The artist in Joyce F. Devlin.

Another artist we've met in her late seventies is Joyce F. Devlin. She's an excellent painter, designed her own house and has a beautiful garden. Her house is amazing, very warm and full of art. She had her latest work in her big studio so we had the chance to see it before it went to the exhibition. She painted a garden on six -six by six feet- panels, pretty impressive if you ask me. Anyway it really brought the summer into the studio! We also saw a bunch of other paintings, mostly landscapes, most of them were very very nice.

Everything in the house, the colour of the walls, the paintings, the furniture and all the other little decorations matched almost perfectly. We immediately felt very comfortable and had a nice afternoon, had a nice lunch and long discussions about 'life after death', 'a united world' and the many different religions. Joyce herself is a Baha'i, a follower of the Baha'i Faith, they basically believe in Unity of God, Unity of Religion and Unity of Mankind. Well it was pretty interesting to hear all the stories and different opinions but after all we decided not to become a Baha'i Member...: )!

This is actually the first house we visited with a big bunch of healthy, good looking houseplants, awesome! After all the talking and too much tea and cookies we were ready to go home but first we had to take a walk in the big garden. It was raining a bit and we're still in a very early stage of spring but we had to see it. The garden is a nice collection of all kind of shrubs and trees in different shape and colour! Joyce decided to join us and gave us some explanation about the way she thought about it and how she did it, nice job! And ofcourse, early spring means a lot of birds in the garden! I'm glad we could write down a couple of new observations in Sibley's almighty birdguide. The Common Redpoll (Carduelis flammea) and the American Goldfinch (Carduelis tristis) were visiting. The Red-winged Blackbird (Agelaius phoeniceus) is back in the country and as you can see in the lay-out of this blog we saw our very first Northern Cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis).

And after a few very good and sunny days...Maberly is covered, a few inches of snow turned the fresh Springscene into WinterWonderland again!

White Hugs &
Snow Kisses

Take Care

T&H - AlmostReadyToHitTheRoad.