For Christmas I discovered a wonderful book for Emlet, A Lot of Otters, without realizing at the time that the same author-illustrator did a book I loved from when I still worked at Phoebe (or at least still frequented it), Grandfather Twilight. In A Lot of Otters, the mother moon looks for her baby, her moonlet, so it's a perfect book for Emlet. And Grandfather Twilight is just a wonderful bedtime book. So I collected that for her birthday, and another by Barbara Helen Berger, All the Way to Lhasa. And Stella Luna, partly because of the ratapiņata, partly because of "I Am Sam," and partly because it's such a wonderful book.
I found a lot of green and lavender clothes, a purple chenille sweater, a pair of green with purple flowers leggings, a lavender shirt and socks to go with the leggings, a little white sweater, a blue denim sack dress with embroidered flowers around the collar. Also I taped "Monsters Inc." and found a Peter Gabriel mix cd RDC ripped while roadtripping to Yellowstone as a token for Emlet's parents.
Also I found a donkey. After acquiring it, I walked back to Cassidy with it propped on my left forearm and the bag with the other shopping in my right. (The clerk had offered a bag. Ha!) I saw a woman in a restaurant window notice the donkey's notinabagness and smile. If it had been in a bag, it wouldn't've been able to wave at her. She waved back!
I did all this shopping on a Thursday night. The donkey spent the weekend with Morse, Hamlet, Monty, Pantalaimon, and Booboo. Actually I had met and fallen in love with the donkey while Christmas shopping but I couldn't quite put such a Real animal in a box. Instead for Christmas Emlet got a small hippopotamus puppet who can hold a bar of soap and wash her back: not quite real. This time I determined that the donkey's need for a home and Emlet's certain delight would overcome whatever trauma it endured in the box.
I wrapped the three books and put them in. I squished all the clothes as small as they could go, taped the paper tight, and put them in. Meanwhile, the donkey lay on the floor by my bedtable with its head partly on Booboo's legs and under Hamlet's head, making friends. I showed it the box and told it what awaited it on the other end of its journey. I cut out some apples and pears from construction paper for snacks. I drew a sippy water bottle on the inside of the box, figuring that if a hamster can figure one out, a donkey can. I told it about the Little Prince's sheep.
Then came Monday. The donkey and the box sat separately on my desk that morning, to be joined and taped at the last possible minute. Minne suggested some windows. I drew some sashed windows on the inside of the box, with screens for air and blinds for darkness. Then it was lunchtime. The donkey clambered into its box, on its back, its hooves (which are huge--it's going to be a big donkey when it grows up) gathered under its chin. I ruthlessly taped the box up and sent it on its way.
I talked to Nisou this morning. She peeked in the box to see if things were wrapped, so the lid is ajar and the donkey has some air. It will have its freedom on Tuesday, Emlet's birthday. She mentioned that the Pacific northwest hummingbird I gave Emlet lives on a shelf over the head of her bed and sends her dreams, and that she had just read A Midsummer Night's Dream and so finally named the hummer Oneiros.
"OH!" I exclaimed, all happy. In the donkey's letter of introduction (in broken French), it says it doesn't think it's Eeyore. It is much too happy to be Eeyore, plus it tail is sewed, not nailed on. The only other donkey I could think of was poor confuseled Puzzle from The Last Battle. But of course, Midsummer! "Could the donkey's name be Bottom?"
And Maman, who is Meme to her grandchildren, has been there for a fortnight, mending clothes, baking bread, and most of all babysitting Emlet. I talked to her a little too, and she said that she has heard I am responsible for all the best soft toys in Emlet's collection. I erkled inwardly at "soft toys" but was pleased to know that my offerings are noteworthy.
Today as we began to paint RDC asked what I would like to listen to. He is having great fun with his iPod: in addition to all his CDs he also subscribes to the audio version of Scientific American and gets either one or two audio books a month. He's already listened to Laurie Anderson read Don DeLillo's novella The Body Artist and is now on Stephen Hawking's The Universe in a Nutshell, also, ahem, not read by the author. I've heard some of it, when he's piped the iPod through the speakers in the kitchen to cook, and Hawking can be quite funny. Thank goodness. Anyway, I said Nutshell, because I'd probably have to listen to and read it a few times before understanding any of it so hearing only bits might not matter at first go.
"But I'm almost done with it," RDC countered.
"Great. I'll find out how the universe ends."
The trim is done. It might need a few touch-ups here and there. Also RDC finally finished painting his study's closet door (which has been off since that room went under the palette knife in June 2000). He got all panicky when he thought, this morning looking at the door, at its hinges and latch, that he had been painting one of the room doors.
Four doors stand in a vertical heap in the laundry room: two that we removed and don't wish to restore to the study and bedroom doorways, and two glass-paned doors that might have been Formigny's original exterior doors. The basement ceiling's not much taller than the height of a door, and the solid interior doors stood at the back of the heap (being not as pretty as glass); we moved the doors carefully. He looked at one of the solid ones, the hinges, the latch. We have a houseguest on Friday and RDC had hoped to have his study done by then.
"But that door's too wide for the closet," I pointed out. "It must be a room door."
We examined the suspect door, on sawhorses in the furnace room for months now. It was narrow. It, like all the interior doors, is two-paneled, the lower one square and the upper rectangular. He'd been mentally hanging the door upside down, with the knob four feet off the ground. He has this thing about the world being built for shorter people. Ask him about kitchen counters some day.
Anyway, I spared him from throwing no small fit about working on the wrong door. Now all that closet needs is a fetal shelf to have an inch cut cross-wise off its width so it can be fit as a shelf. And for us to hang a series of coathooks in the front landing (which will be next after the sunroom).
Nisou was telling about their kitchen, about timbering the walls and installing wood (!) countertops and reinstalling appliances and so on--all since December. This they do with two jobs and a baby and they don't even know Jessie. I am such a snail.