Portrait of the Artist

At the edge of her canvas the painter waits
for the world to come, for her art
to penetrate
its opaque indifference. She starts
 
to doubt the color of what she's seen
the texture and line she's long lived by
all she's been
and become, what she's tried
 
to do: was it a folly or dream or, worse,
unworth the effort? she thinks with a sigh
that turns curse
on that pitiless primitive passionate drive
 
that called the accursed brush to her hand
and whispers now: the world be damned.
 
Carl Sherman

​Carl Sherman has written about science, medicine, the mind and the brain for national magazines, newspapers, and websites. He has published four books. His poetry has appeared in The RavensPerch, Eunoia,  and Corona: an Anthology of Poems (Walt Whitman Birthplace Association, 2020). He lives in New York City.

​The Unfinished

I grew up in museums. I suppose that’s one of those pretentious things ex-New Yorkers often say, but the photographs don’t lie. There’s my brother, circa ‘97, napping in a clunky stroller, wheels click-clacking against marble. There’s me, beaming next to Klimt’s Mäda Primavesi. There I am again, mimicking Winter and Summer in the Met’s European sculpture garden.

Gripping my mother’s hand, I dashed from gallery to gallery, dizzy against rows of immaculate statues, tiny under gargantuan frames. Certain pieces seemed to whisper, come closer, and when they did, I’d pluck my sketchbook from stroller’s undercarriage, plop on a bench, and squiggle childish renditions of Picassos, Manets, and Degas’ bronze ballerinas, wholly unaware of their significance, but awestruck all the same. Being surrounded by art coaxed me to create art, a frenzied, feverish feeling, a spell I couldn’t break. So I scribbled and scribbled until my palms were covered in charcoal, pages lined in frantic fingerprints.

By the time I was eight, I had taken several art classes. But by then, my confidence waned. When it came to creating, expectation never quite matched reality. My paintings were muddy; my Model Magic sculptures, wobbly. Collages were saturated by globs of Elmer’s Glue and eraser streaks soiled drawings beyond recognition. Discouraged, I revisited my museum sketchbook, hoping to rebalance. To my horror, I uncovered nothing more than broomstick arms and bulging eyes, doodles unworthy of the pride they once evoked. The message was clear: I liked art, I appreciated art, but I wasn’t necessarily good at art.

Though I stopped taking art classes, I never stopped going to museums. But the galleries, once filled with possibility, suddenly became distant. By then, the classics stopped whispering to me. They grew cold in their beauty, and for the first time, I was aware of the layers between us. The masters were just that: prodigies struck by divine intervention. Even the subjects that I had once posed beside felt out of reach. As I read their placards, I recognized them as the elite: politicians, the wealthy, their loved ones, no different than the one-percenters whose names adorned hospital wings, academic buildings, and bridges. There was no invitation to create, no invitation to pose. Girls like me were meant to be spectators and nothing more.

The Met Breuer had a brief residence in the New York museum circuit. From 2016 to 2020, it stood at Madison and East 75th, housing more modern and contemporary works than its namesake. Unbeknownst to me, its inaugural exhibition would unravel my most deep-seated conceptions and frustrations with art. Entitled, Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible, it posed a question I hadn’t considered: when is a work of art truly finished?

Spanning nearly 200 pieces, many dating back to the Renaissance, the exhibition boasted works left incomplete by their creators. Half-painted images lined the walls. Perino del Vaga’s The Holy Family with Saint John the Baptist displayed the cherub-like Christ in exquisite detail beside a spectral Blessed Mother, her body reduced to faded graphite. Klimt’s Posthumous Portrait of Ria Munk III resembled an abandoned colouring book. While some of the elaborate flowers shrouding Munk were emblazoned in gold, violet, and crimson, others remained as bare as the smudged spirals outlining her neglected frame. And, most haunting of all, was Anton Raphael Mengs’s portrait of Duchess of Huéscar. Draped in silk, the duchess was perched on an ornate gold chair against an emerald background. Delicately, she dangled a ring in one hand and a skeleton key in the other. Her face remained a flesh-colored blob.

