Voila! : My Scars

My appendicitis scars turn a year old today. With the unlikely set of events the particularly pesky appendix yielded, this was a perilous journey but what a difference a year makes! Thus, an offering from literature's smallest, most fearless heroine seems particularly apropos. Like Madeline, we should all be so brave as to look fear in the face and say "pooh-pooh."

In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines lived twelve little girls in two straight lines. In two straight lines they broke their bread and brushed their teeth and went to bed. They smiled at the good and frowned at the bad and sometimes they were very sad. They left the house at half past nine in two straight lines in rain or shine — the smallest one was Madeline.

That's all there is. There isn't any more.

Lyrical Loveliness : Ray LaMontagne

Image via Flickr

Music is my first love. I was a tickler of ivories before I was a reader of words. It seems increasingly rare these days, but when you find those musicians who are also true lyricists - who set the poetry of language to the mastery of their instrument - that is a treat to be savored. Raymond Charles LaMontagne is just such a treat.

She lifts her skirt up to her knees,
walks through the garden rows with her bare feet, laughing.
I never learned to count my blessings,
I choose instead to dwell in my disasters.
I walk on down the hill,
through grass, grown tall and brown and still
It's hard somehow to let go of my pain.
On past the busted back of that old and rusted Cadillac
that sinks into this field, collecting rain.
Will I always feel this way?
So empty, so estranged.

And of these cutthroat busted sunsets,
these cold and damp white mornings
I have grown weary.
If through my cracked and dusted dime-store lips
I spoke these words out loud would no one hear me?
Lay your blouse across the chair,
let fall the flowers from from your hair
and kiss me with that country mouth, so plain.
Outside, the rain is tapping on the leaves,
to me it sounds like they're applauding us the the quiet love we made.
Will I always feel this way?
So empty, so estranged.

Well I looked my demons in the eyes,
laid bare my chest, said "Do your best, destroy me.
You see, I've been to hell and back so many times,
I must admit you kind of bore me."
There's a lot of things that can kill a man,
there's a lot of ways to die,
listen, some already did that walked beside me.
There's a lot of things I don't understand,
why so many people lie.
It's the hurt I hide that fuels the fire inside me.
Will I always feel this way?
So empty, so estranged
- Empty (Til the Sun Turns Black - 2006)

Lost and Found : Homeward Bound

Image via the incredible Jon Klassen

Home. The word evokes a certain wave of feeling accompanied by images of a warm hearth or a thoughtful spread. The idea of home seems simple enough: a place to lay one's head, a roof to shelter you from the elements, a quiet respite from the pace of the outside world - maybe it will even yield a pleasant memory or two. I grew up in such a place, so I believe it exists. Somewhere along the way, though, the importance of home seems to have gotten lost in the name of job performance or the challenge of living on slave wages. As I've discovered after many eager home-finding attempts turned wary, home is not such an uncomplicated concept as I'd hoped.

There is first the way you feel when the manager-on-duty (or, in some of the unluckier cases, the realtor-on-duty) turns the key in the door (hopeful), second, the way you feel upon occupying the entryway (fresh, that new paint smell), third, your thoughts upon discovering the master closet (where's the rest of it?), fourth, your thoughts on hearing the owner's asking price (are they serious?!) and finally, turning to your fellow home-finding mate and admitting defeat. Again.

There is the quickness with which a week passes (wow, it's Friday again already!), the precedence climbing the job ladder seems to take (just one more year like this!) and the prioritization reality forces upon you (credit card debt, anyone?)

There must be more to a home than those aforementioned simplicities - intangible qualities that make you feel cozy and secure and nested. Yet, they can't be as impossible to recreate as they seem in the throes of this current plight. It reminds me of one of my very favorite childhood storybooks, The Lost & Found House. I doubt it was ever very popular or widely-read but it is a sweet, tenderly illustrated little tale about Cricket the mouse and his search for a place to call his own. He didn't mind committing to hard work or lengthy repair processes, and he seems to believe that even though his first home was lost and swept away, a new home could be created in its place. Despite stormy weather, unfriendly landlords and a particularly serious cold, Cricket pressed on, undaunted, and eventually found his way home.

