The Honey Jar, Drawn

August fifteenth. The sketchbook has been on my counter since June 2011. I have opened it approximately forty times and closed it thirty-nine of them without putting pencil to paper, which is an embarrassing statistic even when you're only keeping it in your own head. The one exception was the collapsed bowl, Thanksgiving morning, and I photographed that and eventually put it on the blog at the end of last year and felt, I don't know, a small version of accomplished, which is the right scale for a drawing of a bowl.

Today I opened it and drew the honey jar. The farmers market one, from a few weeks ago, still sitting on the windowsill between Gerald and the collapsed bowl and the letterpress card, because apparently my windowsill is a small curated archive of things I did on impulse that mostly worked out. I wasn't trying to make it good. I just wanted to make it finished. There's a difference that I've been learning, slowly, which is that I can sit with a blank page for fifteen minutes hoping something good will arrive, or I can pick the nearest object and describe it in lines and at least one of those things results in a drawing.

Second drawing. The honey jar. It counts.

It's not a remarkable drawing. The proportions are slightly off and the lid reads a little like a hat. But it's the honey jar, you can tell that it's the honey jar, and when I put it down next to the real one they have a family resemblance. That feels like the point. The sketchbook has two drawings in it now. The second one is a honey jar with a lid that looks like a hat, and I am unreasonably okay with that.

The real one and the drawn one. Both on the sill now.

I've been thinking about a thing Simone said a few weeks ago, nothing profound, just something offhand between shifts, and I keep turning it over the way you turn over a smooth stone. There's probably a post in it, or maybe not, maybe some things are just for you. The honey jar is for me and also now for the sketchbook, which I think counts as company.