Sister time over Christmas

 

My sister Kathleen flew down the 24th from the rainy Pacific Northwest to catch some sun over Christmas. Here's my view as I waited for her in the cell phone lot. It was sunny and about 76.

As soon as she got here, we arranged all the homemade holiday sweets on plates and worked our way through most of them over the next 72 hours!

Here we are Christmas Eve before having our green chicken enchilada dinner.

On Christmas morning we had our coffee and spinach quiche, then set out for a little hike on the Bridle Trail at Catalina State Park. We saw a lot of horses and saguaros under a beautiful blue sky. Then it was back home to open presents and call family.

The day after Christmas was unusually chilly and overcast, so we skipped the hiking and spent several hours at the Ted DeGrazia Gallery In the Sun, one of my favorite art spots in Tucson.

This is the gallery for visiting artists, where a wonderful weaver from Silver City, NM, had a show.

"Desert Portal" by Donna Foley

Donna Foley uses natural plant dyes and wool from rare breeds of sheep (which she used to raise) for her contemporary Southwest weavings. Her artist statement says: "I weave my tapestries as maps of my spiritual journey. The topography is both an external terrain of the mountains, desert and wilderness where I live as well as an internal landscape of meditations and dreams. ... Many of my tapestries incorporate symbols such as petroglyphs, runes and I Ching hexagrams as well as found objects of stones, feathers, roots and beads." 

"Incantations At Dawn" by Donna Foley

Her website: www.fourdirectionsweaving.com

The rest of the 10-acre compound, which was built by DeGrazia in the 1950s with materials from the surrounding desert, shows the artist's touch in every detail.

Here is his adobe Chapel In the Sun, an open roof building with his colorful murals on the interior walls and narrow rough-hewn benches. 

This is one of DeGrazia's mosaics of native Indians, displayed outside.

This is the adobe home where he lived with his wife. The walls are a soft turquoise color, as are the kitchen tiles.

For more photos of the Gallery In the Sun, see my previous post here: more-color-with-julia-and-jade.html. 

By the time we finished we were hungry, so we headed over to the Eclectic Cafe for my favorite enchiladas, with red, green and white sauces. Delicious!

That evening we toasted the Arizona sunset and I discovered how cool it looks through a wine glass. The next morning, before Kathleen left, we spotted a vermillion fly catcher on our walk in the park near my house. It looked right at me, as if it were posing. Now it's just me at home with the rest of the cookies!

Have a colorful day