IS This the End of the World?

So IS this the end of the world like that ridiculous funny movie I saw the other day? If it isn't then why is the magnolia at the corner of our lot trying to blossom again when everyone knows that only happens in late March or early April?  Look at this picture. I mean really!Also today I had to knock off work early to go to Mahoney's Garden Center with a picture of my two new hydrangea plants. The more I water them the worse they look. "Is this too MUCH water?" I asked resident plant guru Carrie Kelly. "No," she said, "in weather like this you have to water them every day. Their problem is they're so hot that they're trying to hide," she said, doing a kind of duck-and-cover move in imitation of the poor suffering plants.If they are trying to hide I can  identify. Here in my part of the world in the sixth and hottest day of the week I keep thinking of that first paragraph of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mocking bird when she says that by noon of an Alabama summer the talcum-powdered ladies would be melting like the frosting on a plateful teacakes.By 6:00 last night I'd had three baths in less than 24 hours. (Our shower is not just broken, the whole floor is gone. You can step inside that glass door and look right down on the heads of friends and family enjoying cold drinks in the kitchen below.)I don't like to complain  - even though the probable HIVE of microbes living in our sad little air conditioner that hangs its boxy grey fanny out our  bedroom window is making me sick. I mean, I love the warmth - I think.  And look at the color of that magnolia blossom! And who cares if the bag if Tostitos turns instantly into something resembling a bagful of limp puppy ears the second you open them? Tostitos aren't that great for you anyway.It's just that when I imported that picture of the magnolia I came upon THIS picture taken in our same corner six months ago. It just looks so delicious doesn't it? I get light-headed just looking at it.

More Maya Angelou, on Men

She also had this to say, Ms. Maya Angelou, when that same interviewer from TIME magazine asked “Did you inherit your mother’s fondness for guns?”“I like to have guns around. I don’t like to carry them," said Maya.“Have you ever fired a weapon?” asked the person from TIME.“I was in my house in North Carolina. It was fall. I heard someone walking on the leaves. And somebody actually turned the knob. So I said 'Stand four feet back because I’m going to shoot now! Boom! Boom! The police came by and said ‘Ms. Angelou, the shots came from inside the house.’ I said ‘Well, I don’t know how that happened.’Well now we know that It’s wrong to feed falsehoods to  cops - of course! -  but  the way I look at it, those two cops were probably guys and it's really is never a mistake to  keep a pretty tight hold on how you communicate  things to a guy. “You want to control the information when it comes to your man,” said  my very own mother-in-law regarding my relations with her own darling boy.  “Timing is everything,” she added, nodding her head in emphasis.I believed her. Hadn’t she just recently told me about the time when, driving home from HER mother-in-law’s house carrying on her lap the  extra platter of the eggplant parmesan that she'd made for the family, her own young husband patted her knee and said while it had tasted perfectly fine, really it just wasn’t QUITE as good as the way his mother made it? And hadn't she in response and on the spot opened the car window and tipped the whole drooly platter out into the street?Yes she had, indeed she had.I love stories like these two, told by Ruth Payne Marotta and the wonderful Marguerite Johnson AKA our Miz Maya Angelou. They inspire me and make me want to also say to any men who mess with me: Stand back four feet now.Son.And get ready for what’s comin’ at you now - and you'd best HOPE it's just a platter of eggplant. :-)

maya angelou

“You endured some really horrible things, mostly at the hands of men,” somebody at AARP ‘s Monthly magazine said to Maya Angelou in a 10 question Q & A  last spring. “Have gender relations improved?Here’s how she  responded:"No, I think men are as crazy as they were and women are as crazy as they were."I think it’s wise when women say what they like and don’t like and will and won’t take. Men ought to do the same. I've never had a dislike for men. I’ve been badly treated by some but I’ve been loved greatly by some. I married quite a lot of them."As I say, gotta love her!

What Must He Think?