The final room was devoted to sculpture. In Rodin’s Orpheus and Eurydice, the poet and his deceased wife stood with their arms entwined, clutching each other as the rest of their bodies faded into rocky slabs. Louise Bourgeois’ Untitled (No. 2) unveiled a stack of disembodied hands, languid, as though flopping from a tomb. Among them were busts devoid of lips and figures with half-chiseled eyes, unseeing in ceaseless limbo. Dismembered body parts, tossed aside in frustration or disinterest, littered the floor.

It was a chilling display, equal parts mesmerizing and voyeuristic. These unfinished bodies were shroud in mystery, and perhaps a hint of sorrow, forgotten by time, dismissed by their creators. And, in their wake, was an unexpected window into the artists themselves. Looking upon their orphaned creations, the greats descended from the impenetrable realm I had assigned them. Squinting back at the Duchess of Huésca, I realized that her face, like many others in the show, was not actually blank, but violently scraped away, evidence of obsessiveness, a need for perfection. I thought back to my lumpy clay and the spindly necks I repeatedly snapped and rolled out again and again.

As expected, most of the works were of nobles. But as I gazed at their unfinished faces, I wondered if the artists resented their blue-blooded patrons. True, commissions were often the lifeblood of artists, especially those who achieved fame posthumously. But, privately, did they resent immortalizing the rich, the same way a Fine Arts major bemoans corporate PowerPoints? Perhaps indignation over misappropriated talents contributed to the fate of these lost works. Perhaps, disenchanted, they decided to shelve the aristocrats’ vanity projects in favor of something more enriching, more satisfying. Selfishly, I hoped their distraction lay in the ordinary, memorializing the beauty found in the unnamed and unassuming.

I paced the exhibition, taking in new details at every lap. Other installations oozed with elitism, perpetuating a haughty air. But the Unfinished lacked that grandeur, evoking a sense of camaraderie found in an open studio or artist colony. I knew many great artists created studies before realizing their masterpieces, but to see their scraps in all their glory was satisfying. Maybe they, too, felt mocked by the Muses, prisoners to their own self-doubt.

Sometime after the exhibition, I began creating again. I filled sketchbooks with mediocre paintings. I taught myself embroidery. I signed up for pottery class, filling my cabinets with wonky bowls. I created without pretension or expectation. Visiting the Unfinished made me dwell on the unstarted. And, if the greats persevered through their imposter syndrome, so could I. Not long after, the classics began whispering to me again.

Maria Pianelli Blair

This piece was first published in Bleating Thing.

Maria Pianelli Blair is an artist and writer based in New Jersey. Her prose has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Blood+Honey; Querencia Press; Rawhead Journal; and Lost Balloon, among other publications. Her collages have been nominated for the Best of the Net anthology and published widely. 

Referenced Works
 
Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible. Exhibition at the Met Breuer. 2016.

• https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2016/unfinished

The Holy Family with Saint John the Baptist, by Perino del Vaga (Italy) 1528–1537

• www.artuk.org/discover/artworks/holy-family-with-saint-john-the-baptist-207372

Posthumous Portrait of Ria Munk III, by Gustav Klimt (Austria) 1917-1918

• https://x.com/metmuseum/status/753592477928611840

Portrait of Mariana de Silva y Sarmiento, duquesa de Huescar, by Raphael Anton Mengs (Germany) 1775

• https://media2.wnyc.org/i/620/765/l/80/1/Mengs.jpg

Orpheus and Eurydice, by Augustin Rodin (France) 1893

• https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/191330

Untitled (No. 2), by Louise Bourgeois (USA) 1996

• https://www.artsy.net/artwork/louise-bourgeois-untitled-no-2

 

See Through

Where stone and pillar held firm and formidable, diagonal canyons of air and light form transient shadow and shape.

Strange how echoes become visible when belonging to either side.

Confessions and fervent prayers drift past in full view, no longer needing to seep through cracks 
to escape. 

Bored eyerolls and questionable gestures intended for childhood crushes across a pew look lost, 
eternally seeking a response no longer forthcoming.

The curious daughter of the tree out back
climbed as the perfect perch
to hold hands, steal a kiss, 
has entered as a congregant of trunk and branch.

Deeply exquisite is this state of exposure. 
Nothing ruined, only revealed. 

Centuries of lives that cobbled these stones with their stories, only to find their place with one. 
At their head.
 
Sun replacing stained glass becomes the window witness.

Janaea Rose Lyn

This poem was first published in Synchronized Chaos.

