an animal poems workshop, making pet rocks with hetrick hardscaping, art-everything with artfusion 19464, etc.

understandably (even if a little sadly) more popular than the animal poems workshop at the pottstown family and home expo last weekend was the lure of making pet rocks through my the efforts of my siblings, scott and tammy hetrick of hetrick hardscaping.

but a beautiful reprieve came from a five-year-old boy named clayton who told me some stories about his dogs, and we used those to write some poetry lines. he wrote his name at the top of the poem, and i assisted with the rest of the writing since he's still getting used to the alphabet as well as using markers to spell out words. 

i described how cool it would be to make the last lines of the poem end separately, on the right, at the edge of the paper, versus sitting aligned on the left. this is a good way to illustrate how where you put words on a page can bring out their more artful value so that it's not just letters but something more visual. it was clayton who realized and commented on how the period at the end of the poem could be seen as the softball landing at the end of his final sentence, like it is thrown during a game and slants down toward the ground in falling, when not caught. i told clayton he had a great brain to think of this creative concept. you can see his poem and mind's work below here. and he happily left with his poem in hand, to show to his parents, since he went to the expo with his grandparents, knowing he'd get to hang it up on his fridge at home.

*i realized late that we were so excited when we put this poem together that we forgot to include the ''h'' in the last word, so it should read as ''hit.'' oops and a half.

anyone who wrote an animal poem earned a piece of candy from the peppermint stick candy store. winnn at life, mhmmm ! 

and here is one of those greatly loved pet rocks in the process of its glittering existence, with a glue-made mouth, to boot.

julie tonnessen of artfusion 19464 in pottstown also joined the day and had a mural continually in the works on the wall behind her table.

 and here is where the pet rock parents camped out when not at the glitter-rich station.

 more art and poem pieces.

while james mason isn't as kid-aged as some of the guests writing animal poems, he playfully tested out his own poem about rabbits. since he couldn't remember much about his old pet rabbits from childhood except that they lived in cages on his family's back porch, he used a story which i told him from my life from last year, and this inspired his poem. i noticed a bunny plopped out in hiding at the end of my garden, which is fenced in old wood. figuring it was alert and a little frightened, i walked away not to scare it more. then later that week, i came outside and noticed the bunny still in the same position and thought, ut oh. i soon grasped that it had in fact died the previous week. my lips went into the sad face pose. i drove the bunny to a creek behind the unicast park down the street and buried it in a thick patch of yellow-blooming swamp flower specimens.