Faith, persistence, togetherness. Sometimes the simplest lessons are best.

There in the corner was a tiny house. It was slightly falling apart, but it looked empty. His heart thumped as he pushed the door. It creaked open. Inside the house, the floor was covered with odds and ends, and broken bits and pieces. He went upstairs. There was nothing there but a rickety bed and a mattress that needed stuffing. The place was really a shambles.

Cricket set to work at once. He swept out the odds and ends with a broom. He glued the broken bits and pieces back together again and stuffed the mattress full of soft hay. He made new shingles for the roof and put up the fallen shutters. Then he painted CRICKET'S HOUSE on a sign and hung it over the door.

The Lost & Found House by Consuelo Joerns (1979)

Words 'Round the Web

Image via ffffound

Happy Friday! A collection of this week's loveliest from the world of words:

I get nostalgic coming across the childhood titles my mom and I love. Happy mother's day wishes!

I love the idea of these classy lady-loving signature calling cards from the creatives at Mr. Boddington's Studio.

There's no task too daunting for The List of 100. (Thanks Jenny!)

Moving? Lending? Combining libraries? Keep track of beloved friends with The Little Chickadee's wonderfully vintage-inspired book plates

Very into Patrick Watson's words this week... especially from the title track "Wooden Arms."

When it comes to Audrey Tatou, no words are necessary. (via Concrete & Honey)

Fashion Fixation : Plaid Rebellion

Salinas Cool Shadows two piece via Anthropologie.com

"Summer imminent" means swim and sand and rouses that desire for freedom and adventure. While I'm not yet in any position to be thinking about donning this sweet, girly bikini, I appreciate the sentiment. The long hangover of school-aged anticipation leaves that familiar tingle on my tongue as the weather warms and the freeze of worries begins to thaw. I am reminded of high school Lit class and Edna St. Vincent Millay - deciphering the meaning of her Catholic schoolgirl resentment and a need for self-expression beyond the strict margins allowed her - relating to her plight in seeking something more. Well, Ms. St. Vincent Millay, I've found a plaid rebellion against that abhorrent dress. Fashion and flirtation are always trusty accomplices on the mission to break free...

Strong sun, that bleach
The curtains of my room, can you not render
Colourless this dress I wear?—
This violent plaid
Of purple angers and red shames; the yellow stripe
Of thin but valid treacheries; the flashy green of kind deeds done
Through indolence high judgments given here in haste;
The recurring checker of the serious breach of taste?

No more uncoloured than unmade,
I fear, can be this garment that I may not doff;
Confession does not strip it off,
To send me homeward eased and bare;

All through the formal, unoffending evening, under the clean
Bright hair,
Lining the subtle gown. . .it is not seen,
But it is there.

The Plaid Dress by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Fragile House : Mirth, Optional

Frank Lynch via Flickr

I work in a business park not unlike a long corridor. Down the corridor, there are "exhibits" on either side displaying curious goings-on all the day. I've dubbed one particular exhibit "Fame, Cruel Mistress Factory." That may mean I have an overactive imagination but that is beside the point for the time being. I've dubbed the exhibit such because each time I pass by, there is a precarious new dream being documented; a hopeful starlet being minted before the camera's watchful eye. Blond, brunette, auburn, raven black - the tossed-about tresses change hue from hour to hour, but the poses never do. The click-click-clicking of the photographer's lens marches on dutifully, indifferent to its recently transplanted subjects. Rushed along by a late winter wind or sluggishly plodding in the cloying heat, I've passed this exhibit to find the exhibitors unchanged: stand here, kneel this way, tilt your head left, smile brighter, touch-up please!