Janaea Rose Lyn is a dance artist and writer. Her love of well-chosen words, visual art, and metaphor is a common thread in all of her work, kinetic and literary. Her poems and creative non-fiction have recently appeared in the online journal Synchronized Chaos, Delaware Bards Poetry Review, and Hydration, Arizona Art & Poetry. Janaea is also the author of Choreographing Your Dance Career and worked nationally and internationally as the director of professional companies and college programs. She is an independent artist and educator, currently choreographing a collection of poetry and prose.  www.janaearoselyn.com

stoop (verb) to lower oneself by unworthy behaviour, to descend from dignity
 
I’m up early and running along Richmond Hill. I think I can hear another jogger’s footfalls behind me, but when I look back along the road I can’t see anyone. Maybe it’s just the echo of my steps bouncing off the houses. I turn onto the path that snakes down to the Thames. In front of me stretches London’s Eden, the only view protected by an Act of Parliament. The vista, so loved by Turner he returned to it again and again, stops me dead. A row of memory benches, each carved with many names, lines the road. What’s rustling in the bushes? Down and contour feathers freckle the grass, the only remains of some bird consumed here. As the dawn red spreads I wonder how its colour distorted in the year with no summer. The passage of time has barely changed this place, it’s all trees, grass and river. But the eruption which shook the other side of the globe altered the hue of Turner’s skies. Ash darkened the sun. We spent hours last month watching as the waves broke against the lee shore at Margate. Did the onshore squall whip up the sand that buried us? I cleaved from you there. I have not answered any of your calls, or replied to your stream of messages, and tomorrow I will take the clothes you left to a charity shop. I look up at the clouds as a swallow glides towards the river. She’s quick, avoiding most predators, but the peregrine in his diving stoop is the fastest animal. He plunges, she evades, he rises and drops again. His clenched talon is a door slamming to break her wing. He twists and grabs her mid-air then drags her to the grass. We never said goodbye. Her tail feathers, forked like a serpent’s tongue, forced open. I never said this was over. He’s ready to eat. He’s plucked her clean and laid her out, guts opened.
 
Emma Dandy

Emma Dandy is a poet working in Birmingham and writing to explore trauma and complex relationships. Publication of her debut pamphlet - I Laid Out Knives, Guns and Razors - is forthcoming with Hedgehog Poetry Press. You can find her on Instagram @emmadandypoetry

Surrealist

after Untitled, by Elsa Thoresen (Seattle, WA) 1993
https://dpa730eaqha29.cloudfront.net/myedmondsnews/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Elsa-Thoresen-1906-1994-Untitled-circa-1993.-Oil-on-canvas-30-x-40-1_8-in.-Estate-of-Elsa-Thoresen-Courtesy-of-Alice-Tompkins-scaled.jpg

she, at 87 years of age
swirled her acrobatic brush

and where I naturally 
rounded into the habit of 
grief in Payne’s gray, I

was upended into an
uneasy acceptance
and the lightest feeling of 
tightrope walking over
pain flames,

from this parchment pink, I 
reached the wings of resignation,
realization and 
buoyed 
by her palest of sky blue,
a peace.

​**

Kinetic

after Untitled, by Elsa Thoresen (Sweden) 1948
https://i0.wp.com/www.norwegianamericjan.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Elsa-Thoresen_19-scaled.webp?resize=325%2C260&ssl=1

The essence 
of the egg she once cradled
remained 
within the crevices
of her driftwood state.

Her sister tree-
sliced into a circus tent pole,
levitated in a storm
the crisp canvas rising
as wings of a seagull. 

Tonya Jolene Cunningham

Tonya Jolene Cunningham lives in the Pacific Northwest where she makes her living as a preschool teacher. This helps her to still view the world with wonder. Tonya has worked as a bookseller in many states, always inspired by nature and the poets she meets. She's been published in WeMoon and Glyphs, and recently won the Edmonds Poet's Perspective. 

​

Did you know we have an Ekphrastic Academy?

Join us on zoom for a variety of single-session zooms and longer classes.

Events are about art history, art appreciation, artist lives, writer's craft, ekphrasis, and more.

Our workshops are a great place to connect to community for conversation about art, discovering the lives of artists and their work, generating new drafts, and having fun. They are a great value and you always receive the slides of images directly after the session so that you can reference works that ignite your imagination.

