A Little Blue

I'm feeling not-so-bright and cheery these days. Maybe it's the weather we're having--gray and drizzly (don't tell me how much the garden needed it!), or maybe it's all the emails I get from my friend Don about the Gulf oil disaster that only seems to get worse by the minute, and the fascists who seem intent on taking over the world (or at least this little bit), as reinforced by the dozens of campaign signs for the Tea Bag Gubernatorial candidate that I pass every day (I'm hanging my hopes on the gene pool for this one). Or maybe it's that I spent my birthday weekend sick in bed (and am feeling more than a little sorry for myself about it).

I always seem to get sick this time of year. I told C the other day that I'm constitutionally opposed to the end of summer. And I do mean end. While August may be the height of heat and vacation fun in more salubrious climes, in Maine, if you haven't sweat by mid-July, you may as well give up until next summer (or crank the woodstove mighty high this winter).

As happens every year, my inside organs began scrabbling against my chest wall in panic when I drove past the beaver bog up the road last week and saw the red maples living up to their name, and turning crimson. Though it happens every year, it hits me like the acorn on Chicken Little's noggin and I feel sure they're harbingers of the Apocalypse. I begin grasping around me, trying to scoop up last bits of summer--The beach, the beach, we must go to the beach once more; Lemonade! We haven't drunk enough lemonade!; Popsicles! We forgot to make popsicles!--only it's like trying to carry handfuls of water up the beach to your sandcastle near the dunes...by the time you get there, all that's left are a few salty drops on your damp hands. It usually leads to ill-advised behavior, like marathon water-treading in 60-degree ocean water resulting in near-hypothermia. And it never once has slowed the inevitable march of winter, not by one iota.

I feel the same sense of panic whenever I notice one of my boys is a little taller, or a little smarter or a little more mature. Wait! Wait! I want to cry. We haven't done all the things we were going to do while you were little! I try to put on the brakes long enough to read another picture book, make a silly hat, build a fairy house in the woods. But they ignore my pleas and my mad scrambling to Slow. Down. Time. as resoundingly and heartlessly as the autumn wind does.

I know, as a person who has read more than a few issues of The Sun that life is impermanence and that trying to resist change is the source of suffering. That I should practice non-attachment to things like summer, my children's childhood, my very life. That life is like the beach, where the tide comes in and washes it clean twice each day, and no matter how high up you build your sand castle it too will succumb to the ravages or water and wind.

And that is what is so wonderful about the beach. It is never the same two visits in a row, or even from the moment you plop down your towels and beach chair to the time you scoop all the pails and shovels and sunblock and gritty sandwiches up and drag your damp, salty, exhausted charges back home.

But still, after even the most perfect beach day, I feel a tug of regret...we didn't get there early enough or stay long enough; we never made it to the tidepools; we didn't spend enough time in the water or on the sand; I didn't get to read enough chapters of my beach book. Always, always I feel there could have been more, that I could have tried harder, appreciated it more while it was happening, and now that it's over I've missed my chance.

It's a feeling I imagine I'll still be nursing one day, many years from now, creaking in my rocking chair on the deck, replaying my life (wondering why, oh, why, did I not make photo albums before I had 46 years of digital pictures to sort through with arthritic fingers), watching the leaves fall on a late summer morning.

Question Mark

More Vintage Goodness

When C and I were wandering around Brunswick, Saturday, we found our way to an old mill building that houses a flea market and antique mall. The flea market was horribly dirty and disorganized, with individual booths piled to overflowing with a whole lot of junk (I guess that's the definition of flea market, right?). There was some good stuff tucked in here and there, but everything was priced really astoundingly high. I did find these three little enamel cups (half-price, and still more than they should have been) that I thought would be cute for the boys for camping (of course when I showed them, they all three wanted the green one!):

The antique mall next door was much more pleasant, and had lovely stuff, neatly arranged and displayed, but still the prices were at least double of what I normally see around here. It made me appreciate our middle-of-nowhere antique barns!

The friend who watched the boys was getting rid of some stuff from her house and gave me these sweet little mugs.

When we got home Satuday afternoon, there was a package in our mailbox. My mom sent me this fabulous yellow Harlequin creamer and strawberry print dish towel for my birthday (thanks, Mom!)

Vintage Swap

I participated in the Vintage Swap for the first time this summer. My partner, Amanda, went way overboard in the generosity department and sent a box packed with: four hand-crocheted doilies/tablecloths, four small woven cloths (napkins?), vintage sewing tools (including electric scissors, of all things, which I haven't tried out yet!), a dress, a rooster basket, a piece of cloth, a set of embroidered pillowcases, a book on ceramics, two Corel ware mugs, and a glass horse. All passed down from her grandmother, great grandmother and a dear friend of hers.

My favorite is this doily, which is exactly my shade of orange. I think it will find its way onto a pillow very soon.

Thank you, Amanda!!

I sent Amanda these little bits (she said her favorite colors are reds and browns):

A table runner (or dresser skirt, perhaps?) embroidered with poppies and wheat.

A handkerchief apron (which I've actually had my eye on for a while!).

A crocheted potholder (I was in a store recently where they had a row of antique crocheted potholders hanging along a wall and it looked so cute!).

A bit of embroidered brown linen.

And a red glass (hope it made it in one piece!).

