Nice?

I awoke this morning to discover that I had (probably) sold my two "bad day" yarns as well as another one of my art yarns. Yesterday I sold two other skeins and received a nice check from the Craft Council shop for ten skeins that they sold. It feels nice.

Also, yesterday a group of about a dozen high school students from Ontario made an rather inpromtu visit to The House Museum. They are "gifted" students who are participating in a summer program that takes them to western Newfoundland and a friend is one of the organizers here. Her plans for them visiting the south shore (bah!) fell through so she called me to see if I could accommodate them in about an hour. Seeing as we were all still in our pajamas and the house was a mess from my complete lack of housekeeping the day before, I naturally said, "of course, come along!" And then spent the next hour running around trying to make the place look like Something.

The kids were mostly quiet but obviously engaged in what I was speaking about - how culture gets represented, who makes those decisions, the differences between tourists and locals, how museums have a kind of automatic authority, etc.. It reminded me that I love thinking about those subjects and I really love it when other people do too.

I realized that I am still quite raw from last year's Door's Open experience when a couple of people gave me some very, very negative feedback (how can you really forget when someone calls your house "filthy"?). Each time when someone has come in thereafter, I am always asking myself if they think I have a filthy house. But the truth is, most people are not thinking that at all. Yesterday helped to put that experience where it belongs: into the vague, fuzzy past that makes up most of my memory these days instead of it leaping out of the fog and searing itself on my forehead, "She keeps a FILTHY house!"

I know that, by not opening this year, I have retreated from having to receive those kinds of comments. I don't like to admit that since I am supposed to be an Artist Who Can Take It, but there it is.

Today I am reminding myself that the up is as much an illusion as the down, even if it does feel nicer.