I know God is really busy but what must he think looking down on us all?In the heart of the big city nearest me there's a bagel shop whose high stools are mounted on a raised platform next to its windows, on the other side of which early in the morning, uncountable numbers of people pass, all either heads down or peering at their cell phones.They’re hurrying to work mostly. Anyway the expressions on their faces make it seem as if that’s where they’re going. They never look up at the buildings they pass. They never look up at the sky over their heads. Certainly they never look at one another. I can sit with my coffee and a bagel for a whole hour and never tire of looking at them.“Humans!” He must think. “These busy humans rushing about! They look so earnest!"Well, humans ARE earnest. It kills me to see how earnest.But if it’s true that we are earnest, we can also be frisky at times:Take the guy who pulled up beside me in the parking lot of the medical center where I went for blood work last week. He turned off the car and before getting out lifted a hip flask to his lips and took a long pull. This was at six o’clock in the morning. “Hope he’s not one of the doctors!” was all I could think.Or take the two people who parked on either side of me at the little pond I love to visit. The woman climbed out of her own car and into the man’s. The intensity with which they then kissed – for a good four or five minutes - might have told the story by itself but seeing how their shoulders then began to slump and their conversation to flag anyone could tell that these were stolen moments.“Give it up!” I wanted to call over to them. “This won’t make you happy!” But they would have thought I was crazy. And anyway how did I know what I was looking at, really?You can look and look and still not know what you are seeing. Why? Because people are mysteries, sometimes even to themselves.A blogger I admire wrote me last week to say he was glad to see I had ‘broken out of the darkness that pervaded some of [my] pieces for a while and was back to [my] usual sunshine and brightness.” Dim-visioned human that I am, I didn’t know I had been writing out of a place of darkness.But then we are often the last ones to know how we ourselves feel.We rely on those loving others, who are watching not the sky, or the buildings, or the people in neighboring cars but us.They are watching us. And thank God for such people in our lives.  

Nobody Puts Baby in A Corner

Nobody Puts Baby in A Corner: Yup you got it: that's the funniest line in all of Dirty Dancing and  it's also what I have done twice this week: I put a number of key people in a corner by not showing them in this cavalcade of pictures, and they're people that NO ONE should put in a corner.Who are they? The moms of all these babies and kids you have seen.First comes Curlyhead's momma, Dodson's wife Veronica. I know huh? Two pictures of Dodson with their baby and none of her. What's THAT?  So here's Veronica now:Next we have mother Number One of our three grandchildren, Chris , recognizable by her baseball cap and the fact that you can't get her to stand still long enough to pose. Here she is treating little David's foot.Third we have Carrie, Mother Number Two of those same three grandkids (Figure it out people.)And finally Suzanne the mom of one of the little baldies, who can repeat anything anyone says with perfect enunciation in this hilariously tiny high voice.So there they are, the four moms workin' quietly behind the scenes.Now as a reward for wading through these family photos, the big last scene from Dirty Dancing,  right after Patrick Swayze weighs in about where "baby" really should be: on the stage (where else?)[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=fvwp&v=LRMx97w0WKo&NR=1]

The Gold is in the Background

I love the things you see in candid pictures. That’s why I don’t mind it when kids get behind the camera. The shots are more spontaneous; you can tell no one has tried to get the Pepsi cans out of the way first.This is a nice candid one on the left here that tells the rest of the story about that bad set of splinters our six-year-old got from a splintery old dock. Here you see him just after he'd been taped and bagged and bound and sealed before trying for a quick dip, all because the doctor who did the surgery had said no swimming for three days - but it was 95 degrees and so muggy the clams were steaming themselves. (He lasted maybe ten minutes before the foot was thoroughly soaked by lake water that one adult there present described as 'a bath of pathogens.' He had a fresh soak then in hot saline solution poor kid and no more swimming after that.)Then consider this photo from my post on Monday:It was taken by Splinter Child, and shows his older brother getting hugged by his grandfather while at the same time in the background showing our honorary son Dodson carrying down the first three or four items of the hundred  or so such items all new parents seem to haul around whenever they travel with their baby. When I put this up yesterday and placed the link to the story on Facebook I heard from the famous Emily McDowell, who I first met as a three-year-old in 1979. "Do I spy my print on the wall of the NH house?" she wrote last night.She sure did spy her own print, one of many such prints that you can see on her Etsy page here. Take a look at these two 'details'  of it. I bought the print for $35 a year ago, had it framed it for of maybe another 60 bucks and wouldn't part with it now for anything.   Remember your own crazy adolescence and all the mistakes you made? Talk about gold in the background! I especially like  The Vast Forest of I Can't Believe We're Not Dead. Take a more extended look at all Em's stuff here.