It was fun going through the antique malls with my eye tuned to a different channel...and not worrying about whether I actually needed something before I bought it, since it wasn't for me! I did suffer a bit of anxiety over trying to find the exact right thing, but I think I did OK!

And they danced by the light of the moon, the moon, the moon...

When C and I got married, eleven years ago this past Saturday, it must have been The Summer of Marriage, because it seems like we attended a lot of matrimonial festivities that year (twenty-five must be the age at which one's biological clock begins to tick on overdrive). Many of those ceremonies turned out to be solemn affairs, with a surprising amount of heavy-handed godliness for a bunch of hippies from COA.

I wanted to bring a sense of joy to our ceremony, a light-heartedness and a bit of irreverence. We didn't want our friends to be bored, and we certainly didn't want to depress anyone. So, along with a number of pagan-ish readings from this book, C and I read Edward Lear's nonsense poem "The Owl and the Pussycat." C's friends appreciated the reference to the "land where the bong tree grows," while mine (those bad girls) snickered over the owl's waxing poetic over his "lovely pussy." Everyone got a huge kick out of the two being married by the "turkey who lives on the hill," at the expense of our officiant, our dear, dear departed friend Al.

"The Owl and the Pussycat" was one of my older sister's and my favorite stories when we were young, and we heard it many, many times (oddly, I can't remember what book it was in, or what the illustrations were like). It's one of the few poems I know by heart (along with about half of "Kubla Khan," and "Candy is dandy/But liquor is quicker." My sister, just to show how psychic we sometimes are, got us the book (illustrated by Jan Brett) for a wedding present and planned to read it at the reception for her toast. She was not pleased to be upstaged by the bride and groom.

This is just a really, really long way of explaining why I was so thrilled when Heather Ross came out with Owl and Pussycat fabric this summer...I knew right away exactly what I needed to do with it...a commemorative pillow for our anniversary (in disguise as my gift to C). I found a picture M drew of those very characters when he was about five years old and visiting friends of ours. I embroidered the picture and framed it with happy, sleeping moons and owls and pussycats in their beautiful pea green boat, sort of following the quilting technique form Patchwork Style, only I didn't read the directions very well and missed some steps. It's all a bit crooked and wonky...I'd like to blame my old sewing machine, but it was probably more due to me a) being lazy and b) starting the damn thing at 10:30 Thursday night (it did give me the chance to step outside sometime after midnight and view one shooting star--the Perseids were peaking that night).

(The back)

We dropped the kids off at friends' on the coast Friday night (the very friends at whose house M drew that picture), and went out to our favorite restaurant, El Camino (here's me savouring my Mexican Chocolate Pot de Creme with ancho chile powder...mmmm),

then spent the night at a bed & breakfast--yes our first night away from kids since we went to Philadelphia almost two years ago. We did not dance by the light of the moon (it was a new moon), but we did sit in the park in Brunswick and, you know, have an actual conversation. With complete sentences and stuff. We even played a few hands of Rummy (like the old days when we didn't have kids or a TV). I have to say it ended far, far too soon Saturday afternoon (why is it one's children always seem so much louder and, I don't know, like there are more of them, after one has been away from them for a bit?). Next time, we're taking a week!

Smoke

Summer Books and a Day "Off"

One day last week E had a high fever and I had to stay home with the twins (M was staying with friends at their lake house), and--not that I would wish illness on anyone--it was a wonderful day.

In the morning, while the boys played Lego's, I was able to finally finish reading an essay from a back issue of The Sun that I had started reading weeks ago, and got interrupted every time I picked it up (I have let my subscription expire and am not allowed to renew it until I've read all of the back issues I've been accumulating for nearly a year).

We played several rounds of Round Up and The Sleeping Grump, then I sent the boys back to the Den O' Lego's so I could sew...finally making our summer book basket.

After lunch, we walked to the mailbox, then, because E was feeling hot and tired again, I laid out our picnic blanket and they drew while I embroidered the word "Summer." Later we read a couple of chapters out of On the Banks of Plum Creek and they resumed Lego's while I started dinner.

It was so nice to just relax and not have anywhere to go or anything to do--it was just like those days off I used to get every week, without the rush to get M's bus. We did not even succumb to the TV temptation. I think I need to work on a scheme to get more days like that, don't you?

Now, as to the summer book basket, inside we have:

Blueberries for Sal

Jamberry

I Wear Long Green Hair in the Summer

Scoot

River Parade

Muncha, Muncha, Muncha

In the Small, Small Pond

Little Beaver and the Echo

Fairy Houses

Summer's Vacation

Miss Rumphius

Flower Fairies of the Wayside.

and lots of books about bugs and gardens. I'm sorry to say we've read hardly any of them! Between hardly ever being home, reading chapter books at bedtime (the Little House series) and my getting them out so late (I did get the actual books out a few weeks earlier, after we went raspberry picking and needed to read about Little Sal), we just haven't gotten around to it. (Perhaps we need another sick day?).

I'm glad to have all four book baskets done and tucked away, neatly on top of the bookcase at the top of the stairs(see Autumn, Winter, Spring--looking back, I see that all of them, except winter, were completed well into the season in question, so I guess I'm just continuing tradition here). I can picture myself, a lonely old (middle-aged) lady in a couple of years, taking down the seasonal books, reading them to myself (perhaps I'll need to get a cat) while my boys are off driving fast cars or something. Sigh.

What are you reading this summer?