Rain Over Omaha, Nebraska

Visitors at the Amana colonies Visitor Center can sign their names in the guest book and see examples of the many crafts these German settlers practiced as they built a community in their new country. Broom and basket making, hooked rugs, blankets and quilts, wooden furniture -- the community sounds like one that was both industrious and prosperous. The Iowa farmlands

surrounding the colonies are beautiful with their rolling hills of cornfields and large, well-kept farms.Traveling and signs go hand in hand. We are dependent even more on them when we leave our familiar routes and home base to travel through unfamiliar places. So this fallen sign in the center of a construction zone in Amana, Iowa, seemed to represent their omnipresence.

While we are traveling(and yesterday morning while we sat in the dealer's service waiting room for four hours), I am reading "The Everyday Work of Art" by Eric Booth. According to Eric, we still haven't improved on those original tools cave painters knew about -- "metaphor, improvisation, following impulses, making things that have personal meaning, exploring the worthwhile things others have made, creating rituals in a special place."

Driving 1,300 miles in the first leg of a cross country trip -- we will reach our first destination when we arrive in Sargeant, Nebraska this afternoon to visit Bob's cousins -- gives me a lot of time to consider the importance of art making in my life. Even the experiences of this trip are all observations that I feel will somehow translate into "making."