Register for your favourite subjects, or try an unfamiliar topic and discover something new.

Upcoming: Abstract Women, The Impressionists, Tina Modotti, Leonard Cohen, and more.

Ekphrasis Anonymous sessions are purely generative. They include a curated grab-bag of various styles and artists. We write from four to six artworks during these sessions.

If you haven't tried our workshops yet, take the plunge and find out what you've been missing!

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​
​Workshop Testimonials
 
Lorette’s workshop on Paul Klee today was everything I had hoped for. And more. We were writing within the first ten minutes. When it comes to marrying graphic art with poetry, art with any form of creative writing, no one presides over the marriage with greater grace.
Lee Stockdale

*
 Luzajic is the real deal. Her workshops convey her profound mastery of ekphrasis, art history, and multiple writing forms. She excels in communicating complex ideas with ease, all the while generously opening creative doors for each participant to walk through. She does all this with wisdom, respect and kindness."
Theresa Wyatt

*

I recently completed a 4-week ekphrastic prose poetry class taught by Lorette Luzajic. Lorette is a phenomenal instructor when it comes to anything ekphrastic but I was also pleasantly surprised and delighted to find what a wonderful instructor she is in prose poetry. Although an experienced poet, this was my first class using that specific genre. Lorette gave us wonderful examples of prose poems as well as thorough and gentle instruction in the art as well as craft of writing prose poems. This is my third or fourth class with Lorette and I've never encountered another instructor who is so generous with their clearly detailed work product. Her slides contain a wealth of information and references, yet she givingly shares them with her students without fail. She is my go-to instructor for excellent, interesting, and thorough teaching.
Robin Gabbert 

*
Writing Ekphrastic Prose Poetry: This course was so inspirational and helped me expand my writing capabilities. Lorette C. Luzajic is an amazing teacher, art historian, and artist. I wrote at least 10 prose pieces based on the artwork she presented in class. I will definitely take another class with Lorette in the future. 
Laura P.

*

I loved taking Lorette’s Ekphrastic Prose Poetry class over four weeks. It provided a wonderful foundation for both writing ekphrastic poetry and also writing prose poetry. It reignited my love of both art and writing poetry.  I’m ready to revise my poems from 7-10 years ago and work on a chapbook or full length ekphrastic collection!  Thanks so much for your fantastic classes which is packed with a ton of art, poetry, instructional material, critiques, and interactive sessions.   I’m excited and looking forward to taking more of your workshops and classes.  Thanks a ton!
Deborah Strozier

*
Having taken both ekphrastic writing and collage classes from Lorette, I can’t recommend her enough. She brings to her classes a profound understanding of process and practice, warmth and grace, and is supremely well-prepared and thorough. Her thoughtfulness extends to every person in the class. You will learn a lot, while being encouraged and inspired. And Lorette’s takeaways are keepers: full of imagery, inspiration, and art history. 
Camille L. 

*
The workshop was fantastic,  inspiring, and wonderful. You're an epic instructor and mentor, Lorette. Don't want to see it end.
Rebecca W.

*

This class was a great discovery for me as I don’t know a lot about art history. I was introduced to a number of paintings which worked very well as prompts for stories. Lorette also taught us with very organized lectures and power point presentations about Ekphrastics and the short short. That was the more academic part of the class which is lacking in most workshops. In addition, she critiqued our work so we got that necessary feedback.
Helaina M.

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Any workshop with the indomitable Lorette Luzajic is an adventure into imagination and creativity that transcends preconceived boundaries. I will register again and again and again!
Barbara K.

A Walk at Daylight 
 
At daylight the miserable man was carried to an oak…
 Down past the orchards, across the stone bridge, over the roaring river,
Those who’d been selected grunt with exertion, 
muscles tense, struggling as the path steepens. but still, 
  The most loyal of life carried him forth, never ceasing, into the forest of old. 
 
He, once a man of prominence, had firmly yet humbly requested it to be so.
The overcast morning air held in it a threatening crispness, 
 Though the grass was deep green, Summer’s leaves had fallen.
Upward they toiled into hills, through rows and rows of inferior silhouettes,
until they stood, gasping, at the base of the ancient, staring up in awe.
 
