My dear friend Shiella Foster, the author of the limericks to this book, died at the age of 93, on April 2, 2021. She was the first friend I made in Canada. Her limericks she started writing being 80 years old became a bridge between us. She was looking for artists to illustrate her rhymes, and I was looking for opportunities to volunteer. That’s how we met and became friends.
We published the first book with Sheilla in 2012 (with some other illustrators involved), and started working on the next one. Unfortunately, COVID happened with its lockdowns. Sheilla was living in a senior home, so visitations got impossible. Anyways, I managed to make a draft book with limericks as a 2020 Christmas gift for her. Sheilla liked the pictures I made and a few days before her death she asked me to publish all her limericks.
A couple of year before she died she passed me all her manuscripts and one new limerick that she’d just finished:
An urn of ashes stark and cold,
Don’t feel sad, I was pretty old.
I’ve lived my life,
Both joy and stride.
Now, I walk the streets of gold.
Sheilla was preparing herself and her friends to the fact that she was going to leave soon. But I know that she would be happy to see this book finally published. And, I hope, I’ll be able to print 2 more books with her limericks – as she wrote over 100 of them!
All pictures originally painted in watercolours. To add some charm to the pictures I used some prints by famous impressionists and postimpressionists and created collages.
Can you recognize fragments of paintings by Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Gustave Caillebotte, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Mary Cassatt, and Henri Rousseau?
It’s fun!
Hardcover, 5.5″x8.5″, 64 pages, 80lb. paper