Leaves again!

I love leaves. In the fall I usually gather them around, lovely reds and oranges and yellows. This year, haven't been anywhere there are gorgeous leaves yet. The three liquidamber trees are gone from our yard, and the neighbor down the street with the beautiful tree chopped it back to nubbins. I got a few oak leaves at the lake, but they are not usually multi colored. 

Hoping tomorrow to get hubby to drive around town to see some pretties. Maybe it's too early. I don't know.

I have a huge dictionary (I mean like the ones that used to be in the library, 4 or 5 inches thick) and over the years when not using it for finding words, I have filled it with leaves between waxed paper, or copy paper. It's so heavy it presses them. So that's where my "leaf collection" is. My leaf loving granddaughter's birthday is coming up, so I looked through there to see if there are some leaves to send her, and I decided to make a card. Yesterday I made a square (3 inches?) from an old game piece, and decoupaged a leaf on it, after making a sponged background. So I did the same with the card. 

So that was my inspiration for today, leaves, November birthdays, a granddaughter who loves leaves like I do. 

It's a "slimline" card, which basically means it fits into a business size envelope, and you only get one card out of a piece of card stock. But these 3 leaves just jumped out of my dictionary so there you are. A grape leaf, a gingko leaf, and an oak. The grape from my back yard, the gingko from somewhere in Lodi, and the oak from Lodi Lake. 

As usual, much nicer in person, and it would also be nicer if I would work on my photog skills.

And also as usual, a trigger of memories. I had a good friend named Marilyn once upon a time. She and I worked at the same church, and we had a staff retreat at a place called Volcano. As Mare and I were walking around, we came upon a tree with the most gorgeous leaves. I of course grabbed a few to take home and press. Sometimes I find, especially with brightly colored leaves, it's best to just put them straight in the scanner and copy. So I did that, cut them out, and made a framed arrangement of leaves for each of us. That was such a precious time, getting to know her. We became pretty close friends, even applied for jobs together. It came out that she had a crush on my brother in high school! Life is crazy sometimes.

We both quit working there at that church, and she was helping me get my business going, and then suddenly she got sick. Turns out she was a smoker, and ended up with lung cancer. She died in 2010. That chased any idea of a business right out of my head, and I never had the heart to try again.

But I'm remembering the good stuff. She didn't live far from me, both of us were dealing with aging parents and dementia. One day she called me up in a panic, her mom wouldn't sleep in her bed, she wanted a Big Girl bed. I told her to get her a new bedspread, and it worked! I remembered all this when my mother in law got worse, and accused me of all kinds of things. Mare was gone by then, but remembering that she went through it too helped.  She was such a sweetheart. She collected rabbit figurines, stored them in boxes under the bed and called them her "dust bunnies"... One thing I remember was her friend speaking at her service. Candace insisted that you had to iron T shirts, and Mare said no. Mare insisted they observe people and check it out. Sure enough, people didn't iron their T shirts. My kind of gal.