Five Friday Happy Bringers 5/30/25

My weekly gratitude journal, of sorts.

1. This unique little “Dog Library” that I discovered near us here in historic district Savannah the other day.

A variation of the Free Little Libraries and Free Little Pantries scattered across the country?

2. This simple, unassuming little fresh-from-the-garden zucchini gift from friends and what I made from it.

3. Rejuvenating Spring Rain. (We’ve had a bunch of it lately.)

4. Robert’s Oh So Delicious! St. Louis Ribs on Memorial Day.

5. Attending a fascinating lecture at our local Jepson Center for the Arts about their latest exhibit, Moss Mystique: Southern Women and Newcomb Pottery.

We didn’t know much about Newcomb Pottery until our Toledo-in-the-Summer and Savannah-in-the-Winter friends Don and Jim told us all about the incredible pottery.

From the exhibit: “IN 1895, THE ART DEPARTMENT AT THE H. SOPHIE NEWCOMB MEMORIAL COLLEGE, a women’s school in New Orleans, Louisiana, began a new enterprise: the Newcomb College Pottery. The educators hoped to provide their graduates with way of putting their design education into practice and earning an income in a manner that was socially acceptable for white upper-class women.”

“These women decorated a variety of wares with ornament inspired by regional fora and fauna. Though students were educated in ceramics, the Pottery hired men to create the wares, which were formed from a mixture of clays from around the region. Promoting the Pottery to national and international audiences, its founders and some decorators claimed that the products were unique and authentic representations of the American South.”

“The Pottery’s aesthetics shifted dramatically over the following decades, and the school added other media, such as textiles, to the enterprise, but the emphasis on these products ‘Southerness’ remained in place until the Pottery’s closure in 1939.”

“Drawn from the permanent collection of the Newcomb Art Museum of Tulane University, this exhibition explores Newcomb decorators choice of imagery and their relationships with regional identity. Plants and vacant landscapes suggested isolation from busy urban centers in New England and the Midwest, while moss-draped oak and cypress trees matched descriptions in fiction that romanticized the pre-Civil War period. Even the decorators’ status as upper-class white women placed them as ‘belles’ in these fantasies. Though these women created many of these designs over 100 years ago, their work reinforced perceptions about the American South that remain powerful today.”

May you Exhibit some Powerful Joy this mid-spring Weekend!