green children #1

This is the first segment of my green-children project where I write their story from several different perspectives, each one illustrating a different theory about who they were and where they came from.

This one is from the perspective of the forest/mountain/mine shafts the children wandered into after leaving, in this theory, St. Martin's land, aka a magical faerie isle. It is definitely the most abstract of the theories. Of course, it would be hard for it not to be abstract, considering it's told by a mountain.

i’ve lived my life for a thousand years and i will for a thousand years to come. i watch the sky and the sun rising and falling and feel the earth changing and shifting around me: in my roots, in the stone walls of the caverns within me. bitter winters don’t shake me. i am more than what i seem. you can’t blow me down, can’t pull me up or knock me over.

the children were so young. a blink in my own eye, really, just beginning their already fleeting lives.

there was a girl, a boy, skin green as spring. i felt them, watched them, listened to them for so long—

they were within me. in the mine shafts, among the trees. and i came to know them as they walked, they came to be my own—

a part of me in a way, a way that’s hard to explain. i knew of their past, knew of the land they’d appeared from. remembered the forever-twilight and the river that churned, gushed green-black-blue all at once. now they were broken off from st. martins. lost in an unfamiliar place, that’s what they felt they were.

i wanted to tell them. i wanted to tell them i was here, i was all around them, i knew them. they were safe within me, i watched over them every moment until they went out the other side.

there were scattered bands of wolves throughout the woods. desperate creatures, bone-thin. their eyes always brought to mind the thick ice on the pond come winter: gleaming and dull at the same time, heavy. dark. cold.

i watched those wolves as much as i watched the two of them. not letting my guard down. i wasn’t going to let some ferocious part of me take them down. no.

pan and gelsey is what i called them. pan for the little boy and gelsey for the girl. named them like they were my children.

in a way, they really were.

i knew they wouldn’t stay forever.

how could they? i loved them but there was no way they could know that. i was not the place for them. i never could have been.

the last passage comes out on the fields where the reapers are. i knew they would be found. i pushed them along on that last leg of their journey, cleared their path of rocks and pitfalls, held myself steady so the rocky ceilings closing in the caves inside me wouldn’t fall down on their heads.

as soon as they took a step into the field they were gone.

there is a blindfold over my eyes forevermore. i can’t see them now that they are gone from me.

but still as much a part of me as before, always.

Mexico '68

if you look closely, you can see this piece of paper is quite old, it's a medal count for Italy from the 1968 Olympics, which I thought was really cool. the painting on top of it is fairly unrelated.

the Green Children

Has anyone heard of the Green Children of Woolpit before?

Sometime in the 12th century, two little kids appeared right outside the village of Woolpit in Suffolk, England. Their skin was a very unusual color, they spoke a language that no one understood, and the only food they ate was green beans.

This was in the time when people believed in faerie-changelings and those types of stories.

The boy was unhealthy and died shortly after they arrived in the village and were baptized. The girl, however, survived, and eventually learned English. When she did, she said she and her brother were from a place called St. Martin's Land, where it was always twilight and all the people were green. She grew up healthy and eventually got married. The strangest thing is that after they had arrived and began to eat normal food (other than beans) their skin lost its green color.

People have different theories for what really did happen, one being that they were, actually, faerie children, but also that they may have had chlorosis (what turned them green) or arsenic poisoning (both are scary ideas.) Rather than having come from a magical unknown place, it is possible they were North Belgian refugees, as at the time Belgian people were trying  to immigrate to England and a large number of them killed.

I won't give all the details of the theories now, because I have a plan for a project where I tell their story from different perspectives, each one illustrating a different theory or idea of what could have happened.

I shall start posting them as soon as I can.

redesign!

as everyone's probably noticed....I've given my blog a redesign! I have a nice new font and new header and everything--I'm pretty happy with it! What do you think?

a good sandwich

+

 +

These are doodles of the ingredients of a sandwich I made myself--there should be some peanut butter there, too, but the drawing didn't turn out. 

It was honestly one of the yummiest sandwiches I've had, but also so rich that I couldn't actually finish it.......

A sewn backpack

Summer is coming to a close, and I'll miss it so very much...

But: Here I shall show you a project I have completed while being lazy and not posting ~ my lovely backpack!

This idea started out as sharpie-doodle type thing, I ended up really disliking how that looked and had the inspiration to sew it instead.

Hope everyone had a great summer and is enjoying the last bit of it!

Cheers, Ava

People at the farmer's market

A few characters based on people I saw at the farmer's market yesterday.

It is, by the way, my birthday today. ☺

Cheers!

Pinned

I don't know how old, exactly, this collection is.

The insects inside are very dried up--to the point that half of them are missing legs (which are lying at the bottom of the frame.) I think that the small dragonfly's wings were probably colorful at one time. Now everything's fading away.

Tape dispensers

The Lenox School for Boys

Non Ministrari, Sed Ministrare!

          In Lenox, Massachusetts, on the grounds of Shakespeare & Company are multiple old buildings that were once a part of the Lenox School for Boys. This is my drawing of St. Martin's Hall, which I would do anything to go inside of. The front door is padlocked, but when you look in the front windows you can see an ancient leather trunk just lying on the floor. A leather trunk. It's like nobody even fully cleaned out the building when the school closed. When you look into some of the other windows, though it looks like Shakespeare & Co. uses this big room to store their props, even though they say the building is condemned and unsafe to go in. That drives me crazy, because there is an open side door to the building and I am DYING to go open the leather trunk. DYING. When I opened the door, though, someone told me it was condemned. And it seemed like she cared.

      This is a picture from a school graduation in 1966! They are picnicking right by the front door, the one in my drawing. See the flowers on the paneling?
      Even the little part of the building you can see looks really different from how it does now.

      AAAAH. I want to open the leather trunk SO BAD and explore the rest of St. Martin's hall. I'm pretty sure it's not going to fall down on me.

-Ava


P.S. They don't say anything about the closing on the little plaque near the St. Martin's hall, so I was hoping for wikipedia to say something like "The Lenox school closed under mysterious circumstances in 1972--"
It did not. The Lenox school closed because of financial problems. What a let down.

P.P.S. Oh, look! It's the 100th post on my blog!