We Were All Together

We were all together over the Fourth and the little kids took pictures.These are some of them, showing how the babies schmoozed and the grownups talked and Bambi drank from a cup, smart little Bambi!We held all the babiesand played all the fun games like Pictionary - 'til 2 in the morning some of us. Our son came back just for the weekend and that was so nice, seeing him and Marie too. It pierced all our hearts to have him leave again for the distant south.We ate Annie's famous fried chicken AND her special tacos AND we made our own pizza with Annie's homemade dough. We had her brownies too!This child, our rising Fourth Grader, just chilled on the deck with a borrowed i-pad. Something about his pose kind of says it all. It's really summer now!

Notes from the Vacation Front

Maybe it wouldn't really BE a holiday weekend without a trip to the ER. Not one but two splinters worked their way into one little foot yesterday. They were from a dock that more or less lies in wait for people, its splinter-giving intent lurking darkly under all that summer sunshine, like a troll under a bridge.We tried getting the thing out ourselves but it hurt the child too much so the long wait at the ER it was.I didn't get to go on this trip but I heard about it: the guy who dropped a very heavy weight on his foot. The one who came in because his eyes were bothering him. The third one who arrivedwith such a bloody hand he was sure to need stitches.Our little victim did not need stitches and that seems a miracle to me, since it turned out he didn't have one splinter but two, one under the other, even deeper in the flesh. The ER doc had to dig a trench, use a retractor, the whole bit. Luckily though, his scalpel was sharp enough and the slice he made fine enough that the surgical site will knit up fine all on its ownThe child just can't swim for two days or get the foot wet at all which will be hard with all this water all around and the heat wave still churning away...Maybe I can get him to sing "Frère Jacques" for me again like he did that other time - until his baby sister staggered by and brought down the camera. Never a dull moment on vacation with the kiddies!http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kV5AiXsKpOk

How to Throw a Wedding

Wherever you went in June you saw brides billowing like wind-tossed roses. You saw grooms too, standing a little behind them and looking like they’ve just had the skin sanded off their faces. Ah, weddings are a great invention. I love everything about them: the public witness, the pomp, the fruit cup…When I was a bride, I wore my hair off my face with fake sideburns dripping down and looked like Elvis circa 1978. My groom, for his part, had enough hair on his head to stuff a sofa with. And a wedding wasn’t a wedding in those days unless one of the guests showed up in dressed like Mork from Ork, and the services were filled with vows not to obey the other guy or tamper with his karma in any way.These days many bridegrooms are back in top hats.  Many brides march down the aisle strapless, with almost no fabric above the waist but plenty trailing behind. They arrive in rented Rollses or horse and-buggy contraptions. They’d arrive go in Cinderella’s pumpkin if they could figure out how hire her fairy godmother.So fashions change, and change again, and yet there are some things about a wedding that remain the same. You can mess with the style all you want - print the couple’s name on every square of paper goods in the restrooms - but all really good weddings are alike in that they have certain key elements in common:

• First, hordes of relatives who can be counted on to provide noise, a sense of history and sometimes-iffy behavior.
• Second, sufficient libation.
• Third, plenty to eat. No one ever had fun at a wedding with a melon ball on a toothpick or some Cheez Whiz smeared across a Ritz. What you need is hearty food and plenty of it.  I attended one wedding where the portions of Veal Parmigiana were so huge that the guests were encouraged to scoop whole platters of what they couldn’t finish into doggy bags provided by the waiters. And that was just the first course.
• Fourth, music of a kind all generations can enjoy. The success of the day is guaranteed if a person 90 can be talked into dancing a hora, jig or tarantella.
• And last but not least, sobbing at reception’s end. An especially nice touch is added if the bride is one of the sobbers. I know I sobbed myself, bidding farewell to my childhood home and foolish hijinks and meals cooked by people that weren’t me. It heightens the sense of drama to have waterworks like this, strikes the older folks as hilarious, and provides everyone with a dandy catharsis.

