The weather has been really weird this week. Pouring pelting rain at the window, sunny the next minute, hail so loud you have to yell to be heard over it, and lots of gray skies in-between. It suits these strange days.
Using this video, I made a little book with one of my cards, and then filled it with swashes of paint.
Pages were pressed together to make a print on the opposite page.
And some daydream doodling- pink crystal waterfall, rooted heart, sparkling goose, and a home built on strong clouds and stone. Time goes along.
It did for Rosee, too...
"About a month after he left, a traveling salesman came breezing into my lair and asked where Stew was. I said I didn’t know, he’d just gone away for a while. The salesman wanted to know who was buying supplies. I didn’t know. He said “Look, you lovely lady, you can’t make bread without lard and sugar and stuff. Somebody will have to buy them. I said wait till Mickey the head baker comes on tonight and we’ll ask him. Mickey was a great help. He bellowed, “I’ve never bought anything, Stew always handled it! All I do is bake!” We stood around swilling coffee and looking stupidly at each other for a while, and then they both pounced on me.
"Miss Rosee O’Neill, we now elect you as purchasing agent for the Blue Ribbon Bakery as of now." I lit out a wail that I wouldn’t know how much to buy or who to buy it from. The Salesman, being a patient soul said, "Get all the old bills out of the flour barrel and order what Stew bought last time. Then this stupid Irishman can keep track of what he is low on, and, well, purchase that. See, here are the bills from my company stretching back three years, so you can go ahead on that." We did. When the bread paper man came, we did the same thing. Everything went nicely. On the first of the month I’d trudge up and down main street getting everybody to make a payment on their bills. None of them actually paid up, but me and my seven bakers were still getting paid.
Then the flour man came and announced that it was time to contract for a carload of flour. He sat down and patiently explained, with papers out of the barrel, that it was done that way. I made him wait for Mickey again. Buying sugar and spices for a couple of hundred was one thing, but contracting for a carload of flour for $1,000 was something Rosee O’Neill was not going to sign. Again, Mickey argued me into it, and I sat and wrote a check for $1,000 signed Blue Ribbon Bakery by Rosemary O’Neill. Then I just sat there and looked at it. Me getting $18 a week. There was something about it that gave me the willies.
One day, a smart salesman came in with a bread wrapping line of paper Stew had never bought, and I turned him down cold. Nothing doing, if there wasn’t an old account with the company in the flour barrel, I wouldn’t touch it.
Of course, I got to use my Newspaper Institute of America writing those clever little ads in the Miles City Star every week.
One day, about a year later, we were all gathered around the coffee pot with the girls from the beauty shop, who always joined us in coffee and rolls, when someone said, “Hello” and we looked around and there was our lost employer- sane, sober and clean. We were all so glad to see him that none of us ever told him how frantic we’d been when he was gone. We didn’t even know whether he was alive or dead till a counter check showed up at the bank about six months after he disappeared. That night I waited till the bakers came to work to show them we still had an employer somewhere."
