The Art & Poetry of Mary Coleman

So for Inktober day 11 I drew a rabid dog which accompanies a poem I wrote. This one I really, really like. Yesterday I worked on a picture of my mom, but it didn’t end up fitting the poem I drew it for, so it will just be for Inktober day 13 (I’m working a few day ahead of schedule). Today I am going to re-attempt drawing something for that same poem.

When I got my first apartment with my husband right after we married. I had left Portland, where I lived with my parents, to live in New Zealand, but the first few months I lived with my husband at his mother’s house because he didn’t yet have his own place. Then she decided to go live in England, so we had to move out and decided to go to Wellington because I didn’t much like Auckland at the time which was the nearest large city to where we were (where I ended up going to school eventually). Wellington was clear on the other side of the North Island, so we packed up everything we owned, which wasn’t much (all I had was a suitcase) and drove down. When we first moved in we had nothing in the way of anything. Not even a bed to sleep on (Michael’s mom gave us some blankets and pillows so we had that at least).

A few days after we moved in our landlord gave us a ride with his truck to the nearest Warehouse (which is like Walmart) and we stocked up on as much as we could afford with our wedding money, including a mattress. My husband started work shortly after that and so with his first paycheck, we were able to afford some more supplies. But we didn’t have a car anymore (hence the landlord giving us a ride), because ours had broken down and we were unable to afford repairs, so it was just sitting outside the apartment. Everything we got from that point on had to be carted back on foot or we would take a cab if it was too large to carry (this is well before Uber). We discovered a nearby second hand shop, so that was where we got a lot of our stuff going forward.