pencil drawing from the upcoming book The Cabins of Wilsonia

This is a personal note to a friend, but you are welcome to read it. Duh. I posted it on the internet!

Dear Doug,

Thank you for using the Contact button on my blog. I was delighted to hear from you, and meant to set your email aside for a thoughtful response later. Instead, I deleted it. My excuses are that it was at the end of a long weekend away from the computer so there were many emails to read and sort AND in spite of continually changing my password, my email is being messed with by some unknown entity which causes me to manically delete messages (or maybe the unknown entity is deleting them. . .?)

Excuses aside, thank you for contacting me! I have been so curious about that little A-frame – is it Doug’s family cabin? Does he ever go there? Will he be up here when I am? Will he be disappointed that I only drew the funny lounge chair? Will he be pleased that anything from the cabin appears in the book?

My choices about what appears and what doesn’t are not based on historical significance.  The book is about cabin life today in pictures (276 of them) and quotes by cabin owners and visitors. Not all cabins are included, because the goal is to show an overview album rather than a cabin-by-cabin directory. It is meant to show a balance of the typical and the unique.

I chose your chair, void of cushions, because it tells me a story about cabin life.

In other news, thank you for sending me a customer named Roger. He is gathering photos of a barn in Michigan for me to draw. (I’d rather he gather me a round-trip airfare, but no one does that.) Receiving a recommendation from such a fine artist as yourself really does my heart (and ego!) good.

Blessings to you, my old (as in long-time, not aged) friend,

Jana