Paul's "Use it or lose it" applies most of all to me. And I've resigned myself to losing it. Mind you, I miss it. Ten years of daily habit. And as I approach 80, I need that stimulation most of all. I miss too the friendship of all of you whom I only know through Comments, some going all the way back to 2004. You've been remarkably stimulating, steadfast and civil porch mates.

But the shakes make writing more pain than pleasure.

In the meantime, I've been trolling through art-inspired posts from the past, and here's another.

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I'm still thinking about our walk along England's Ridgeway, the splendid landscapes. Nature,yes. But human cunning too. Careful planning. An ethic of neatness. Respect for the past. Landscape as a work of art.

And I think of the landscape paintings of the California artist Wayne Thiebaud, the ones he did in the 1990s. Thiebaud is perhaps best known for his pop-arty cupcakes and gumball machines. Those pretty confections do nothing for me. But the landscapes! The landscapes stick in my mind like glue.

By all accounts, Thiebaud is an affable fellow. That he has a sense of humor is evident from his paintings. Even his cupcakes exude a genial kindness. Critics talk about the relationship to de Kooning, but for me the spiritual affinity is with Saul Steinberg. And the landscapes! Let's put Thiebaud in charge of the countryside.

The paintings are inspired by the waterways and agriculture fields around Thiebaud's home in the Sacramento Valley, but the viewpoint is clearly some airy place in the artist's imagination. Light, pattern, color, perspective. Wit and ease. An affable grace. Nature, yes. But human cunning too. The cunning of the horticulturist, the animal husbandman, the orchardist, the arborist, the hydrologist. And the cunning of the artist, who informs our vision of what a landscape might be.

Thiebaud's work is all about the sources of our happiness. Cupcakes. Gumball machines. Water making its way to the sea through fields of shimmering color. So fragile, and because they are fragile they are shadowed with the possibility of loss. Nowhere is that loss more tragic than in the uglification of the land itself.