Celtic, Celtic--

Here's a peep at a division page for The Foliate Head from the Artlog of Clive Hicks-Jenkins; if you jump there, you may view Andrew Wakelin at work on the design for the book in the very room where I stayed when I traveled to Wales a year ago and enjoyed long wonderful days at Ty Isaf, reveling in Clive's beautifully-arranged world and all the festivities for his 60th birthday retrospective at Gregynog Gallery of The National Library of Wales. How the wind whistled up the stairs when the doors were flung open, all the way to Clive's studio at the top! If you take a look at Andrew, you'll see the enormous curtainless windows that woke me to the morning and green views of the garden and hills.

I'm looking forward to the promised view today. Everything Andrew and Clive touch in the way of books grows beautiful.

Last night I attended the Otschodela Council of Boy Scouts "Silver Beaver" award banquet in Oneonta--doesn't that sound strange?--as my husband is a scoutmaster and has been involved with scouting a long time. It turned out to be oddly touching. I always find events like annual dance recitals or crossing-over ceremonies or rural graduations to tug at the heartstrings because it is so lovely to live for a long time in one place and see children growing up and turning into young women and men. But this sort of ceremony, where you see aging men (silver at the crown, with tummies snug in Scouting regalia!) and a good number of women rewarded for many decades of work with children, can also have its moments of surprise and unexpected feeling.

More, the featured entertainment was Celtic and a great surprise: someone I knew as a young teen played a marvelous pipes concert. A few years ago, the Scotia-Glenville bagpipe band (of which Robby Schafsteck and his brother were then teen members) won third place in the Hazelhead Shield Novice Juvenile Pipe Band Championship at the world bagpipe championships in Glasgow--evidently the first time for the award to leave Scotland. Now he is a handsome young man with a proper kilt, bear-fur sporran, and hose-and-gillies!