JUST GREAT MOVIES is the Traverse City Film Festival‘s by-line and last week between feeding the goat, lamb, turkeys, chickens, cats, dogs and ducks, I WENT TO THE MOVIES! Michael Moore and friends started TCFF 7 years ago and rehabbed the old State Theater on Front St. into a state-of-the-art flagship for movie-going year around. Over 1300 volunteers staff the festival and serve as hosts to an incredible spectrum of film types from all over the world. This year Jerry and I sponsored a film from Cuba, HABANASTATION, and gorged on shorts, docs and fiction films galore. WHAT I WORE:
A NEW PEPLUM JACKET. black and white pattern play with sparkley flower accent, shirt cuff pockets and a casual attitude. Lots of compliments. This style is currently at Magic Jacket in Fish Creek, Wisconsin and at Kaye Louise in Boca Raton, Florida. (If there are any left!)
In 1989, the Staley/Gretzinger household, comprised of parents, Meg and Jerry, boys, Hank, age 6, and Lucky, age 4, and Mary, the dog, escaped New York City to spend the first of many Augusts at our newly purchased farm in Maple City, MI. The farm had been a working family farm of 40 acres and included a white farmhouse, big red barn and many outbuildings: a granary, rabbit hutch, chicken coop, tractor barn and guest garage.
After a year or two of getting settled, I realized I needed an artistic outlet and was desperate for downtime from too much young testosterone. Many of the barns and houses in this area were partially built using local stone, but ours was a boring poured cement. LIGHTBULB! I’ll PAINT a stone foundation on it! That will look cool (and give me a ready excuse to exit the house with a cup of joe every morning for an hour or so for almost 3 summers!) This is the barn today, with granddaughter Penelope in the foreground. The blue and green panels above the milking floor door are blown-up images from Jerry’s map. After a year or two I rounded the front facade and started painting the side wall. Every day a stranger would pull off by the side of the road and stop to chat about the project, talking about how real it looked. “Thankyou,” I would reply politely, but to myself I’m thinking, “wait a minute. what about the joke part of this!” I tried to remedy that by painting the word FAKE in the stonework.
Many. many family photos have been taken in front of these doors over the past 22 years. This one is from last summer. The four Gretzinger progeny: Aaron, Henry, Nelle, and Lucky.
Nelle Gretzinger is the wonderful mother of my granddaughters, Penelope and Violet, pictured here with their Granpa Jerry.
My brilliant hubby, Jerry Gretzinger, sewed up this fabulous area rug and when the finishing touches were complete today, it went right outside our front door. I love the new welcome mat with our goofy painted entry fence and pots. But if I leave it there, Clarence the lamb will eat it, no doubt, so back inside it goes…..
The universe gives us gifts all the time, but rarely are we paying attention. Last night Mother Nature wouldn’t let us ignore her. A wonderful dinner with new friends and old on the beach at Leland, Michigan yielded this photo and a forever moment. Every body, every morsel, every dappled view was perfect. Thankyou.
My son, Lucky Gretzinger, took this photo a couple of years ago and I asked him if I could steal it for the blog, because it personifies summer in Leelanau County.