The first full moon of April is our anniversary of being together.  I like having a floating anniversary, connected to the moon.  22 years!  We took an anniversary trip to Philadelphia to hear the Blue Note 7 at the Kimmel Center. Blue Note is celebrating 70 years as a jazz label, and 7 of their fine musicians are on tour together, with an album aptly named “Mosaic.”  We enjoyed the concert, in spite of Wayne’s clogged head, and my bandages from the fall I took on Tuesday(I suppose it is convenient to have been on the way to work, at a hospital, when I tripped.)

We spent Saturday walking around Rittenhouse Square, visiting the Rosenbach Museum for the first time, and seeing Marianne Moore’s Greenwich Village apartment delightfully intact within the museum.   My librarian self was thoroughly mesmerized by the Rosenbach’s collection of first editions, including James Joyce’s Ulysses, and the photograph of Belle Da Costa Greene, friend of Abraham Rosenbach, librarian to J.P. Morgan, passing as Portuguese to elude the prejudice she would have faced as an African American.  Quite beautiful and stylish, she’s quoted as saying that although a librarian, she doesn’t have to dress like one. . .I’ll have to keep that in mind.

We came across an exhibit of prints at the Philadelphia Free Library, Intaglio a Go-Go:  Etching Moves Forward.  That is where I saw Cynthia Back‘s Strata, 2002, aquatint, etching, deep bite, chine colle.  I love the layers, the colors and textures, and my mosaic artist self is intrigued by the tesserae-like stones.  It made me think of my 22 years with Wayne, and his also apt name, Stratz, all the layers of history, of our travels, our love.  He is my bedrock, and I am grateful what we have built together.