It's a rainy summer Saturday in the heart of rural Arkansas and obvious boredom leads me to create a blog. After all, all the cool kids have one.
I'm interrupted in this endeavor by frustrated murmurs, all right - screams, from my husband who seeks to hang speakers on the living room walls. I have suggested asymmetrical placement of the speaker boxes. I'm guessing by his response that this is not preferable. My logic says that since we plan to remove the living room wall, thus opening up the hallway and creating a more open floor plan (hey, I do not watch HGTV without picking up something), we should place the other speaker box on the back wall so we don't have to punch an additional hole in the ceiling and move it eventually. The first speaker box is on the wall on the front window side of the house. Putting the second one on the back wall will create asymmetrical balance. Symmetry could arrive by placing it directly across from the first one. Hmmmm. Which will he choose? How soon do we plan to demolish a wall (a possible load bearing wall)? Which is better audio-wise?
I've never objected to anything a little bit askew. Adds interest. One side can be different and yet mesh with the other to create a pleasing whole. Look at many of my artworks. Look at where I live. Look at the classes I teach. We definitely like to mesh differences in many different ways.
The rain has stopped and on the bird feeder perch two American Crows. I didn't know crows could climb a pole, but there they are, clinging to the middle pole and practicing Cirque du Soleil moves to reach the end of a bungee cord for the molded corn and sunflower seed prize. Other members of the murderous family wait their turn on top of the old swingset. "Caw, caw," one vocalizes. Two squirrels, the comedic interlude of this act, jump from the tree to the bird feeder from the top. This shakes the pole, shakes off the two crows in mid-performance, and startles the others who swoop away from the swingset into the pine trees. More caws. The squirrels cling asymmetrically to the seed mold, one on the top right and the other from the bottom left. The seed mold swings. The pole swings. The squirrel on top swings off. He lands on the ground pretending it was intentional. His cheeks are symmetrically filled with corn and sunflower seeds. The other squirrel is hiding on the far side of the oak tree trunk. The crows have noticed me at the window and flap between the trees to the neighbor's yard, kernels of corn in their beaks. There is a great deal of balance in the front yard today, even if one side is different than the other.
And thinking of that I notice the two identical bird seed feeders, hanging on either side of the other feeding pole. Both were hung carefully by my husband who sees to it that both are always equally filled with sunflower seeds. Both have the same design, same pattern and same color. Except sometime today, with all the bustling acrobatics, someone has hung on the perch rim of the one on the right a little too long or a little too heavily. It's kind of wobbly-angled, rakish. Now the matching feeders are asymmetrical. Do I mention this to the man who refills the seeds regularly? Will he notice before they require refilling?
He did mount the speakers asymmetrically. He manages to even up just about everything in our life that needs to be balanced. He also plans intentional asymmetrical designs for bird feeders and for hanging bungee seed-bells for my afternoon's entertainment.
It's a rainy Saturday afternoon in the heart of rural Arkansas. Cool kids who have blogs and those that don't should come hang out. We're not bored, we're just a little askew.