I live in the land of the stars so the endless parade of wannabe celebrities isn't new -- but for some reason I've a bit more empathy for the possible emptiness that awaits the hopeful these days. Their peripatetic existence makes me a little wistful - imagining from whence they came and if they'll have a home to return to should their big break break down. Maybe the need for sympathy isn't there and this isn't really so sad an exhibit. I'm sure the headshot-takers aren't all crushed beneath the weight of giant ambitions; maybe they've very few expectations at all. Maybe their real priorities are quite grounded. But in the event landing in the stratospheric echelon of a very thespian few is everything to them, I have an Edith Wharton-induced tenderness for the any machine's sacrificial cogs. Poor Lily Bart. Forgetting to mention my imagination can be dramatic in addition to overactive, I can see a parallel or two...

It was no longer, however, from the vision of material poverty that she turned with the greatest shrinking. She had a sense of deeper impoverishment—of an inner destitution compared to which outward conditions dwindled into insignificance. It was indeed miserable to be poor—to look forward to a shabby, anxious middle-age, leading by dreary degrees of economy and self-denial to gradual absorption in the dingy communal existence of the boarding-house. But there was something more miserable still—it was the clutch of solitude at her heart, the sense of being swept like a stray uprooted growth down the heedless current of the years. That was the feeling which possessed her now—the feeling of being something rootless and ephemeral, mere spin-drift of the whirling surface of existence, without anything to which the poor little tentacles of self could cling before the awful flood submerged them. And as she looked back she saw that there had never been a time when she had had any real relation to life. Her parents too had been rootless, blown hither and thither on every wind of fashion, without any personal existence to shelter them from its shifting gusts.

She herself had grown up without any one spot of earth being dearer to her than another: there was no centre of early pieties, of grave endearing traditions, to which her heart could revert and from which it could draw strength for itself and tenderness for others. In whatever form a slowly-accumulated past lives in the blood — whether in the concrete image of the old house stored with visual memories, or in the conception of the house not built with hands, but made up of inherited passions and loyalties—it has the same power of broadening and deepening the individual existence, of attaching it by mysterious links of kinship to all the mighty sum of human striving.

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (1905)

Spring's Eternal : Hope's An Orange

Image via We Heart It

Considering the great effect geography and surroundings can have on one's experiences and the perceptions subsequent, I suppose I am not unique in regarding my "native Southern Californian" status as an integral personal trait. I've heard haughty New Yorkers, proud Mississippians and even one fiercely loyal Nebraskan recount their indigenous tales with possessive rosiness and have soaked up the secondhand magic therein.

Locals the world over have their own means of hailing the spring's seasonal changing of the guard. There is no transition as drastic as winter to spring and maybe that's why you're all the more overjoyed when it occurs. But you're from Southern California, you say. There is no such dramatic passage for you. People in other parts of the world like to use California's lack of seasons against her. "I prefer to know when it's fall," one friend will quip. "I would get bored of all that sunshine," another claims. Yet just because there is subtlety in the changing of the seasons doesn't mean they don't exist. In fact, it is the subtlety which makes me feel all the more a gleeful co-conspirator in the spring that universally signals our emergence from all kinds of literal and metaphoric hibernation.

And so perhaps there is nothing that can lay claim to native Southern California status more wholly than the orange tree. The orange tree is instrumental in my mission to decry the shift in seasons and is ultimately the bearer of that slight but definite evidence of springtime: the orange blossom. The scent hits you before the sight of those sultry miniature blooms when you happen upon them out of the blue one warm April afternoon. And just as surely as you were longing for far-off Saturdays spent beached on the sand moments before, the realization that spring has sprung is heralded by the orange's faintly sweet, honeyed triumph. True, spring may be more dramatically signaled by the descent of New Yorkers on sunny Central Park after a late winter ice thaw. But sorry my Manhattanites, I'll take the understated harbinger of spring that is the orange.

And as a fan of the tangerine colored orb, it appears I am in the best sort of company.

Of the fruits of the year I give my vote to the orange. In the
first place it is a perennial--if not in actual fact, at least in
the greengrocer's shop. On the days when dessert is a name given
to a handful of chocolates and a little preserved ginger, when
macédoine de fruits is the title bestowed on two prunes and a
piece of rhubarb, then the orange, however sour, comes nobly to
the rescue; and on those other days of plenty when cherries and
strawberries and raspberries and gooseberries riot together upon
the table, the orange, sweeter than ever, is still there to hold
its own. Bread and butter, beef and mutton, eggs and bacon, are
not more necessary to an ordered existence than the orange.