 He was laid to rest against the great spiraling trunk,
It would seem that he had been here many times before.
 Staring up at the branches, he arrived at the great oak door.
So soon it will open, he need not knock. 
Slow comes the ticking, even slower, the tock.
 
No, these branches to him, a most familiar view.
As a boy, they had held him, and beneath them he’d played.
They’d witnessed his rise, shaded him, and felt all his pain. 
Laid here in this place, to spend the last moments of his life,
He thinks of his children, his home, and his wife. 
 
Oh, here he sits with the softness of moss upon his back.
His frail legs laid out upon the dew wet grass.
His breaths came in weakening hollow rasps.
It seems he’s reaching for something just of grasp,
Hauntingly beautiful, the end of the path.
 
His wrinkled hands reach up toward the sky.
His eyes stare upward, up into the ancient branches.
But he is no longer here lying in this place,
No, the branches upon which he sits are of earlier days.
No longer that old and miserable man, a boy, a tree, a superior plan.
 
The branches gently sway back and forth,
A warm morning breeze dances among summer leaves.
At the trunk of this great tree rests a tender child.
When he looks up among the strong branches, 
the sun shines upon his youthful face...
 
For, at daylight the miserable man was carried to an oak.

John Ford

John Ford: "I've had the pleasure and honour of having my work selected in the challenges, which has been enormously encouraging as an emerging poet. I was born and raised in the beautiful state of Colorado, in the USA, where I live now with my incredible spouse and our three children. I am a horticulturalist by trade and owner of a landscaping business operated in my home city and surrounds. In recent years I have become serious in action about a long felt desire to write and to contribute to the communities of art, that have long provided me a sense of support and inspiration in a world of so many unknowns." 

​Briseis Facing the Day
 
She stands held, like a captive, in Achilles’ camp
Peering askance at the charred plains and sparkling sea
At the death and destruction, at the waves and the unknown
Her fragile beauty draped in shivering white silk
As sweaty soldiers and heralds clang about at her back
 
She’s again to be taken, to be surrendered as a prize
Like Helen was to Paris, on that fateful night
She draws her gown tight, the sole woman in sight
Loath to go, as Achilles has become all that she knows
 
Achilles sits there, dishonoured and dispossessed
With a glare in his eyes and a scowl on his lips
Attended at his seat by his caring tutor and friend
His brother to deliver her in his stead, he unable to do the deed
Yet his brother turns to link them, with arm, eye and hand
 
Briseis, steadfast yet downcast, alone meets the viewer’s gaze
Offering a window into her quivering heart
While her mind travels back, she’s determined to live on
She, too, was dishonoured and dispossessed
Her husband and brothers killed and she carried off
Yet she came to find that life with Achilles flowed on
As in his mother’s realm of the unfathomable sea
 
Elaine Kennedy

A native of Toronto, Elaine Kennedy studied English literature, French language and civilization as well as translation in North America and Europe. She has worked as a translator, writer and editor in the cultural and academic sectors. Today, she devotes much of her time to literary translation. Her work has won the 3Macs carte blanche Prize and has been shortlisted for the Toronto Book Awards and the International Book Awards in the Multicultural Fiction category. After living in Montreal for many years, she recently moved to Victoria.

Three Moons 
 
I know of a world with three moons, two of which are invisible, bouncing against the night's felted borders, yanking the masts in the harbours, the lonely palm trees, the dreams of teenagers. 

In the young florist's ankles, awash in dawn, or in the mailman's complicit smile when he hands you a package from Madagascar, or in the librarian's long fingers, not wanting to depart with the marbled, old book, it is everywhere: the three moons' disquietude, their irrational mathematics, the uninterrupted dialogue never repeating a word.  

Whoever lets his eyes listen finds it in the centipede's hesitations and, after the night's tide leaving the apartment, in his life's debris. It is at work everywhere, its mesmerism groping everyone, everyone reveling in it, unknowingly, like the moais facing the sun.

Only once was this world interrupted. Nobody survived it, so the story tells itself: only once, the three gravitations tangled, pulled, hurt, and snapped, making the moons, all three, collide. For what seemed an eternity, everything gasped. In the end, the world was reset, in non-REM; a blissful stupor reached all its corners, and, after a moment barely smelling of a rose, everything was erased.  