That about covers it, I think. A wedding with any three of these key components is sure to succeed for the couple. A wedding with all six will fortify them for years. Some nights I still pull out my Elvis wig and we relive the day all over again. :-)

Thanks, World Wide Web!

Just this week alone the Internet has delivered me pictures of women pretending to like being stepped on and having smoke blown in their faces.Then there was that ad for losing weight by hiring a tapeworm. - and I don't doubt that there are at least some people out there just dying to bring one aboard and watch the pounds melt away.Every singe day I'm amazed by this Internet, this tangled web we have woven, and the way it has worked its stretchy little tendrils into all our lives.English Ivy has nothing on the worldwide web. Call it electronic kudzu.This morning Facebook is what has me shaking my head webwise. People keep telling me they can't find me on Facebook and sure enough when I look for Terry Marotta all I find is a page belonging to someone who sees dead people.So I began a search for myself under my maiden name, which yielded up the wildly entertaining My Space page of an Irish lad. Here is what he wrote of himself at the time:

"Hay my name is terry sheehy and im 17 going out with susan browne i love u susan !… i like to play basketball football i also like to watch UFC and figthing sports.. Thanks to my fab sis whoohooo and just want to say befor i go to bed just leve a coment and ill comment u back. i like action films and films that kinda do with shit that im interested in and also comedy and going to the cinema."

Pretty adorable kid, if not the best grammarian! I mean, right?  It just shows you:  even if you CAN’T find your own little self reflected in the big electronic mirror, you can have some pretty good laughs just the same.

Quit Yer Gripin'

I was in a bad mood that weekend.  It was the weather natch. People are so silly about the weather. What’s that old saying ? As a rule man’s a fool, when it’s hot he wants it cool. When it’s cool he wants it hot, always wanting what is not. True enough!It had been 41° on the Friday of the weekend before. Then six days later, it was 91°."A 50° difference in less than a week!" we all exclaimed. People whined like you wouldn't believe.  I whined.I met a man at a book talk I gave once who told me he lived outside of the U.S.  for 15 years and was only just now returning. "What do you notice most about Americans, now that you can look at your countrymen with fresh eyes?" I asked him."People complain! They complain about everything!" he said. "I couldn't believe it at first.  It's as if nothing is ever good enough."That shivered my timbers, I can tell you. I didn't want to be one of those people.So I got to considering: Maybe instead of griping, we should actually delight in the variety the world presents. Even the weather, aside of course from the terrifying and violent climatic swings such as the ones that have brought drought to Colorado and tornadoes to Oklahoma.“I'd really like to try doing that,” I was thinking later that day as I walked into my local cobbler shop or "Shoe Hospital" as its owner has dubbed it.Here, a young girl around 11 was munching on a chocolate chip cookie and chatting in familiar fashion with the proprietor."She must be one of his grandchildren," I thought, so wide was the smile she flashed him as she ducked back out of the store."Is that your granddaughter?" "I asked as I handed over the ticket to reclaim  my newly reheeled boots."No," he said. "She just comes in here all the time. She says she loves the smell of the place.""Ah!" said I. "The smell of leather, and shoe polish? Maybe the smell of the oil in these various machines?""Exactly," he said handing me my boots."You know it wouldn't kill you to polish these now and then," he added with a wink.I purchased a tin of saddle soap displayed there on the counter then and there,  took a whiff, sighed happily, and exited the shop one happy camper,  through with complaining for a good long while because ...Life is good! (Have an apple.)