It is well that the commonest fruit should be also the best. Of
the virtues of the orange I have not room fully to speak. It has
properties of health-giving, as that it cures influenza and
establishes the complexion. It is clean, for whoever handles it
on its way to your table but handles its outer covering, its top
coat, which is left in the hall. It is round, and forms an
excellent substitute with the young for a cricket ball. The pips
can be flicked at your enemies, and quite a small piece of peel
makes a slide for an old gentleman.


But all this would count nothing had not the orange such
delightful qualities of taste. I dare not let myself go upon this
subject. I am a slave to its sweetness. I grudge every marriage
in that it means a fresh supply of orange blossom, the promise of
so much golden fruit cut short. However, the world must go on.


Next to the orange I place the cherry. The cherry is a
companionable fruit. You can eat it while you are reading or
talking, and you can go on and on, absent-mindedly as it were,
though you must mind not to swallow the stone. The trouble of
disengaging this from the fruit is just sufficient to make the
fruit taste sweeter for the labour. The stalk keeps you from
soiling your fingers; it enables you also to play bob cherry.
Lastly, it is by means of cherries that one penetrates the great
mysteries of life--when and whom you will marry, and whether she
really loves you or is taking you for your worldly prospects. (I
may add here that I know a girl who can tie a knot in the stalk
of a cherry with her tongue. It is a tricky business, and I am
doubtful whether to add it to the virtues of the cherry or not.)


There are only two ways of eating strawberries. One is neat in
the strawberry bed, and the other is mashed on the plate. The
first method generally requires us to take up a bent position
under a net--in a hot sun very uncomfortable, and at any time
fatal to the hair. The second method takes us into the privacy of
the home, for it demands a dressing-gown and no spectators. For
these reasons I think the strawberry an overrated fruit. Yet I
must say that I like to see one floating in cider cup. It gives a
note of richness to the affair, and excuses any shortcomings in
the lunch itself.


Raspberries are a good fruit gone wrong. A raspberry by itself
might indeed be the best fruit of all; but it is almost
impossible to find it alone. I do not refer to its attachment to
the red currant; rather to the attachment to it of so many of our
dumb little friends. The instinct of the lower creatures for the
best is well shown in the case of the raspberry. If it is to be
eaten it must be picked by the hand, well shaken, and then taken.


When you engage a gardener the first thing to do is to come to a
clear understanding with him about the peaches. The best way of
settling the matter is to give him the carrots and the black
currants and the rhubarb for himself, to allow him a free hand
with the groundsel and the walnut trees, and to insist in return
for this that you should pick the peaches when and how you like.
If he is a gentleman he will consent. Supposing that some
satisfactory arrangement were come to, and supposing also that
you had a silver-bladed pocket-knife with which you could peel
them in the open air, then peaches would come very high in the
list of fruits. But the conditions are difficult.


Gooseberries burst at the wrong end and smother you; melons--make
your ears sticky; currants, when you have removed the skin and extracted the seeds, are unsatisfying; blackberries have the faults of raspberries without their virtues; plums are never ripe. Yet all these fruits are excellent in their season. Their faults are faults which we can forgive during a slight acquaintance, which indeed seem but
pleasant little idiosyncrasies in the stranger. But we could not live with them.


Yet with the orange we do live year in and year out. That speaks
well for the orange. The fact is that there is an honesty about
the orange which appeals to all of us. If it is going to be bad--
for even the best of us are bad sometimes --it begins to be bad
from the outside, not from the inside. How many a pear which
presents a blooming face to the world is rotten at the core. How
many an innocent-looking apple is harbouring a worm in the bud.
But the orange has no secret faults. Its outside is a mirror of
its inside, and if you are quick you can tell the shopman so
before he slips it into the bag. 

- Golden Fruit from Not That It Matters by the inimitable A. A. Milne