
Here we are at the beginning, Friday the 6th, posing at our table with Soma’s nephew Mark Hann and his wife Gayl. They were visiting from Montana (2 degrees) and proved to be very helpful.
[The exciting energy surrounding this book encourages us further to proceed with the production of a Maya audiobook, due out early next year. See next blog . . .]Also in December was the major art exhibition hosted by the upstairs gallery at the Tucson International Airport. Entitled “We Live Here Now,” it ran October through December, 2019. Some 160 works were entered by Southern Arizona artists but only 60 were accepted for the show. The level of art on display was exceptional and it was an honor to hang with this esteemed group.
My entry, a 49-inch watercolor, “Dying Barrel,” depicts an actual barrel cactus which grew on our 20-acre patch of desert when we lived near Tucson 1981-1996. At the artists’ reception December 15th a couple approached me and asked, “We hear there is a story behind this image. Can you tell us?”
I told them about the housing developer which acquired the large parcel of land next to our place to build a retirement community. When they asked us to sign off on their plan they assured us that there would be a natural, 100-foot buffer on their side of the property line and the grove of mature palo verde trees there would remain intact. We signed the proposed plan and then, months later, were awakened early one morning by the roar of a giant bulldozer grinding forward, pushing down the entire stand of trees. It was like seeing your neighbors being machinegunned at dawn. Brutal. I couldn’t speak for three days.
“Oh,” they explained. “You signed the preliminary plan. The final plan, the one approved by the county supervisors, was a little different.”