What followed was our beginning. The moons caromed, hurtling through nothing, plowing nothing with something, shooting a howling hole through the mountain of silence, putting a bullet hole of existence through non-existence.  

Eventually, what followed was us. You.  
​
I know of a world with three moons, two of which are invisible, where everyone bobs a lifetime of disquietude, unknowingly praying for a serenity, smelling, barely, of a rose.

​The Keyhole

Was it a wound, a laceration, some sort of genitalia? 
Every time he came closer, the smell pushed him back.
It sometimes moved. Kind of breathed. Kind of blinked. 
Kind of coughed. 
Sputtered.
It sometimes sang, abruptly, in the middle of the night.
Most of the time, though, he forgot it was there. Until 
it would take off and drill the air, back and forth, 
farther and closer, like a fly. 
Like a bullet. 
 
Then one day it stopped.
 
Inside him.
 
He would cover it with a joke, with wit, with a boutonnière.
With doubt, with self-loathing, with acts of defiance 
that were taken for bravery.
He would cover it with a garden of irresistible pains.
With the tattoo of poetry. 
He would hide it with love.
 
He doesn't remember how or when he touched it. 
First with his hand 
(it was surprisingly smooth, patient, even docile), then
cheek, 
then the back of the nose, lips, slowly, wetly, until
he entrusted his eye.
 
He was received longingly, 
gingerly, 
like Leda.
 
They held hands.
 
It was so achingly beautiful it made him sad he waited so long. 
 
It would have been grieving if it hadn't been happiness. 
 

Obdormit
 
The tuning noise stops 
when he closes his eyes. 
 
Instead of music,  
what follows are crackles,  
gurgles, 
a warming  
radiator. 
 
Borborygmi 
through the pipes of the brain. 
 
Or maybe this is 
the music. 
 
And the swooping of images—a ladybug,  
mother, the Nile and its pyramids,  
the estranging mirror, snowing—is  
the ballet. 
 
Then the sponge cleans everything, 
smudgingly,  
like a blackboard. 
 
Falls off the chalk tray. 
 
From I 
 
to me. 
 
* 
 
Note: Obdormit is a Latin verb meaning "he/she/it falls asleep" 
 ​
Stefan Balan

Stefan Balan: "I am a Romanian-American poet living in the Greater Boston area. My writing career spans a twenty-year silence. At one end: my Romanian work—a book of poetry published at 30 and reissued by the Museum of Romanian Literature, and a co-authored a volume on Lars von. At the other: my English poetry, which has appeared in The Baltimore Review, West Branch, The Worcester Review, among others. In 2025 I was nominated for the Pushcart Prize by The Baltimore Review and was a finalist for the MĀNOA poetry contest. In 2024, I received 3rd Wednesday's first prize for poetry."

Woman’s Glory (according to man)

Because I could stop for death
By:  Emily Dickinson
“Because I could not stop for death -
He kindly stopped for me -
The carriage held but just ourselves -
And immortality.”

Tearing down, backward progress to
time smeared with vaseline glasses,
pretty, only in distorted 
reality of benefit
to warlords brave behind the screens,
dissecting hard fought, won freedoms.
Afraid of irrelevancy-
If not needed as provider,
What worth?  Murder autonomy.
Because I could not stop for death:

Refusing to bow,
to give in, to give
up - no submission.
Stand against hard blows -
future in peril,
hold strong and prevail;
Absorb the bruises,
ignore the voices
angry and loud as
He kindly stopped for me.

Bow strings taut with accusations:
You are too much, yet not enough;
Allow the soft light to infuse,
blurring hard edges, revealing
glowing beauty of womanhood.
Lean into the arms that protect:
Just pray, obey, keep sweet as your
rights fade into your true purpose:
Support, submit… isolate as
The carriage held but ourselves.

There is no greater 
blessing than to give
your life, your soul, your
essence to home, hearth.
Your beauty to him.
Your body to him.
Exalting on high
his manly ego -
you achieve glory
and immortality. 

Robin White

Robin is a lifelong creative: poet, writer, painter, collagist, and mixed media artist.  She was born and raised in a small gown in Georgia, USA and can drive on a wet red clay road without going in the ditch.  She loves music from gospel to hair metal.  Going thrifting and antiquing followed by good food and good company is a perfect day.   Her dream is to live on the beach at her favorite place in the world, Jekyll Island, GA.