My Aunt Dixie...the artist

My aunt Dixie is one of my favorite aunts. I used to spend a week with them in the summers...and, those weeks turned into the entire summers when I was in middle and high school. Aunt Dixie is (and always has been) an artist. She is married to my uncle Cam, an investment banker. It is an unlikely union, but it has always worked...and, they have been a model couple and family for me my entire life.

Aunt Dixie has finally kicked off her long-anticipated website, www.dixiehoggan.com, showing her works of art to the world. She is a painter, photographer, writer, and a travel professional...essentially...she does it all.

Often, the subject of her work is the Chesapeake Bay. They have a bay house on Stove Point, in Deltaville, VA. She looks out her window each time she is at the Bay, and paints light, wind, water, and color. Dixie has had a long-time fascination with observing water, weather and sky; and, her fascination has turned into a fixation. Her paintings are, in part, an attempt to orchestrate these observations onto a surface with oil paint.

I have many memories from my childhood and adolescence spending time with Aunt Dixie and Uncle Cam, and my younger cousins, Rebecca and Alex. Like their parents...Rebecca is an artist (bluegrass musician in Nashville), and Alex is a financier...he is involved in private equity in Southern California.

At the bay house, I used to sleep in the loft....in which you had to climb a steep ladder-staircase to enter. The loft was a magical place in that it had an entire wall of the old crank-out horizontal louvered windows...so, virtually an entire wall was a view of the bay...and, I would gaze out from my hidden loft vantage-point as often as I could. And, with the windows open, you could smell and taste the brackish bay air in the morning, afternoon, and night. You could hear the bouy bells, the clanking of the sailboat halyards, and the neighborhood dogs howling at the moon. It truly is a magical place.

With my aunt and uncle, we had slow-paced summers.....filled with morning walks, afternoon swims, evening sails, and lots of great meals. We caught our own blue crabs in crab pots...which we would retrieve by sailing out to them on my uncle's laser sailboat. We would haul in our catches (which would be obtained through chicken necks used as bait)...and, then Dixie would drop the crabs (live) in a steamer pot filled with Old Bay seasonings, and we would listen as their scrambling reached a fever-pitch...then died down and stopped....as we waited for dinner. Somedays, we visited blackberry farms, and picked fresh blackberries. We'd go home with ink-stained mouths and fingers and we would whip up fresh blackberry cobbler, and woof it down topped with vanilla ice cream after dinner. Then, we would typically walk or ride bikes in the breezy twilight....returning to the cottage to play a game of Chinese Checkers or the famous 'ring toss' game before retiring to bed. Dixie taught me how to drive a car on the winding roads of Stove Point. You could see the Chesapeake Bay on one side of the road, and Fishing Bay on the other.

My Aunt and Uncle are here in California now...traveling and visiting their son/my cousin...and they will be in my neck of the woods tomorrow. We are meeting for dinner, and I can't wait to visit with them. I am ecstatic, and proud of Aunt Dixie for finally getting her website up and running....so her already well-known work will be available to a broader audience. 'Til next time.....