What Can I Say

What can I say, it was raining again, and my hair was too weird, darker than it should be which looks funny with my gradually  disappearing eyebrows.That's a family thing with the eyebrows. Some of my family members have no eyebrows at all to speak of.At least I started out with some ..Do you doubt me? There they are on that chick in the middle:I guess I was in my early twenties when that picture was taken.When I was 19 they  were  DARKER STILL:(I know, I know. All I need is a mustache and I'm Tom Selleck in a wig circa 1980.)But even my sturdy Irish brows are thinning now and the it seems the roses have  gone my cheeks as well. At the frame shop last month my friend behind the counter said, “Well hello! Your HAIR is so dark I didn't know you!"I mumbled something about how I told my  stylist  how I kind of hated the blonde direction he was heading in so he made my hair dark. But In the days just after he colored it even I could tell it was a mite TOO dark; just a mite too Morticia Addams. Plus I could sense small children edging away."I thin it looks better to have light hair around the older face," she said. Whose older face she meant was pretty clear to me.And so it was that I ducked into the salon last week and showed him my roots."So these are basically the color of old snow," I said pointing to the half-inch of grey sprouting up from my scalp, "and this is, like shoe polish black, practically,” I added, pointing to the other 15 inches of hair. "So what do you think, can we look for something less dark that will diminish the contrast between the real and the dyed as the hair starts to grow in?”“Sure!” he crowed. He's waited for years to throw the whole Magician's Book of Color at me.And so yesterday with rain one again pelting down on the Ark we're all bobbing about on in this soggy month of June,  he lightened it a tad, got out the bleach and the  tinfoil and gave me a kind of maple syrup with tones of umber base with streaks of Christina Hendricks Red.Christina Hendricks: That’s  Joan Harris on Mad Men,  as I'm sure you know. You see the resemblance I'm sure? Uncanny isn' t it? ;-)

What Did YOUR Mom Do All Day?

I spent all weekend fixing things, or trying to, so today I'm dressing up as my mother and meeting my friends for coffee in the living room... My friends are all  imaginary so I won't have to clean up much.See how pleasant we all look? I'm the one with the dark hair.

• We may play a hand or two of cards after this.
• Or discuss silver polishing techniques.
• Or the best way to keep your girdle from riding up.
• Or if we feel really daring , maybe we'll talk about that new Magic Fingers gizmo you find these days at the Howard Johnson Inn...

The kids are playing stickball outside, we think. Johnny sassed his little brother earlier but we'll have to wait for Father to come home to deal with that since after all Father Knows Best. Or, er, Ward Cleaver maybe, the Beav's dad...ha ha.  A little irony for you guys today! In truth my hair has never looked as tame as the hair of the lady on the left.Here's how I really look today, a fresh two inches of rain having fallen on my little head  last night.Truth in advertising ha ha! And while I'm telling the truth I should admit I borrowed the photo on top from a Chock Full O'Nuts ad in a magazine.

Fix-It Weekend

This past weekend everything broke.First, on Saturday morning, the washing machine lost its mind and began throwing water all over everything. Water filled the back hall and migrated into the bathroom. It soaked three rugs so thoroughly you could hardly lift them. It also leaked down into the cellar and flooded the table we use as a tool bench. We have one of those nifty folding suitcasey things in which every screwdriver and awl, every plier, pincer and nut nestles in its own contoured bed of molded plastic. Alas each one of these wee beds was also waterlogged. You wouldn't think a hammer could float but ours seemed to be doing just that.I did the wash for the rest of the weekend by turning on the main water valve and standing there while the tub filled, turning off the water while it agitated, turned it on again to bring on the rinse, tuned it off again to supervise the spin and so on. This method worked pretty well, galling as it was to spend my time this way. The repairman can't get here for days, the shop says.Then the toilet in the downstairs bathroom became similarly unstable, leaning dangerously - almost like a skittish horse - when you sat down on it. We tried tightening it but that's not as easy as it looks. When toilets go wrong, experience has taught us you pretty much have to loosen the bolts, pull the thing clear out of the floor, buy a new beeswax collar to act as your seal, and jam it down again as hard as you can and then retighten the bolts. I have seen my man do this before, but this time we both thought well the plumber guys are coming anyway... So we kind of just closed the door to that little room and went on with our weekend.Finally, things got really bad when, last night, the case on my Kindle wouldn't fold up nicely, that seemed like the last straw. The little lamp is attached to the case and if the case won't fold right, the light won't illuminate the 'page.' What will I do?" I moaned to David "How will I get to sleep if I can't read in the dark?"He took the Kindle from me; checked the places where it attaches to the case; unbent the case a little and - voila! - the fault lay in a plump red Gummy Bear that somehow got lodged in there somehow. Sigh. David can do anything. Maybe tonight when he gets home from work we'll tackle the washing machine ourselves. And I have to say I find it strangely thrilling to see him with hoist 140 pounds of porcelain and bring it in for a landing... What a man!

