Who is responsible for the weather?
I was going to dig out the other bit of the front yard today. I'm not overly enthusiastic about doing this, since we already have problems with drainage in that corner and I'm not a landscape or hydraulics engineer or whatever I'm supposed to be to arrange the ground properly. Also I should rip out that easement, though I didn't order enough ground cover for it. I didn't any evening this week because the weather supported my slugdom (wonderful, wonderful rain!); forecasts called for a warmer and drier Friday. But it is 40 degrees and cloudy.
I think I might walk down to Cherry Creek and look for a skirt--a grey one, naturally--because for Paris I have either my allegedly undyed linen one, very pale, very thin, not a good material for traveling nor a color for wearing several days in a row nor a weight for possible chilliness or rain; or my denim skirt, which is too American. I made the mistake of describing it thus to my mother.
"What's wrong with being American?" she demanded querulously.
"Nothing, of course. What I mean there is that it's denim, it's the equivalent of wearing jeans except it's a skirt, so it's too casual--as the U.S. is casual--and I know you would no more wear jeans traveling in a foreign capital than I would." (I don't know. Maybe now she would. But she didn't pack jeans to go to England in 1981.)
Of course if I can't find the right skirt I'll justify the denim by being appropriate in all other respects, durability and nonwrinklyness and skirtiness.
And then I might bus to downtown and watch a matinee of "Holes."
Because it's damn well too cold to muck about in the muck. Warm muck, that would be okay. Maybe tomorrow.
It is not just that they both have the same Vermeer on their covers that makes them similar to one another. There's also that I read them within months of each other and that Voigt's city of Trastad is (deliberately) very Dutch.
I just reread both of them over the past two days. Elske is satisfying for tying up all the Kingdom threads and for being better than Wings of a Falcon. Girl is just great, though rereading revealed a flaw: on page 46, she tells her family that her employers have a daughter her sister's age but on page 53 her sister sees her at the market with that girl and Griet says she had not mentioned the similarity in ages, that her sister should not feel displaced.
I love that book.
Yesterday a package awaited me on the porch. I left my sister a message that it had arrived and that I wouldn't open it until my birthday, but when we talked last night she had me open it. She wanted me to have the things before going to Paris (my entire family fear I am not going to survive this trip, so if I don't that should be ascribed to my family's Gut, a powerful if temperamental organ of prescience). She told me, as I cut the tape, that it was a bunch of stuff equivalent to the crap she mails me from the Sunday supplements. "A Thomas Kinkade Christmas train?" I asked.
No, but a t-shirt with a train on it. I first thought it was Thomas the Tank (Steam?) Engine, but it's the Smile Train, a charity her friend runs to fund corrective cosmetic surgery for kids with cleft palates and the like. Also a pitcher with a pattern of squares that I recognized (as I was meant to) as reminiscent of our mother's lemonade pitcher. A citronella candle in a periwinkle metal sand bucket. More bubbles for my bubble machine. A purple pen from Liberty Mutual. A lavender box of tissues. Another rubber duckie, this one from the Colonnade whose rooftop pool she uses. A shaven? chenille pillow that neither of us was sure I'd like but that exactly matches both the slate blue pillows and the wine-colored throw on Dim the Couch. (I didn't name my furniture. Someone else did.) So overall it was like a Yule stocking, except a birthday one. It was great, and everything made me laugh.
Also there was the yellow rose I took from my grandmother's grave, all finished drying now.
The English Book of Common Prayer says, "In the midst of life, we are in death." For us that day it was "In the midst of death we are in life." After the service when first my great-aunt and then my other great-aunt and then my mother took yellow roses from the flower arrangement, my sister and cousin and I decided to do so as well before the family stripped it entirely bare. The wreath looked as bedraggled as you'd expect after being tugged at and dismembered, and the three of us chortled mirthlessly at everyone's (and our own) heresy and disrespect, and mirthfully as we invented words for our grandmother, who would pretend to disapprove but suppress a smile and let us see her doing so.
Is it only an Irish thing, to be so close to laughter at or after a funeral? I think not; grief can often lead to hysteria. I do like that Irish short story about the wake, and is the dancing master's wake? Because as people drink and dance at the wake, they decide the guest of honor, loving to dance as he did, should partake of the festivities, so out of the coffin comes the corpse to partner his mourners in their dancing. The story's probably meant to illustrate how we're all drunks with no sense of propriety, but me, I'm glad for when a joke can shine through clouds of grief.
CLH and I laughed, because yesterday was a month and a day before my birthday. But this is what she gets for being so hyperprompt.
I have a few subliterary weaknesses. I speak freely of my pubescent and adolescent predilections for V.C. Andrews and Stephen King, respectively, and I write truthfully if with shame of my continuing addiction to Jean Auel, so you can imagine (or maybe you can't, if you really didn't try, so maybe you shouldn't, OMFB) how much lower my real cheesy subliterary guilty pleasure is.
I would like to state for the record that I seldom indulge in it. In fact, I haven't for years.
There is one title that was always my favorite, except I didn't know the title. Or the author. Only the series name and general plot. (Yes, it was a series.) The book might have resurfaced in my brain when my own personal Gracious Wings realized what a poor joke the male lead's name was. Eventually, a google search turned up a title, Amazon turned up a seller, and now, three months after I bought it--three months during which the vendor, or the vendor's pimp, alleged it had been sent out two days after I placed the order--it showed up in my mailbox (with a note from the vendor apologizing for her tardiness, which was due to illness).
I have to go now. I have to reacquaint myself with trash I knew was trash late in high school--when Stephen King didn't survive tenth grade.