Pastel Sky: Sunset on I-5 – Easter Sunday 2016 

During my grad school days I would study in the Reserve Room at Wilson Library beneath enchanted pastel drawings of trees in the wind, dusk across Bellingham Bay, and morning light seeping in through patterns of window muntins by artist Susan Bennerstrom. I couldn’t afford textbooks and discovered that I only had to request a book from any class and it would be provided. The catch – I had to read it in the Reserve Room surrounded by Bennerstrom pastels that made me fall deeply in love with pastel as a medium. My favorite time of day is when sunset pales and the last wash of light across the transition sky flattens this 3D world into luscious flat pastels of smudged clouds with just a hint of under-color, foreground in black silhouette. I framed my fading day slipping behind the back of the Diablo Range, the Central Valley boundary line, from a car window on Interstate 5, driving home from a weekend with most loving and happy in-laws who built the foundation of my happiness in the love that tendered the man who is my husband. He is a work of luminous color on my canvas of middle age.