The Smell of the Place Alone

I was in a bad mood last weekend, I’ll admit. It was the weather of course. People are so silly about the weather. What’s that old saying ? As a rule man’s a fool, when it’s hot he wants it cool. When it’s cool he wants it hot, always wanting what is not. True enough!

It was 41° on the Friday of that three-day weekend. Then six days later, it was 91°. "A 50° difference in less than a week!" we all exclaimed.People whined like you wouldn't believe.I whined.  Here in our part of the country where the air is crisp enough it seems practically mentholated , most of us hadn't even dragged out our window fans yet, never mind digging that dented and drooling boxhead of an AC unit up out of the basement.Thus, the heat came as a shock to us all as we rummaged through closets for shorts and T-shirts and remembered for the first time in months why it is that people actually wear antiperspirant. We griped. It's what we do.I met a man at a book talk I gave once who told me he lived outside of the United States for 15 years and was only just now returning. "What do you notice most about Americans, now that you can look at your countrymen with fresh eyes?" I asked him."People complain! They complain about everything!" he said. "I couldn't believe it at first.  It's as if nothing is ever good enough."That shivered my timbers, I can tell you. I didn't want to be one of those people.So I got to considering: Maybe instead of griping, we should actually delight in the variety the world presents. Even the weather, aside of course from the terrifying and violent climatic swings such as the ones that have brought drought to Colorado and tornadoes to Oklahoma.“I'd really like to try doing that,” I was thinking later that day as I walked into my local cobbler shop or "Shoe Hospital" as its owner has dubbed it.Here, a young girl around 11 was munching on a chocolate chip cookie and chatting in familiar fashion with the proprietor."She must be one of his grandchildren," I thought, so wide was the smile she flashed him as she ducked back out of the store."Is that your granddaughter?" "I asked as I handed over the ticket to reclaim  my newly reheeled boots."No," he said. "She just comes in here all the time. She says she loves the smell of the place.""Ah!" said I. "The smell of leather, and shoe polish? Maybe the smell of the oil in these various machines?""Exactly," he said handing me my boots."You know it wouldn't kill you to polish these now and then," he added with a wink.I purchased a tin of saddle soap displayed there on the counter then and there,  took a whiff, sighed happily, and exited the shop one happy camper,  through with complaining for a good long while.

I'm Not the Pope

When I joined the Fewer Than 12 Items line at the supermarket recently, the woman directly ahead of me turned and made the  ‘After You’ sign with her hands. “Go ahead,” she said. “You have only one item and I have 12.”“Nah, it’s fine,” I said smilingly back, and we both turned to watch as the sales associate rang up the purchases of the man in front of her, a process that took a while, what with the weighing of his produce and the waiting while he dug out his reusable bags.Finally he was gone and this nice woman was next - but instead of unloading her items on the belt she turned to me once again. “Go!” she said again, standing back as if to let me pass in front of her. “You need to go, I can tell. I have an instinct.”“No, really,” I said. “I mean, my day is no busier than yours.  It’s not like I’m the Pope.”“The Pope! I wouldn’t give my place to the Pope!” she laughed.“You don’t like the Pope?” I asked, worried that I had wandered into a dicey realm.“It isn’t that. It’s more that… well, you know. Popes, Presidents: they get all kinds of breaks.”This was true, as I knew from my junior high boyfriend, who has worked protecting both Popes and Presidents. They don’t even carry any money.She went on. “So see I like to do what I can for …”“For the little guy? Regular schlubs like us?”“Exactly,” she said.  “Now go ahead of me.”So… I went ahead of her.And she didn’t even seem to mind that I turned out to be carrying over one shoulder my own silky reusable bag, which I use to put my items in as I shop, to save the trouble of using one of the store’s wire baskets. Thus, like a magician pulling rabbits from a hat, I drew forth a packaged salad, a bottle of water, and a pint-sized container from the aisle of bins where you can scoop out your own nuts, grains and seeds.“What’s this?” asked the cashier holding up the small container.“Oh I’m sorry!” I said. “It’s Red Wheat Bran. That’s what the bin it came from said.” He stopped and drew out a booklet and began laboriously hunting through columns of small print for it for the Wheat Bran code number. “I guess I was rushing so much I forgot to label it. I’m scheduled to meet someone in the eating area at the front of the store,” I added lamely.“See? I was right!” said the woman, now behind me. “I told you I have an instinct! You did need to go first!”I thought about this exchange for the whole rest of that day, and what we mean when we use the word ‘need.’I guess maybe I did sort of ‘ need’ to get through the line fast and meet my party. But what I needed even more was to meet someone like this, people who keep their her fine antennae tuned outward, toward others, rather than inward, toward themselves, ever aware of what they might do to help. Those people are our real spiritual leaders in my book.

