Saving what you care about -- Floods and Flowers

"Painted in New Orleans, Portrait of Estelle Musson De Gas (1872), was the last in a series of portraits Degas made of his sister-in-law."

A wonderful exhibition is currently being shown at the Stanford Cantor Center. This photo is of one of the paintings saved from a museum in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina by dedicated museum staff. I love the picture -- although I'm not convinced that arranging flowers technically qualifies as domestic work -- saving something you love from a catastrophic natural disaster -- that might qualify. There seem to be many many gardening poems, almost as many as the laundry poems I've found in my searches -- but that's another topic. For now, I'm sticking with laundry, dusting, ironing, bed making -- I think there's another entire oeuvre of cooking and food poetry, too. For another day, another blog.