Imagine

Imagine meeting a friend from across the world in a place where neither of you live. Imagine that your friendship only existed on the internet before this face-to-face encounter.


We met in Strawberry Fields, the garden dedicated to John Lennon in Central Park, on a scorching hot day in July.  We waited for a little while awkwardly on opposite sides of the little garden before finally finding each other. Our only visual sense of each other were the blurry, far away photos that we had seen online. Oh yes, a definite highlight of my recent trip to New York was that I got to meet my sweet friend and fellow artist Lucile Prache from Paris and her two wonderful teenagers, Jeanne and Werner.  

Because we were both in New York on family vacations, we only spent a little bit of time together (a short visit to the Met including lunch one day and a visit to an art supply store and dinner at the Mario Batali restaurant Otto on the final night of our trip) but, as Lucile said, how amazing that two people who live so far away from each other were able to meet at all!

At the end of a day spent in hot and humid Manhattan, I'm not sure if
we are at our glamourous best but we sure do look happy!

Lucile is as warm and beautiful as I imagined her to be. She has a gentle manner and a great sense of humour and I immediately felt that we could have happily spent hours together.  And she speaks English beautifully! (Did you hear that, Lucile?) Now when I view her artwork (we own two of her originals and two prints), visit her Etsy shop and blog, or exchange emails with her, I will have a clear and lovely picture of my friend in my head. She surprised me with a thoughtful gift for the birthday that I'd celebrated a week earlier:  a block of French Sennelier watercolour paper and a bamboo reed like the one she uses to write words on her gorgeous food paintings. Thank you and happy birthday to you too! Lucile celebrates her birthday on July 25th! A BIG anglophone hug to you, Jeanne and Werner! I am so happy to have met you all.

And speaking of birthdays, my sweet and funny Chloé celebrated her 13th birthday on July 7th while we were in New York. I had trouble finding a 'normalish' photo of her. She seems to specialize in dramatic, crazy expressions these days. (I don't think she'd disagree.) I like this photo, even if a little hazy, taken with my iPod Touch the night of her birthday dinner at Otto. (We liked the restaurant so much we ate there twice.) Hard for me to believe that my youngest baby has turned into this tall, zany, beautiful and talented teenager.

And just to complete the family picture, here's a photo of Emma and Chloé on Broadway.

And a photo of Jocelyn and me taken at the top of the Rockefeller Center with Central Park in the background.

This week, I am spending most of my time weeding rather than painting it seems. When I read of tangled, forgotten gardens being resurrected after years of neglect, I am in awe. Two to three weeks of neglect in my garden lets the weeds think that they are in charge.  There are family visits in the weeks ahead.  I need the garden to be ready for our days away. Hopefully I can squeeze in a little painting time every now and then too.