Happy Birthday Annie

Happy birthday to my littler girl, born in a thunderstorm, imperiled from the 20th week in utero on and then suddenly here, thank God ,thank God!This was Annie, who sucked her thumb in secret for years in the cloak room of the Children's Own School.Annie, who befriended the ugliest wrecks of dolls, giving them fancy names and making them costumes so they could compete in her specially declared Doll Olympics in that steamy summer of '88.Annie, who, when her little brother came, was heartbroken  briefly yes and seen crying in every video I took for the first three months of that new baby's life.  But Annie, who then devoted herself entirely  to his care, abandoning her own room to sleep on the floor under the desk in his room.To keep him company, she said.Annie, who made all his fun.Annie, who, come to think of it, made a whole lot of our fun , for all the lucky years when she lived in our house.This is Annie above,  making her nephew David's fun one beautiful day last September, with just a box of crayons and her warmth.And these are the iris, which  bloom every year on her birthday.Here's to you Annie Payne, and to many returns of this day!

Ready For Summer

This is me when the sun finally came out Monday, and these are my goals for summer 2013:One, protect my noggin from those harmful UV Rays. I'm all set in that department, as you can see.Two, tone up my arms, which are looking a mite doughy after the long winter.Three, keep the blue contact lenses. Yes!My smile I'm ok with. Can't improve on this one I figure.OK really this is my namesake's namesake, Caroline Theresa the fifth, called Callie.She's ready for summer too. :-)

Family Chaos

Rain or not, you can have fun anytime when the company's good.These are the three people I spent the holiday weekend with.(Edward doesn't REALLY drive yet but it won't be long! Nine years old and growing like a weed!)As for the other two, they're pretty little still.Young David, doing the Britney Spears thing here with little Callie in his lap, still speaks with a lisp, made worse now that his has lost his first-ever tooth. How happy he was when it popped out on Saturday as the took that very first bite of cold cereal! It's a rite of passage losing that first tooth, and he waited a long time for it.Six-year-olds are as eager to lose a tooth as 11-year-olds are to get braces. Many other kids have them and that's all they care. (I just thank God I came up in a house where it would never occur to my grownups to spring for that kind of luxury. I looked ok enough with my baby teeth but that sure changed when those big teeth came in! Even today, the left front tooth is trying to cross at the ankles with the right front one, as these grandchildren happily point out to me when they sit in my lap. But steel bands  right inside your head with you? I'd rather keep a ferret for a pet, and ferrets smell to high heaven.)So here's Little David seconds after the tooth came out, with big brother Edward helping to celebrate.And here I am in kindergarten with my own little toy-piano-key chompers.And finally here is David once again, trying to sing Frères Jacques, with some Zapruder-film-style camera joggling on account of the baby, who does insist on coming right up to you to touch your eyes and step on your feet. Gotta love it though! Family Life is rich life![youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kV5AiXsKpOk] 

It's Warm and Sunny It's Warm and Sunny

It's warm and sunny it's warm and sunny. I shut my eyes and  can almost believe it - even though an hour north of where I'm going tomorrow they're predicting snow. SNOW.Here's some video I took 48 hours ago at my favorite litte jewel of a municipal pond.I'll just have to keep chanting to myself: "It's Warm and Sunny, It's Warm and Sunny" until it all of a sudden IS..  May that day come soon!http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASpCvBC_v6Y&feature=youtu.be